Engineering managed care automation via the treatment planning process: a bottom-up approach

This paper describes implementing technology used for developing a personalized treatment plan using a specific treatment planning process and methodology. This methodology involves defining categories of treatment, goals that a program can assist patients to achieve, client objectives that evidence movement towards achieving specific goals, and interventions that can be performed by the program to accomplish these objectives. Each goal is issued a start and end (review) date. At the review date, whether a patient accomplished the goal or not will be assessed by a clinician using acceptable testing methods. Staff intervene according to the objectives for which the intervention has been designated and chart against these objectives by comments and assigning a progress indicator. Using this methodology which includes these two disjoint measures, care facilities can utilize technology to employ a paperless system that will standardize the process for developing a person-centered plan, identify program and staff deficiencies, evaluate the effectiveness of changes made to the program with respect to staff and patients, and capture information necessary to produce detailed billing. Software that implements this method has successfully been employed at the Rose Hill Center for Psychiatric Treatment & Rehabilitation in less than six months. Facilities using this software can transfer patients between programs and keep a longitudinal patient record. Funding has been granted to use this software to study best practices in the treatment of schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder.