Hatching Creativity: Conversations on Success, Innovation, and Growth
Welcome to "Hatching Creativity: Conversations on Success, Innovation, and Growth"! Join us as we dive deep into the world of creativity and explore the minds of remarkable individuals who have achieved extraordinary success in their respective fields.
In this podcast, we believe that creativity is not limited to the realm of art and design; it encompasses every aspect of life and business. Through engaging interviews and thought-provoking discussions, we'll uncover the secrets behind harnessing creativity to drive innovation and fuel personal and professional growth.
Discover the strategies, mindset, and experiences that have propelled our guests to new heights. We'll explore guests journeys, challenges, and breakthrough moments. Be inspired by their stories, learn from their failures, and gain practical insights to apply in your own creative endeavors.
Get ready to tap into the boundless potential of your own creativity, ignite your passion, and embark on a transformative journey of success, innovation, and growth. Subscribe now and join us on this exciting adventure!
Hatching Creativity: Conversations on Success, Innovation, and Growth
Decoding the Impact of Data on Behavioral Healthcare and Business Decisions with David Whitesock of Commonly Well
Ever wondered how the power of data can revolutionize behavioral healthcare? Picture this: comprehensive insights informed by key data points that help you provide personalized, effective care to your clients. Join us in this eye-opening conversation with David Whitesock from Commonly Well. We dive into the nitty-gritty of this fascinating intersection between healthcare and data. We discuss how tracking certain data points, understanding demographics, process metrics, and patients' treatment preferences can positively impact patient outcomes.
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.
Speaker 2:One of the things that I love about what you do and what Commonly Well does, is the way you're looking at data to improve clients' lives and clients' experiences. Can you talk with me a little bit about some of the data points that you find to be really helpful to be tracking in behavioral healthcare settings as a best practice? What data points do you recommend people should be looking at?
Speaker 3:From a starting perspective, just process and process being, if you don't have a handle on the total number of people that are in your census, it's oftentimes that I will talk to a behavioral health leader and I'll say what's your annual census and they'll go. That's the first number you need to know. You need to know the date. The moment you wake up you should look at a sheet or dashboard or report that says yesterday you admitted X and that is in the last week you've admitted Y and in the last month you've admitted Z. You need to know those numbers. Like that. You need to know your fall off. So maybe AMAs or just people that leave early. You need to know those numbers. How many people are making appointments versus not? These are all conversion type numbers, but they're proxies for something else. They're proxies for quality. They're proxies for how your people engage the people you serve.
Speaker 2:You're also talking about when people are leaving early. Right, and oftentimes people really have the best idea data-wise when it comes to their marketing whether the marketing is working or maybe on their intakes right. But you also want to be looking and I just wanted to throw this little extra piece and there you're talking about looking at people leaving early or against therapeutic or medical advice. You also want to be looking at the some social determinants of health around there, too, right? Are we more successful with this demographic or this demographic? Certain therapists working out way better with this demographic than this demographic. Where are we best serving our clientele, too, and that will also help, just on a business standpoint. I wanted to throw that in there, as well as on the quality side.
Speaker 3:Kind of fascinating. A lot of people sort of diminish the importance of demographic data, but those characteristics, as you just said, can, especially in behavioral health, be illuminating too a lot of different things. The people who engage that are therapists or otherwise. We bring our own biases into things, whether it's intentional or not. If you could stratify your practice by therapist and then by patient demographic, and then maybe a third measure, just like let's just call it treatment affinity to people think the treatment's working for them.
Speaker 3:As a simple one which, by the way, it's an easy question to get at, mike, I could have you in for a group session tonight along with 20 others. You leave 10 minutes later, we kick you a text message and just ask you on a scale of one to seven Was tonight helpful for you to turn on or not? And you gather that data, take it against your demographics and you put it against that therapist and against all the other therapists and I guarantee you you will see a population or a profile of people that don't connect with a particular therapist, not because the therapist is bad, but what you start to find is, oh, that therapist does better with these people. So what should you do? As of yesterday.
Speaker 2:You should start navigating those types of people to that therapist like you just should we talk in this field so much about the key to success being a longer length of engagement with the client and their treatment? Whatever that is and it's the same thing with any kind of healthcare right it's the engagement of the practitioner and the client or the patient, and that therapeutic alliance is so important. If you don't have a good alliance with that practitioner, then you're also at a significant disadvantage. So understanding that will improve outcomes as well as your business.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean some of the data in the research does suggest that that longer term care has better outcomes. But if you read enough of those studies, what you tend to find is that it's sort of an oversampled, it's a bias. Because of the oversampling of that particular population they stayed in longer, so they're probably gonna have better outcomes, it's like. But that's okay, I'm not gonna knock that. But I would say the counter to that is thinking about. Go back to the example that I mentioned earlier of TV show the Bear. In hospitality and in restaurants you have somebody that comes in one time likely. You're gonna go visit a place. You research, you find the restaurant you wanna go to and you show up and you've got a reservation. Maybe it's a birthday or a graduation or something. You only have that 90 minutes or two hours for it to be a really great experience. That's it. There's no longitudinal anything in there. You gotta get every little bit right and this is the. This will be my one challenge to behavioral health.
Speaker 3:People Stop thinking longitudinally. I know we wanna lay out like a three, six, 12 month outcomes model. That's what I do. I do that for people. But we have to get to the individual moment Cause, every one of those little moments when people walk.
Speaker 3:If I walk into the door of a treatment facility and there is a, if there's a five gallon bucket outside the door with empty cigarette butts in it, who wants to go into a place like that to get healthcare? I don't, so you could fix that. If I walk into the place and immediately I walk in and the person behind the desk is not only behind a desk but behind a computer screen and I can only see like half his face or her face. I'm sorry that is so unwelcoming. These are all things that could trigger a positive effect about that person's desire to be in that space, that when you get to that, that that mini moment, you sort of create a cascade of feelings in that person.
Speaker 3:So all I wanna make sure people understand is yeah, we can, we can track all these long-term outcomes and we can do all these things. But sometimes we just gotta look at what's that experience of people walking in the door and what do they smell and what do they hear. If it's loud off in the corner and the walls are paper thin and you can maybe hear another session going on next door, I mean, if that's me. I'm go, I'm out of here. I don't want somebody to hear my session going on. Those things matter. So your AMAs may not be relevant to the person not wanting to commit to care. It might be the way that they were treated when they walked in the door.
Speaker 2:You hear it really often when it comes to things that were said during the admissions process or with the marketing team on the phone, and they get there and it's different. You know, what you just said reminded me of a of an expression from Maya Angelou, and she said I've learned that people often forget what you've said and they'll forget what you've did, but they're never going to forget the way you made them feel. Yeah, and it's true. I mean, I think that there's definitely a middle ground, but if you make somebody feel welcome and deal with those details that you're talking about, that will lend to a longer term engagement as well, without people actually leaving beforehand, so they do go hand in hand together as well. At the end of the day, it's about helping people and meeting people where they are and where they need to be to get the best results for them. And that's why you've got to be looking at that data, because if you're not looking at the data and doing anything with it, then you wouldn't have anything to work with.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I was at a we're at the National Drug Court Conference, drug Court Treatment Conference a couple of weeks ago and was visiting with a judge and you know it was an interesting conversation around the idea that you know, all of these treatment courts have sort of this designed protocol around sort of this 24 month or 18 month structure of the program and these four phases. And he said, hey, judge, so what's your goal? He's like I want them to get through all four phases. And I said how long does that typically take you? And he goes the 24 months, as you know it's suggested. And I go Are you just trying to meet to the clock of the 24 months? And he goes Well, yeah, because that's what we're told.
Speaker 3:And I'm like what if there was another way? What if you found out that some of these people are excelling faster? Wouldn't you want to move them through the gates faster and get them out of your court faster and clean up your docket? And he looks at me and he goes yeah, that's what I'd love to do, but that's not what the protocols are. And I think there's another thing too, where we've got these like this catch 22 sometimes in our field. We see all the protocols we see what's called. It's like so called best practices, but somebody else's best practices might not be your best practice for the people you serve, but you don't know it.
Speaker 2:If you're not collecting the data, that's it. All kind of circles back to that, right, I mean. Otherwise you're just guessing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and you know, when you say that collecting the data, a lot of people like sort of start to freak out and they're like oh my gosh, I don't know what data to collect. And it's like just break down a process and what information do you need at each one of those moments, like any business has to do this. Right, you know, you talk about the inbound of the marketing to the sales process, to the completing the sale, to the onboarding, to delivering the product, all those things. Right, it's not really. Once you do that, it's not hard to figure out. What must I ask or what must I do to, quote, capture the data? Very true.
