The tools clinicians interact with every day are convenient, intuitive, and accessible—why should their experience with behavioral health technology be any different? Our partners at The Village Network (TVN) recently joined us for a webinar, “Elevating Behavioral Healthcare: How The Village Network Embraces Tech for Growth & Sustainability,” to share how they’ve tailored Arize, our modern behavioral health EHR, to increase staff satisfaction and position the organization for future growth. Watch the webinar to hear directly from TVN’s Vice President of Information Systems Mary Schantz and Cantata’s Chief Clinical Advisor Dr. Jorge Petit. Keep reading for some key takeaways and lessons learned from their discussion.

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Q: How have the expectations of technology evolved in the last few years at TVN?

A: There have been several key themes, but staff retention has been a driving force. We regularly heard feedback with previous systems that clinical documentation was cumbersome and contributing to turnover. The technology available was difficult to learn, navigate, and access. Most of our services are out in the community and staff needed tools that follow them anywhere, but that wasn’t the case. We knew that more user-friendly and mobile-friendly tools were key to addressing retention issues.

We’re also growing as an agency – expanding service lines and getting into new initiatives – so we need data to track key metrics and support decision-making. With previous systems, a lot of reports had to be custom built by a developer. We didn’t have the ability to get in and pull the data we needed to make reporting more accessible, clear, and driven by the feedback we were getting from our teams. Having the flexibility to do that on our own has been another key area of focus.

Lastly, there’s a real need to consolidate and integrate data across systems. We used to have a separate critical incident system and key databases that we accessed for additional information, neither of which overlapped or could communicate with our EHR. We wanted to consolidate our own internal systems into a few tools that our staff can interact with, plus integrate with broader health systems to make information readily accessible the way staff or clients need it.

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Q: How has TVN tailored Arize to better fit the organization’s unique needs?

A: We have several unique service lines and workflows, and we wanted to find an EHR provider that would allow us to tailor the product to meet those unique needs.

For example, we worked with our clinical and program teams to make sure our documentation processes reflect our primary clinical models, which are Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) and The Neurosequential Model of Therapeutics™. Our teams were completing a lot of documentation that supports CPS on paper and asked if we could tie it into electronic progress note templates to reduce duplicative work. We were able to build out a portion of the forms ourselves, with Cantata providing development support to help finalize them.

We were also looking at different models to populate our treatment plan libraries, but decided to develop them ourselves internally so we could tie the language to our clinical models and our focus on goals and interventions. It was very straightforward to build those out — our clinical directors were able to do it without requiring help from a technical team.

Even in billing, we have several unique scenarios and use the tools in Arize to meet the needs of a lot of different payer sources. Our billing team works every single claim that goes out the door and comes back in to make sure we recover that revenue, and if we can save them time by creating efficiency in their processes, that’s a huge win for everyone.

The ability for us to make these customizations internally, without a developer or customized knowledge, has been a big improvement for us in being able to meet the needs of our programs.

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Q: How has TVN ensured high staff satisfaction during the transition to and ongoing use of Arize?

A: Every layer of the organization is impacted by switching to a new EHR. It’s a challenging process to go through to make sure we’ve accomplished everything in the original scope, while not overburdening staff with too much change at once. We learned a lot of lessons.

One of the key takeaways for us was to be realistic about the experience that’s coming. While the impact is obvious now, it’s not always obvious to staff in the middle of large-scale change. It’s important to be clear about that upfront.

Wraparound support through open communication, office hours, follow-up training, or even offering tips and tricks is also critical, not only during go-live but ongoing as processes and documentation continue to evolve. Looping in program managers and clinical administrative staff through the process has also been helpful to get both existing and new staff on board.

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Q: In what ways have you leveraged staff feedback to continually adapt and improve the use of Arize within TVN?

A: We wanted to engage staff feedback in unique ways, so it wasn’t just the IT department defining their documentation and workflows. Our chief administrative officer recommended that we put a team together from all aspects of the agency to evaluate our documentation across the board — assessments, treatment plans, progress notes, and other templates. Do we have this because we’ve always had this? Do we have this because of a clinical quality measure? Do we have this because of a regulatory requirement? This group went through every single document in the system and made decisions together on what to include or change, which resulted in both increased productivity and satisfaction.

This group continues to bring us new ideas every week to continue adapting the system and making it more efficient. Every one of their suggestions gives us the opportunity to debate. What’s the right way to do this? What’s the best way to communicate for the clinical teams? How do we make sure we’re capturing what’s required by rule? Are we thoughtful about where else information exists in the system so that staff don’t have to retype it? We get feedback from all different departments when all the decision-makers are in one room, plus staff have transparency in the process, and that’s been hugely valuable for us.

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Q: How has Arize impacted the expectations and experience of TVN’s staff?

Staff are very pleased with how user-friendly and accessible everything is. They can see that we were thoughtful about how we put our documentation together and wanting to give them tools to reduce complexity and duplication.

You get into the social work field because you want to work with people, not because you want to document, so anything we can do to reduce that burden and allow them to be back in with clients is critically important. We’ve come such a long way from where we were to where we are now, and I think Arize has been a really good investment for TVN.

Watch the webinar to hear more on these topics from TVN’s Mary Schantz and Cantata’s Dr. Jorge Petit. Is it time for your organization to take the next step towards EHR success? Let’s connect to show you what Arize can do for your organization.