Ready to unlock the power of compliance in behavioral health? We've got you covered! Join me and the insightful Maeve O'Neill from CIRCA Behavioral Health as we navigate the complex terrain of outcomes, compliance, and data standardization. We expose the harsh truths about the lack of standardization in behavioral health and reveal how compliance can serve as a solid armor to safeguard your organization while boosting your earnings. As we unravel the fine threads of documentation management, we highlight the critical need for cultural fit when hiring, and discuss creating an environment that breathes learning, fostering perpetual growth and improvement.
Is there a secret recipe for establishing trust and safety in an organization? Absolutely! We shed light on the magic ingredient: clear expectations. Listen in as we dive into the core of understanding expectations as a roadmap to accountability and a crystal ball for future scenarios. We also emphasize that clarity isn't just power, but also kindness, cultivating trust and ensuring safety within your team. Stay tuned and be a part of this riveting discussion, packed with invaluable insights on behavioral health, the indispensability of compliance, and the essence of setting clear expectations.
Ready to unlock the power of compliance in behavioral health? We've got you covered! Join me and the insightful Maeve O'Neill from CIRCA Behavioral Health as we navigate the complex terrain of outcomes, compliance, and data standardization. We expose the harsh truths about the lack of standardization in behavioral health and reveal how compliance can serve as a solid armor to safeguard your organization while boosting your earnings. As we unravel the fine threads of documentation management, we highlight the critical need for cultural fit when hiring, and discuss creating an environment that breathes learning, fostering perpetual growth and improvement.
Is there a secret recipe for establishing trust and safety in an organization? Absolutely! We shed light on the magic ingredient: clear expectations. Listen in as we dive into the core of understanding expectations as a roadmap to accountability and a crystal ball for future scenarios. We also emphasize that clarity isn't just power, but also kindness, cultivating trust and ensuring safety within your team. Stay tuned and be a part of this riveting discussion, packed with invaluable insights on behavioral health, the indispensability of compliance, and the essence of setting clear expectations.
Welcome to Hatching Creativity. This isn't just another behavioral health podcast. This is the place where thought leaders converge to talk about real life challenges, breakthroughs and pivotal aha moments. Hey everybody, thanks for tuning in to Hatching Creativity. In today's interview, I speak with Maeve O'Neill from Circa Behavioral Health. Maeve is a behavioral health care industry expert and one of the most passionate advocates for ethics and compliance. We speak about outcomes, compliance, data standardization and what you could be looking at to best serve your business. And don't forget if you like what you hear, please like, subscribe and tell all your friends about Hatching Creativity.
Speaker 2:I'm here with Maeve today. Maeve, would you like to do an introduction of yourself?
Speaker 3:So I worked in behavioral health my whole life 35 years, about 10 as a clinician, 10 managing programs and then 10 in leadership positions. And then, luckily, the last seven or eight of that has gotten in compliance, where I found my love of helping other organizations become more compliant with regulatory stuff or in line with what the standards are across the industry and then helping to make sure our staff are ready for that. You know, I think it's a matter of making sure that individuals, teams and organizations all have the same information and are walking towards the same goals.
Speaker 2:You know it's funny. I talked about standardization the time and there's such a lack of standardization in this area, right, Everybody does things their own way and feels that it's better, but without standardization, there's no way to compare outcomes or results or what is good. Right? You don't even know that, because I'm thinking that's so many things, yeah, so I think that's really valid.
Speaker 3:I feel I was telling someone earlier, I think, that we in my career I went through sort of the evidence-based practice movement. Do we have the right research bases and the right clinical practices? Then we have the managed care kind of movement. That one we'll align with what payers want. And I think the next movement is going to be compliance. Do we have all the standards? Do they kind of make sense? Are they different in every state? Or maybe there's some more alignment? And how can we help organizations implement them on a daily basis? We add a lot of headaches so that's a lot of problems and just integrate into their daily work. I think it's so much easier.
Speaker 2:Well, it's also interesting because the way people manage compliance it all makes it really hard. People feel like, because they are able to keep their license or their accreditation, that that means that they're doing enough on compliance, and what they're really missing is that compliance should be used as a tool All we're heard to protect to protect your organization and to protect your revenue, or potentially to generate revenue, if you're using the right tools and looking at the right day of the month.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, sure, I think compliance and behavioral health. We're a very kind of a baby program, right. We're just maturing to the point of what is compliance. Do we have all the elements? Do we have all the pieces? Do we have a framework, an approach to it that makes sense, or is everyone kind of just doing the best they can? It's what they have. Is it a person? Is it a good policy set? Is it someone that's helping them to do it because they've done it for so many years? But I think we're going to see a lot more infusion to the field of requirements from accreditation bodies, licensing bodies. You have to have a compliance plan and a program and a staff and certifications, like we do in medical and clinical services. So it's coming. It's going to be here soon, I think.
Speaker 2:You know. What's interesting, though, is that I think, as it meet, there's tons of evolution needed. But the other thing is, is the way people manage their documentation, like they're planning on the Joint Commission or their state not coming out for two and a half, three years, right? So what ends up happening is, if they're not coming out for another two, three, whatever, people just do their own thing, and then, as it gets closer, they're making up information. We all see it right, and what ends up happening is the data is useless. I use examples all the time of whether it's client rounds. People skip on client rounds all the time. Oh, this is how you make sure your clients don't die, you know, or nobody's in a position where they need a clinical help and they can't get it. There are all these standards are here to help people, you know, to help the clients, but down the organizations and you have to look in your data. Perhaps let me actually do something very well.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a real good compliance plan and program that looks at all those risk areas and the data behind it on a regular basis to hopefully have a robust response in place, right? So you don't wait for Joint Commission to come and say, oops, you missed this, you're managing it. You're managing it and then I think, you're learning from it, and then you're developing a culture of learning, like you always want to get better. None of us has this perfect. None of us has this fine tune. It's an ongoing process and then we can learn from each other, I think, as we learned those last few months.
Speaker 2:You know it's funny, you talked about the culture. So I had on Jordan Young on recently and Jordan is a recruiter in the space and we were talking about hiring processes, right, and one of the topics that came up was don't just hire somebody because they're a body and you need somebody in there. Then you really need to make sure that you're hiring somebody who's a fit for your culture, because, one, it's very easy to damage your reputation. Two, it's very easy to poison the well with the rest of your staff when you hire somebody that's not a good cultural fit. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:So I think I've done an interview. Question is how do you see compliance? What is the culture of safety look like? Here is our culture and how do you see yourself fitting in? Those are great ways to interview and then, if someone leaves the organization, maybe even ask what didn't fit for you, what in the organization didn't see right and are there compliance concerns as you leave? Those are great sort of touch points to integrate compliance into those activities. So you love it.
Speaker 2:I like that, you know. I think that one of the things I've seen you present to a thousand times by now and one of the things that always stands out for me about your presentations as well as what you talk about as well as practice is staff taking care of your people, understanding the burden and the workload on your team so that they're not dealing with them. You want to talk about that, sure.
Speaker 3:I think it was probably seven years ago. I wrote an article for the Healthcare Compliance Association Magazine and the title was Compliance at the Heart of the Organization and I really believe that compliance, when done right, shouldn't be a punitive, scary place. It really should be where people come to feel heard, to feel listened to, to feel safe in the organization. And when you do that and then you have, I think, better outcomes for our clients, for our staff revenue. Like you mentioned earlier, my new mantra is happy and healthy staff, our ethical and compliant, to provide quality and safe care. We can't do one without the other right. We've got to do all this and the compliance team person, whatever should be part of that process. Whether you're using a platform like Hatch or an EMR process or whatever it is, team meetings, you wave it in and it just becomes part of our daily activities. That's the goal I like that.
Speaker 2:I think that makes a lot of sense. If you could change something in the industry, what would that be?
Speaker 3:Well, I guess I'd have to say about the staff. I think I would change the fact that well, our challenge programs, it is their staff coming first, Because we all want compliance to come first, or revenue or expenses, yeah right. But if it's really staff, you've got to say how do we demonstrate that? What does that look like on a daily basis? Is it just going warm bodies? Is it taking care of our staff? Is it staff well-being activities I was just presenting earlier about? Do we have burnout initiatives in our programs? What are we doing to prevent burnout in our staff? What are we doing to detect that turnover on Maeve's team or Mike's team? And then what are you doing about to collect it? There's lots of things we can do, but if you don't know the data, if you don't have the information, you can't really address it.
Speaker 2:It's true. It's true, I hear, because I talk to so many people about things like this. I always ask what are you doing to ensure that your staff is happy? So you talked a little bit about staff appreciation and the things that you do, and it's funny because so many organizations I talked to you ask them what are they doing for staff appreciation and they really don't have any things. Or maybe they do a pizza party once a quarter or something.
Speaker 2:I was in California not that long ago and I was traveling around visiting some of the treatment centers that we work with. Then I sat with Michael, the CEO of Alter Health Group, in Data Point, I believe, and he goes hey, what are you doing tonight? I'm gonna say I haven't had any plans. What's going on? I'm taking the whole staff roller skating tonight. You want to cover? And I was like what? He goes yeah, they do team roller skating. And so the thing is is like, with these cool team events, if you want to do something with the team, do it outside the work. Don't necessarily they're spending enough time there, right? Yeah, do it outside and do it in a way where people can really connect and become friends. Yeah, find people look out for each other that way and you're dealing with not only a vulnerable population your clientele but a vulnerable population as yours.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I love the creativity of it. Right, like, whatever your staff, my staff, something else that might be different. So ask your staff what do they want? You might think they want a pizza party, or maybe they want to do something else. You know what I mean. So when you really, when you know your staff, you know it's okay to ask what right now do we need? Do we need a day off? Do we need a party?
Speaker 2:What do we need? Let's do it. What the thing is is communication has to be often and consistent, because if all of a sudden, you come out of the blue and you go, hey, what do you want to do? Yeah, yeah, they're going to be like a deer on the headlights and they're not going on like not going to trust it, right? So it has a lot to do with that whole culture, like, like you had mentioned, you know, it's so important that your staff knows and they're appreciated and respected and you know and to.
Speaker 2:Sometimes they may mess up, yeah, but you got to kind of look at that mess up and wonder, you know, and ask yourself is that a mess up because of carelessness? Is it a mess up because of, like, the personality? Or maybe they go in through some stuff and maybe they just need you to put your arm around them and say, hey, you're going to be all right and you're not at risk here. Right, that goes all along the way. Exactly, we've got people like that. You know where they fit off for a little while and you don't know why they're off. Yeah, but if you have that communication with them along the way, you can go out and straight up. Aspel, I'm noticing you're off, what's going on, and they'll share that with you.
Speaker 3:I hope that connected you. They trust you. Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2:So if you, is there anything that you would say, maybe for somebody who's looking to get started building a culture of compliance, what would you recommend? How somebody gets started? It seems like such a daunting task.
Speaker 3:Well, I guess the first thing is to kind of recognize, if you have data, information, what's our current culture? So what's our baseline now, what do you want to get to? And then you know folks like us in circuit. We can help you figure out what's the best culture of compliance. What's that going to look like? It's a risk assessment, right? Do you have a plan? Do you have a program? Are you reaching the seven elements? Do you have a policy procedure manual? Do you have the training around that, all those pieces. And then you kind of you can't fix it all at once. What you can do is this year, let's do this, we'll tackle this problem and that problem. And then you kind of, I think, get the input of the staff, get the input of the outside people and the next thing, you know you're making progress and you realize the effort in the work is worth it and it will keep growing from there?
Speaker 2:So are you saying that the best method is one foot in front of the other, as opposed to like just going wild and flipping all organization on its head.
Speaker 3:I think so. I think it's clarity. What is the? Where are we now? Where do you want to get to? And then taking steps toward that, and you're going to make mistakes along the way. That's okay too, but I think having an outside person like us come in and help assess that's really helpful too. We see here things that may be unbiased internal yeah, the unbiased objective opinion. External kind of evaluation is really helpful.
Speaker 2:You know you mentioned something a minute ago about being clear. You know, and I'm a big fan of Brené Brown, just like you, and she always says clear is kind, Conclear is unkind. And I interpret that as setting up clear expectation of what you expect from other people and what other people should expect from you. And if you are clear about that, if you hold them accountable for it, they know what they're being held accountable for. The worst is when it's amorphous and we're just guessing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we feel safe when we know what expectations are Right. What am I? What might happen? What's going to happen? How am I going to feel when it happens? Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Thanks for tuning in to Hatchin' Creativity. We appreciate your support. Please don't forget to like and subscribe until all your friends about the show and remember it's never just about one thing.