Public Mental Health – Tracking Clients through the System

Situation

San Francisco’s Department of Children, Youth & Their Families (DCYF) needed to understand the movement of their clients through the services and among the various providers in the public mental health system. With a mission to ensure that young people become healthy, productive, and valued community members, the department needed to understand the impact of client demographics and clinical characteristics on outcomes.

Solution

Using Medicaid billing data, the project team developed models to segment and analyze the patient population by demographic and clinical characteristics such as gender, age, ethnicity, and diagnosis.

The project allowed provider organizations to use innovative approaches to setting up databases and mining data to enhance their clinical and management decision making.

The team developed visualization tools to help stakeholders in the mental health system interpret data about their clients to see the paths clients took through the system.

With this capability, stakeholders could identify early warning signs and patterns of behavioral health disorders and determine interventions most likely to avert worsening symptoms and facilitate client recovery.

Service providers and case workers used the visualization to understand which services clients were using, how the services varied by provider within and across levels of care, and whether the flow varied by client demographic characteristics. Providers and others could manipulate the tools to explore the movement of clients over time among various services.

Team Leads: Stephen Guerin, Joshua Thorp