There’s no question that the goal of every behavioral health or human services provider is to deliver top-notch patient care. But achieving that goal can be quite a challenge. There are numerous processes that go into running a high-quality clinical practice and delivering optimum patient care. To truly achieve clinical excellence, organizations need to optimize their human resources practices, administrative workflows, patient engagement techniques, and care practices.

Operational efficiency and ongoing quality improvement are cornerstones of clinical excellence, but using outdated tools can hinder your ability to offer adequate support for employees and patients alike. Let’s explore the nuances of clinical excellence and how the right technology can improve both provider and patient outcomes.

What Is Clinical Excellence?

Clinical excellence involves maintaining a high degree of operational efficiency while providing high-quality patient care. The exact definition or the metrics used to measure clinical excellence may vary based on the clinical care setting. For instance, best practices may vary among a large medical center, an inpatient rehab, the ICU,a clinical research facility, and a primary care office. However, the focus on strong organization, operational efficiency, and delivering effective personalized care are generally relevant to all health services settings.

In behavioral health and human services, clinical excellence typically involves using the resources available in an efficient manner to deliver the best patient experience possible. These industries typically have strained budgets and are often short-staffed, so it’s even more challenging to streamline processes to achieve clinical excellence.

How to Boost Clinical Excellence in Behavioral Health and Human Services

There’s no doubt that the demand for adequate resources continues to grow for clinicians and patients alike. In fact, a 2022 report from the White House underscores the burden of unmet mental health needs. However, there are key areas to keep in mind that can help move your practice toward achieving clinical excellence. 

Maintain Adequate Staffing

Maintaining adequate staffing coverage is essential not only for patient safety and care delivery, but also for preventing burnout among your staff. It’s crucial to have enough clinicians and support staff available during each shift to properly distribute the workload without overwhelming any individual employee or compromising on care quality. 

Deciding which role to prioritize can be challenging when you’re managing a strained labor budget and shrinking workforce, but ContinuumCloud’s Position Control feature can help. 

Position Control gives administrators a clearer view of their current workforce, open roles, and labor spending to aid decision-making. Administrators can also track actual incurred labor costs against projected costs to see where there’s room in the budget to hire or where certain departments are overspending due to overtime. 

With clear, up-to-date data on the current staffing levels and an organized approval process that ensures only approved roles are filled, Position Control can help behavioral health organizations optimize their hiring process to reduce employee burnout and meet patient demands while remaining fiscally conscious to achieve clinical excellence.

Monitor Employee Productivity

Part of achieving clinical excellence is ensuring that your clinicians are meeting productivity expectations and working efficiently. With ContinuumCloud’s business intelligence tools within the human capital management platform, leaders can use workforce analytics to track key performance indicators related to employee productivity. This real-time data allows you to promptly identify and address any challenges or performance issues that arise.

Prioritize Patient Engagement 

Keeping patients engaged benefits your organization and your patients. With ContinuumCloud’s digital patient engagement tools, providers can stay in contact with patients in between sessions to offer more meaningful care. They can also review patient self-assessments and records to look for signs of distress or relapse to catch any concerns early on. 

Patient engagement software also improves clinical excellence by ensuring that clinicians’ time is being used well. No-shows can result in wasted time and lost income but patient engagement software provides appointment reminders to help patients stick to their scheduled visits.

Patient engagement software can also keep program alumni engaged. This can result in better long-term outcomes for your patients and these alumni can be a great source of feedback on how you can improve patient care moving forward.

Track Patient Outcomes

Patient care outcomes are a useful way to track and measure clinical excellence. Positive care metrics like high patient retention or minimal wait times are a great indicator that you’re making progress toward clinical excellence. With ContinuumCloud’s EHR software, administrators can track and review key metrics, including patient wait times, re-admissions, and satisfaction scores. These data points can help leaders understand where processes may need to improve in order to better serve patients.

Automate Workflows for Greater Efficiency

Process automation can boost operational efficiency and help your agency reach clinical excellence. Automating administrative tasks can free up your employees’ time so that they can spend more time with patients and less time on paperwork. ContinuumCloud’s EHR software allows behavioral health organizations to automate a variety of tasks such as scheduling, billing, and claims processing. ContinuumCloud’s HCM software can also automate common human resources workflows, such as payroll calculations and performance management activities.

Streamline Billing and Revenue Cycle Management

Maintaining an organized billing process and addressing claim denials promptly is another way to improve clinical excellence. Behavioral health providers often rely on insurance reimbursements for a large portion of their income. As such, it’s vital to submit claims promptly and accurately to avoid any potential loss or delay in revenue. Health insurance reimbursement rates are already often lower for behavioral health organizations than for other medical specialties, so behavioral health providers can’t afford to miss out on any claims reimbursements due to denials. 

ContinuumCloud’s electronic health record software includes billing and revenue cycle management features to streamline this process. These tools can help you streamline the billing process to save time, reduce claim denials, and maintain better billing records.

Solutions to Improve Clinical Excellence

ContinuumCloud offers a variety of tech solutions that can help your organization function effectively. With smooth workflows and efficient processes, employees can do their best work and patients can receive the best outcomes.

Human Capital Management 

ContinuumCloud’s HCM platform includes all of the human resource management tools that your organization needs to work efficiently. From managing employee benefits to accessing key HR data, using a unified HCM platform can help streamline common HR tasks and give leadership a better view of its workforce.

Patient Engagement

Keeping patients engaged allows you to provide them with consistent, quality care. ContinuumCloud’s patient engagement software can help clinicians stay connected with patients and program alumni to achieve better care outcomes and provide more personalized, hands-on care. The software includes appointment reminders, patient communication tools, telehealth capabilities, and digital interventions.

Electronic Health Record 

ContinuumCloud’s electronic health record (EHR) software is a comprehensive solution designed to help behavioral health and human services organizations manage clinical documentation, billing, patient communications, and more. Using an EHR can help healthcare systems and providers improve internal workflows and better organize documentation.

Boost Clinical Excellence With ContinuumCloud 

Adopting the right technology can help your company streamline workflows, track data on your clinical excellence initiatives, and better promote patient and employee well-being.

ContinuumCloud’s HCM platform is the only human capital management solution designed specifically to meet the needs of the behavioral health and human services industry. The platform can help organizations save time and serve patients more effectively. ContinuumCloud also offers a user-friendly patient engagement platform to support patient communication and engagement. Furthermore, ContinuumCloud EHR software provides revenue cycle management and process automation tools to help providers operate more efficiently. 

All of ContinuumCloud’s digital solutions provide useful tools to help you achieve clinical excellence. Contact us today to learn how ContinuumCloud’s software products can help your organization.