As demand for home care increases, providers must manage a higher volume of care. With higher visit volumes come more data – but what is in that data, and how can we leverage data to improve care? We caught up with Angela Johnson at CARE Hawaii to hear about their experience and success learning to better manage visit data using CellTrak Insights and Analytics: A service offered to home health and home care providers, managed by data scientists to leverage cloud warehousing services using Microsoft's analytics platform, Power BI.
CARE Hawaii, A Celltrak customer since 2018, provides behavioral and mental health services to Hawaii’s children, adolescents, and adults through a network of mental health professionals. CARE Hawaii began using CellTrak Insights and Analytics to better fulfill contractual obligations with their state-assigned MCO Health Plan, Ohana. To ensure high-quality care is accurately issued, Ohana requires agencies to provide monthly reports detailing metrics such as patient acuity scores, number of sessions provided, and more.
“One, there is a financial motivation [for compiling this data] to meet all of those metrics,” Johnson elaborates, as failure to submit accurate reporting monthly may result in withheld funds. “but being that I'm a clinician, I want to meet those metrics because they equate to a higher quality of care for the clients.”
Gathering data monthly was not without a high productivity cost. Though they were consistently providing metrics every month, it took the agency “hours and hours and hours of labor” to hunt down these metrics. To compile data from their 1550 clients, CARE Hawaii would go through each individual patient and manually type their information into a separate excel spreadsheet. Then, they would have to resolve any records that had not yet been documented to avoid having to create justifications with the state. At the end of the day, CARE Hawaii was spending up to 51 hours each month compiling required compliance reports.
Beyond the time invested in creating these reports, making manual inputs via excel made creating accurate reports difficult, and CARE Hawaii would often find that the data “wasn’t as helpful as they wanted it to be.” Ohana seemed to agree and had requested that CARE Hawaii create reports that could be more insightful for their care providers.
Bearing this in mind, CARE Hawaii came to CellTrak with a wishlist to improve operational efficiency, including:
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Quality Assurance Metrics – Ensuring clients are getting the services required for success
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Patient Acuity Score – This determines the amount and type of services needed monthly
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Progress Notes – Monitors a patient’s change in condition, and if services are helping patient success.
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Required Clinical Documentation – Ensuring clinical documentation is being updated on time to ensure crises and changes in condition are being addressed properly. All patient documentation must be updated within that month, or they may receive a 30-Day report from Ohana. “The 30-day report means that no documentation has been put in a client’s [record] in the last 30 days--that doesn't look good. That's typically is due to the case managers not doing their notes, which is a supervision issue. We wanted to understand [why documentation hasn’t been updated] and get ahead of it and catch problems before our funders” Johnson explains. If case managers do not update patient documentation, CARE Hawaii may have to create justifications, resulting in a rift between supervisors and case managers.
CellTrak’s Insights and Analytics tool meets and exceeds this wishlist by converting raw insights into valuable data visualizations that are meaningful to providers. Using Power BI, Our Data and insight experts at Celltrak automate the manual process of sifting through manual data by creating reports and offering insights from your data. The Dashboard below is one example 
of what CellTrak Insights and Analytics might look like for a provider†, easily breaking down patients by island, showing the number of patients in each acuity level, and describing the services provided to patients. Angela describes using Power BI saying, “it's just so easy. It automatically updates every day, we don't even have to think about it, we know that we have real data.” Now CARE Hawaii can go create reports, review data, and ask staff to fix improper documentation in about an hour, lowering their work time by 98%.
Instead of manually sifting through data for documentation mistakes, Johnson states that the process for sending notes to staff is simply cutting and pasting data into messages for staff. Automatic insights and analytics allow CARE Hawaii to proactively ensure patient care is upheld and ensure documentation is complete and accurate far before reports are due to Ohana for review.
As CARE Hawaii began using CellTrak Insights and Analytics, they realized that not only were they able to fulfill their wishlist, but they were able to gain easy access to more data as they wished. In the future, CARE Hawaii hopes to continue using analytics to track metrics such as the number of hospitalizations, track housing and the number of homeless patients, and track form completion by staff. With customizable analytics, the sky is the limit for what providers can track.
CellTrak partners with our customers to understand their daily challenges and business objectives to develop management and decision solutions that fully leverage operational data. Our experienced team offers Analytics-as-a-service to cut through the drudgery of traditional reporting solutions and works with you to discover better, more effective ways, to drive results. Want to learn more about CellTrak Insights and Analytics? Fill out the form below or email us directly at sales@celltrak.com
About CARE Hawaii
CARE Hawaii, Inc. was founded in 1999 to provide outpatient mental health services to Hawaii's children, adolescents, and adults through a network of mental health professionals committed to best practices in service delivery. CARE Hawaii, Inc. services individuals with serious mental illness, developmental delays, and substance-related issues. With available services throughout the State of Hawaii, CARE Hawaii Inc.'s mission is to provide a comprehensive array of behavioral health services to promote the physical, emotional, social, spiritual, recreational, and educational development of all identified consumers and their families/significant others.
About Data†
The examples of CellTrak Insights and Analytics dashboards included above do not include Patient Health Information (PHI) to remain HIPAA compliant and maintain privacy with CARE Hawaii's Data. Please reach out to CellTrak for a full tour of the service.