Enhanced reporting tools help our customers focus on provision of care.
When an individual battling substance use disorder (SUD) is in crisis, timely program intake and assessments are essential to the path to recovery. With help from federal and state discretionary grant funding, behavioral health agencies are there to provide individuals in crisis the treatment and support they need in some of the darkest moments of their lives.
But, as with any grant-funded initiative, agencies must justify financial need and show how money is having a positive impact on clients enrolled in their programs. For example, state and county behavioral health agencies that receive federal discretionary grant funds must prove that 80 percent of clients who have been assessed for a substance use disorder (SUD) treatment program are followed up with at least once within the six months after intake. Agencies rely on enterprise technology solutions, like FEI’s behavioral health care management systems, to track intake, assessments and client follow up for grant reporting.
Alerting agency staff about required follow-up at the right intervals is just one of the ways our solutions support this type of discretionary grant funding compliance. Another way? The automated upload of grant funding data to federal systems every single night.
SUPPORTING FEDERAL COMPLIANCE
Twenty years ago, Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) – a law that required grant-funded programs to link resource use and management decisions to program performance. Today, billions of dollars of discretionary GPRA funding are used for substance use disorder (SUD) treatment and prevention programs nationwide.
Our Blue Compass behavioral health case management solution assists health and human services agencies in managing and reporting on behavioral health programs, especially those funded through discretionary grants. To that end, our system supports the automated nightly upload of GPRA data to the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Performance Accountability and Reporting System (SPARS). SAMSHA requires agencies to record and report assessment data on new clients within seven days of initial contact. Our solution’s ability to batch upload GPRA data nightly meets and exceeds these minimum requirements for compliance.
Our behavioral health care management platform was originally developed as part of a pilot project with SAMHSA, and referred to as the Web Infrastructure for Treatment Services (WITS) platform. The pilot project helped four states and one large county efficiently report grant-related data back to the federal agency. We continue to enhance our product in support of our customers, including, as was the case in this instance, making changes that comply with new regulations over time, regarding how the GPRA assessment data is collected. Earlier this year, we finalized some updates and enhancements to our GPRA grant management functionality. We built the new GPRA assessment tool for our platform using an updated technology architecture that supports a more user-friendly interface for end users working in our systems.
