Behavioral Health Care Reporting to Referring Provider

By Patrick Johnson, PhD, Director of Behavioral Health, Community Health Plan of Washington

The recent Provider Survey performed for Community Health Plan of Washington (the Plan) by The Myers Group tells us that 71.5 percent of the network providers responding receive feedback/reports from behavioral health clinicians. However, only 18.4 percent of the respondents rate the information they receive as timely and thorough.

Contributing factors to the low score may include work processes that put patient documentation at the end of the week or later due to heavy demand for behavioral health clinical time. There may be insufficient time to provide robust reports for all clients. Medical providers and behavioral health pProviders may have different definitions of timely and thorough reports. The dissatisfaction may be due to very different expectations on reporting between medical providers and behaviorists.

Given that the satisfaction with reports being timely and thorough is low, we recommend that behavioral health clinicians do their own evaluation of their reporting processes with their referring providers.

There are several options for behavioral health clinicians to improve the reporting process:

Learn your referring providers' expectations. If they are really impossible to meet%mdash;negotiate.
Examine the reporting process. It may take no more overall time to write and send the report if it is done right after the visit than it does to batch them and send at the end of the week.
Examine the process. Flow it out and see where the time goes. The behaviorist may find ways to delegate nonclinical work to others and save time for more in-depth reports.

The exchange of information between those who provide medical health care and behavioral health care is critical to accurate and timely diagnosis and treatment. Better communication contributes to better care.