Strategic Solutions: Rethinking Mental Health Systems with Colorado’s Behavioral Health Agency
Colorado’s Behavioral Health Agency is reimagining what coordinated care looks like across a diverse and shifting state. An early product goal has been the Bed Capacity Tracker, intended to give families in the midst of emergencies insight into where to find timely care.
Offering
Proejct-based Research and Strategy
Sector
Health Insurance
Partnership
Bloomworks
Approach
The Bed Capacity Tracker was built with good intentions, but after years of stagnation and an unclear path forward, the BHA team decided it was time to evaluate the current challenges and outline a path forward.
I joined Bloomworks for an 8-week design sprint focused on the challenge. With an additional User Researcher and a Technical Strategist, we explored the challenge from every angle, including technical reviews, product reviews, surveys and interviews of providers, intergovernmental interviews, and comparison state interviews.
Strategic Pivot
Through intensive research and stakeholder engagement, we uncovered deep-rooted concerns among mental health clinics regarding the burdensome nature of the tracker. Surveys and outreach efforts revealed a critical misalignment between the tool's implementation and clinic workflows. While we found some states that made a similar tool work, their state healthcare environment meant they succeeded due to fundamental and unrepeatable conditions.
Faced with this challenge, our team proposed a pivotal shift in perspectives: start with referrals and automate the bed capacity tracker. Recognizing the interconnectedness of patient care pathways, we advocated for a strategic shift towards a referral-centric approach. By bypassing the tracker and integrating referral mechanisms directly, we alleviated the burden on clinics while enhancing system efficiency.
Mending a Stressed System
The mental health system in Colorado is at a breaking point. Everyone wants a BCT to exist, but providers see no feasible way to create and input the data that won’t stress their facilities more. We believe our research can help the state manage stressed relationships by providing real relief to providers while helping add transparency to a deeply opaque system. Our research helped reroot the agency in the teamwork required to make this system function.
“Our industry isn't just in a labor shortage, it is truly a crisis. We are losing staff left and right to private practice where the documentation requirements are much more lax and the pay is much higher, but we are not finding replacement staff. We have had to shut down several offices because of this labor crisis and are about to close more offices. So to be blunt, data reporting to the state is nowhere on our list of priorities because we are just trying to stay afloat and keep the doors open.”
—Quality Assurance Professional, Residential Substance Use Disorder Facility
“Capacity is always changing. There’s unexpected discharges, planned discharges often fall through, clients can be violent requiring isolation, blocking a bed. Getting true accuracy is difficult.”
—Behavioral Health administrator