ENHANCED REPORTING TOOLS HELP OUR CUSTOMERS FOCUS ON PROVISION OF CARE.

When a client is in crisis, timely assessments and program intakes are essential for starting the path to recovery. In some of the darkest moments of a client’s life, behavioral health agencies are there to provide treatment and support, often thanks to federal and state discretionary grant funding.

But, as with any grant-funded initiative, agencies must justify financial need and show how money is having a positive impact on clients enrolled in their programs. As one example, state and county behavioral health agencies that receive federal discretionary grant funds must prove that 80 percent of clients who have been assessed for a substance use disorder (SUD) treatment program are followed up with at least once in the following six months after program intake. Agencies rely on enterprise technology solutions, like our behavioral health care management systems, to track intakes, assessments and client follow-ups for grant reporting.

Alerting agency staff at the right intervals is just one of the ways our solutions support this type of discretionary grant funding compliance. Another way? The automated upload of grant funding data nightly to federal systems every single night.

Supporting federal compliance

Twenty years ago, Congress passed the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA) – a law that required grant-funded programs to link resource use and management decisions to program performance. Today, billions of dollars of discretionary GPRA funding are used for substance use disorder (SUD) treatment and prevention programs nationwide.

FEI’s Web Infrastructure for Treatment Services (WITS) platform was designed to assist health and human services agencies with managing and reporting on behavioral health programs, especially those funded through discretionary grants. To that end, WITS supports the automated nightly upload of GPRA data to the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)’s Performance Accountability and Reporting System (SPARS). SAMHSA requires assessment data to be recorded and reported within seven days of initial contact with new clients, making our nightly batch upload feature very appealing. This automated data upload is used by 18 of our WITS customers today.

WITS is our behavioral health care management platform that was originally developed as part of a pilot project with SAMHSA to help four states and one large county efficiently report grant-related data back to the federal agency. WITS is now used by 37 of our customers today, and we are in the process of planning our migration from prem-hosted solutions to the AWS cloud.

Our product teams finalized some updates and enhancements to our GPRA grant management features in 2023. They built the new GPRA assessment tool for WITS using an updated technology architecture that supports a more user-friendly interface for end users working in our systems.

These enhancements were driven by new regulations from SAMHSA regarding how the GPRA assessment data is collected. This is just another example of how our customer support helps our state partners continually navigate the difficult waters of ever-evolving federal requirements.

While a legacy solution, WITS continues to be a product that supports our customers’ behavioral health care management needs, so clients can get the help they need when they need it. Our solutions teams are consistently working to address customer needs within WITS, which will continue to be supported under the Blue Compass brand name.