Recovery Needs Level: Using data to determine the best level of service for consumers of mental health services

Clinical practices sometimes dictate that mental health consumers should keep receiving high intensity services even when clinical judgment and the consumer's experience may recommend otherwise. In this presentation, we describe our experience with Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) services at the Mental Health Center of Denver. Our approach for service utilization starts out from the basic premise that people with mental illness do recover, and as such the need for high intensive case management services may change over time. To implement this idea in practice, MHCD created a committee that: 1) Developed the idea, 2) Created an instrument to assess the level of service needed based on a clinical criteria, 3) Implemented, and compared the assessments to clinical and qualitative information, 4) Trained stakeholders (both, mental health consumers and clinical people) on the use and its implications for recovery and 5) Finally, it implemented an appeal process to veto the system when the consumer or their clinicians feel that such change may be inappropriate. The implementation of this approach has been closely monitored for years, and we will present information about its effectiveness and the cost savings associated with its use. We will also describe new developments intended to advance the recovery process by assessing services for consumers at even higher levels of recovery. Finally, we will describe how the results of this approach have allowed MHCD to increase our service capacity in a way that respects the needs of the consumer and provides a more efficient use of our resources.