Behavioral Healthcare

Building a New Future Together

With 100 employees and a $5 million annual budget, CPCS provides a comprehensive array of clinical and rehabilitation services for seriously emotionally disturbed children and severely mentally ill adults, operates an adult day center for the trail and elderly, and provides around-the-clock psychiatric emergency services. In 2004, CPHC secured a grant to provide behavioral health screening and brief intervention services to its medical patients and subcontracted with CPCS to provide these se...

The Community Health Center Perspective

The federal health centers program, administered by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) in the Department of Health and Human Services, has long recognized that the nation's healthcare safety net must weave together primary care, mental health, and substance abuse services to adequately serve uninsured and underserved individuals. In 2005, 74% of federally funded CHCs provided on-site mental health treatment and counseling, and 50% provided on-site substance abuse treatme...

Integrated Care at Paxton House

A major contributor is widespread treatment with second-generation (atypical) antipsychotics, which are associated (to varying degrees) with substantial weight gain, dyslipidemia, and increased risk for type 2 diabetes.MiS However, recent evidence indicates that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder arc risk factors independent of antipsychotic use, and lifestyle factors associated with weight gain and diabetes, such as poor diet and physical inactivity, are also common in this group, ''he costs...

Working Together to Address an Urgent Need

In this region, Milford Regional Health System is the largest provider of medical services, with a hospital Milford Regional Medical (enter), a multispecialty physicians' group practice with 20 locations and 80 physicians and nurse practitioners (Tri-County Medical Associates), and a small community health center (Tri-River Health Outer).

Facility Design Showcase

Outdoor features include gardening plots; woodland trails for walking, hiking, and biking; horse pastures used m assisted equine therapy; volleyball nets; fire pit; and ample searing tor reflection and relaxation.

Behavioral Health Monitor

The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) will significantly expand its support group program for people with menial illnesses to all 50 states and Puerto Rico by 2009, thanks to an exclusive multiyear partnership with AstraZeneca, LP. ECRI, on independent, non-profit health services research and patient safety agency, has issued Restraints, a new report from its risk management analysts.

Publisher

Caught in the Act

The plight of the mentally ill in prisons is of great importance. All too often people with mental illness are arrested for "petty" crimes and sent to prisons lacking the resources to handle them, leading to unnecessary suffering and inhumane conditions.

Tools For Transformation

Reinventing Performance Evaluations

Changing any organization's culture is a daunting task, hut since performance evaluations touch every employee (or are supposed to anyway), they can be used at reoccurring intervals to reinforce recovery values and identify ways to put them into practice for every person in the organization. Bill recently reviewed an evaluation form used throughout a large academic psychiatric program and while it seemed to cover the usual bases, it didn't reflect the organization's goals and certainly wasn'...

Views On Technology

Emrs and Database Structures

Behavioral healthcare providers at all types are implementing electronic medical records (EMRs). justifiably, much attention is being paid to issue's of client/patient privacy, clinician work How, and the EMR's impact on resources and procedures. In addition, dictionary formats make intormation available for aggregated reporting, while free-text data are difficult to aggregate. therefore. data-type decisions impact the capacity to aggregate content across programs and populations for efficie...

Perspectives

Moving Beyond Our Ehr Phobia

Similar to past years' conference otterings, the EHR topic was holding its own last year against heavy-hitting topics such as evidence-based practices, integrated behavioral and primary healthcare, and risk management and staying out of jail (According to Andrew Quinn, a former federal prosecutor and plenary speaker, healthcare fraud is number two on the FBI's hit list after terrorism). Coming back down to earth, to present and practical thoughts, the ease and dependability of data storage a...

Our Time to Lead

In every town in America, we see unmet: young pregnant women with untreated depression; the elderly living alone, isolated, anxious, and at risk for suicide; seriously mentally ill men and women released from jails and prisons without housing and into a communitv mental health and addictions treatment system that desperately needs to be expanded and better funded; or worse.

Teaching the Past to Guide the Future

Boards of directors will determine a number of these decisions; retiring leaders will have some sway; and consultants will influence the hiring process. Remember, leadership is not just about your organization; it is about the collective effort to ensure that the vision, mission, compassion, and passion of the past are Inoculated into the spirit and soul of leaders of the future.

Views On Washington

A Record of Healthcare Reform

Aided by an energetic state Medicaid director and his close ally, Lt. Gov. Sally Pederson, Vilsack's administration craftcd a major Medicaid package with Republican House Speaker Danny Carroll, The bipartisan legislation greatly reduced state costs for Medicaid, included incentives for businesses to contribute to health insurance for employees in Medicaid-eligible tarnilies, and gave performance awards to healthcare providers.

Information Technology

Vista's Limited Impact

Retail store shelves are now adorned with rows of stylized boxes trut contain the various flavors of Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system and Office 2007 productivity suite. For now, Vista's impact on the behavioral health field is really no bigger than the impact of Windows XP when it was released, and Vista currently doesn't have any features that wuuld yield a return on investment.

Examining Chemical Dependency Providers' It Needs

To be successful, a BH information system should demonstrate at least two qualities; the ability to be fully integrated and the flexibility to change.2 In New York the Practice Improvement Collaborative (PIC) is stressing the importance of chemical dependency (CD) treatment providers having comprehensive, reliable, and standards-based computerized information systems.

Performance Measurement

Benchmarking Blossoms in the Garden State

* Financial benchmarks include current ratio, net days in accounts receivable, bad debt, and operating revenue and cost per client and per unit of service for various levels of care. Trina Parks, senior director of adult intensive programs at the Mental Health Association of Essex County in Montclair, notes that the Benchmarking Initiative provides a larger audience and expanded sense of improvements that her organization can make.

Justice System

A Large Court System Tackles a Huge Problem

Appropriate graduated sanctions to address noncompliance and incentives for progress are determined through a collective problem-solving approach that not only involves the client, TASC case managers, probation officers, and judges, but also the Chicago Police Department's Crisis Intervention Team, state's attorneys, public defenders, and DMH- and DASA-funded providers. The program has been supported through a combination of local, state, and federal funds, including a significant contributi...

Liability Landscape

Ensure Staff Sign On and Patients Sign Off

An adequate medication risk management system in the community mental health or hospital setting should start with a commitment to involve the facility's entire ireatment staff in the effort to avoid errors. Furthermore, obtaining informed consent is an important part or building a quality therapeutic relationship, which is critical to both treatment success and good risk management.

Women Services

Treatment with a Feminine Touch

Therefore, the new facility has extra phone booths, vanities in each room, extra storage space for hair dryers and other personal items, and a crafts room for projects with children. The Orchid's program features a holistic approach for treating substance abuse, employing "the aesthetics of healing" along with yoga, acupuncture, and various ancillary services.