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Do you want to cut back on your admin hours to spend more time with your clients? Why is measurement-based care much more than just collecting data? How can Blueprint support you, your private practice, clinicians, and clients?
In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok speaks about measurement-based care and faster progress notes with Danny Freed.
Podcast Sponsor: Alma
Going in-network with insurance can be tough. Filing all of the right paperwork is time-consuming and tedious, and even after you’re done, it can take months to get credentialed and start seeing clients.
That’s why Alma makes it easy and financially rewarding to accept insurance. When you join their insurance program, you can get credentialed within 45 days, and access enhanced reimbursement rates with major payers. They also handle all of the paperwork, from eligibility checks to claims submissions, and guarantee payment within two weeks of each appointment.
Once you’ve joined Alma’s insurance program, you can see clients in your state of licensure regardless of where you’re working from.
Learn more about building a thriving private practice with Alma at helloalma.com/joe.
Meet Danny Freed
Danny Freed is the founder and CEO of Blueprint, a digital mental health screening and assessment platform. They’re partnered with mental health clinics across the country, who use Blueprint to more easily practice measurement-based care and earn additional reimbursement revenue for doing so. Prior to Blueprint, he founded a mobile security startup called Companion and graduated from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
Visit Danny Freed’s website, Blueprint, and connect on Twitter and LinkedIn
FREEBIE: Visit Blueprint and find out more about their 30-day free trial!
In This Podcast
- How measurement-based care is typically done
- Using data to support clinical work
- How Blueprint helps practice owners
- The intersection between technology and mental health
- Danny’s advice to private practitioners
How measurement-based care is typically done
Measurement-based care is this thing that’s been around for a few decades within mental health care. Early on, it was only something that was really done in a research setting, [then] started to trickle into the day-to-day practice, which is exciting.
Danny Freed
Essentially, measurement-based care is the routine check-up with clinical-based assessments and the use of those assessments throughout the course of care.
These measurement-based care milestones are then reflected upon and used to make decisions on the best course of action going forward for a client, throughout their journey.
There’s so much more value that we can deliver to clinicians beyond just, you know, a PHQ-9 every two weeks, for example … so especially over the last 12 months we’ve been thinking a lot about how we [can] expand this definition of measurement-based care, and how we maybe even rebrand what [it] means so that it’s not just collecting data. dat
Danny Freed
Measurement-based care is not about collecting data for data’s sake.
It is about tracking someone’s progress and using that information to continually adjust the clinical approach so that this client can truly recover, heal, or reach their goal.
Using data to support clinical work
1 – Capture the relevant data: clinical assessments, etc.
2 – Administer homework through Blueprint
You can go in and you can assign DBT diary cards or CBT font records or even daily journals depending on what your approach to care is.
Danny Freed
3 – Capture passive behavioral signals: add in your clients exercising, sleeping, and personal lifestyle patterns to use this valuable data when making decisions about the best care going forward.
All this data is generated into your very own client Blueprint.
These three things serve as the input for what we do, which is what we call a Blueprint. We’re taking all this data that we’re capturing throughout the course of the week between sessions and we generate this Blueprint for the clinician which they [can] pull up typically at the start of a session, or a couple of minutes before a session.
Danny Freed
How Blueprint helps practice owners
Not only does Blueprint help you to invest more time in yourself as a therapist by crunching the numbers and presenting you with the facts, but it also helps you to keep an easy but detailed handle on your cases.
Using [Blueprint] as a tool to help with case management and supervision. That quality assurance – not from a report-card standpoint but from a “using data to identify cohorts of clinicians or cohorts of their caseloads which may be below our normal benchmark” – and using that to dig in and apply more training or more resources, and without data, that might’ve [gone] uncovered.
Danny Freed
Data doesn’t take over from you and your skills, but it acts like a fine tuner that can pick up on what is not working as well, signal it to you, and then allow you to choose how to move forward.
This work enhances your skills as a therapist, it doesn’t surpass them. This combination of clinical and data excellence combined with your skillset as an empathetic therapist will set you apart from the rest.
The intersection between technology and mental health
Many people are scared, nervous, or even excited about the prevalence of technology in modern life, and these perspectives are necessary because they support the debate about where the line should be, and if there should even be one.
Ultimately, AI is here, and it will continue to grow and improve over time. However, AI will not ever replace a human being or a therapist – at least not any time soon! Instead, how can AI be a tool to help human beings be more productive and creative?
How do we leverage [AI] to help us as humans do our best work? Hopefully in less time! And what does that look like across any type of profession?
Danny Freed
Danny’s advice to private practitioners
Trust your measurements. The job of a practice owner or a therapist can be very lonely, so trust your measurements. Don’t put everything on you to do yourself – help yourself by using technology that can support you.
Sponsors mentioned in this episode:
- Learn more about building a thriving private practice with Alma at helloalma.com/joe.
- Ready to take your practice to the next level? Try Pillars of Practice!
Useful links mentioned in this episode:
- Visit Danny Freed’s website, Blueprint, and connect on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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- Check out practiceofthepractice.com/invite to join Next Level Practice
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Meet Joe Sanok
Joe Sanok helps counselors to create thriving practices that are the envy of other counselors. He has helped counselors to grow their businesses by 50-500% and is proud of all the private practice owners that are growing their income, influence, and impact on the world. Click here to explore consulting with Joe.
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