Implementation Guide

Develop a Sustainment Plan

Part of a successfully implementing Collaborative Care in your practice is developing a robust sustainment plan. It is important to think first about creating or improving an effective, measurement-based integrated health care delivery model and then determine how to sustain your effort. Long term, quality is the best assurance of sustainability. Will you be able to sustain your integrated care program after launch?

Implementation Resources

A narrow view of sustainability might only consider finances, but there are other critical factors that play a role in helping practices develop, sustain, and continually refine their model of care. The AIMS Center strongly encourages practices to consider all the ways that practicing measurement-based care can contribute to the health of your patients and your practice. There are many critical factors that play a strong role in helping a practice develop a comprehensive sustainment plan. Finances are only one factor.

➔ BROADLY DEFINING VALUE

As you plan for your model of care, it is important to consider all the ways in which delivering effective integrated treatment will add value to your organization. Read the AIMS Center’s guide to broadly defining the value of your model of care.

➔ FINANCIAL MODELING WORKBOOK

In an effort to help organizations understand the ongoing costs and revenues associated with integrated strategies, the AIMS Center created the Financial Modeling Workbook in collaboration with the Institute for Family Health and the American Psychiatric Association. This Workbook focuses on the ongoing costs of care such as care manager time, psychiatric consultant time, administration time, and overhead (including QI efforts) to help practices:

Estimating visit volume and the number of patients served;
Defining and analyzing how much time staff engage in key integrated care tasks; and
Estimating fee-for-service and BHI/CoCM G-code potential revenues more accurately

Additionally, it allows you to play with practice parameters to understand their impact. For example, you can vary the length of appointment times, the percentage of time staff spend on the different components of collaborative care work or other factors to start to better understand how to build or revise clinical workflows.