Exception Reporting: A Novel Approach to Tracking of Multiple Behavioral Health Outcomes

Federally funded medical and behavioral healthcare programs often have substantial evaluation outcome tracking and reporting requirements, which can become burdensome to program staff resulting in decreased buy-in, increased chance of staff burnout and turnover, and less rigorous and consistent data collection efforts. To address this issue, a novel data collection approach, "exception reporting," was implemented to supplement and support the required data collection for a federally funded Assertive Outpatient Treatment (AOT) program. This work details the process and outcomes related to exception reporting for this comprehensive behavioral health treatment program that serves justice involved clients with serious mental illness (SMI). Results indicate that exception reporting was easily integrated into clinician's normal workflows and resulted in a number of benefits. Specifically, results indicated that exception reporting decreased the data collection burden for program staff while allowing them to efficiently track program outcomes required by the funder. Additional research into which practice settings exception reporting can most easily be integrated into, and which client outcomes may be best tracked using this methodology, is indicated.