The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA

Abstract #44556

Eleanor M. Travers, MD, Headquarters, Department of Veterans Affairs, 10 N. Greene St., Office of the Director, Baltimore, MD 21201, 410 605 7244, emtravers@cs.com

Healthcare executives and managers are always searching for better ways to improve the treatment production capacity of their organizations. Treatment capacity in a health care organization is a vague, hard to measure concept which varies over time and with local economic conditions. The term "capacity" is generally used to refer to the sustainable maximum output that is produced in an organization, depending on factors such as labor and technology availability.

For mental health operations managers providing resources for the seriously chronically mentally ill (SCMI), the task is made more difficult by the duality and complexity of patient's diagnoses and the lack of meaningful management information about the demand and intensity of care in the community.

Managers often do not have sufficient, reliable data to establish benchmarks and analyze trends in SCMI workload, fiscal and human resources consumed during prior treatment process to plan for future budget cycles.

In mental healthcare sites, the patient's diseases and conditions (the case mix) determine the workload. Similarly, the capability to maintain the standard of care stimulates greater consumption of human and fiscal resources, often in larger proportion than planned, when highly complex cases require more intense care or when the need to maintain a continuum of care and recidivism cause greater intensity of effort and cost per complex patient.

This paper summarizes the measurement tools needed to predict the demand for SCMI care and estimate a health care organization's treatment (production) capacity capability within the local community, a geographic area or larger service area.

Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of this session, the participant will

• Recognize the value of mental health management performance indicators and benchmarks to gauge the organization's progress in treating patients with serious, chronic mental illness
• Be able to describe the basic elements of production capacity management, as applied to treatment of the unique case mix in his/her own institution
• Describe the unique differences in complexity of SCMI patients, the duality of their diagnoses and the influence of these factors on the organization's clinical inventory of services required to deliver appropriate care
• Apply basic measurement tools for judging past production capacity performance, and construct a simple forecasting model for predicting future demand, workload and costs

Keywords: Decision-Making, Management

Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.