The Colorado Behavioral Health Administration's (BHA) Strategic Plan, published in January 2023, set out six focus areas, including improving access to behavioral health care, making behavioral health care more affordable, bolstering the behavioral health workforce, promoting accountability, uplifting lived experience, and improving whole person care. To track how well we are meeting this vision, BHA will establish a performance monitoring system, known as The Performance Hub.
The Performance Hub will help BHA understand the quality and access of behavioral health care for people in Colorado. In the future, the information will help us to improve services and put them in the right places for our communities. The Performance Hub will also help us to track efforts to improve the health of all people in Colorado and address health inequalities.
Colorado Revised Statute 27-50-201 says that BHA must put in place a performance monitoring system and make it available to the public. We will uphold our values of truth, equity, collaboration, community-informed practice, and generational impact as we work with our state agency partners and stakeholders in its development.
Our Approach
The Performance Hub will show how well we are meeting expectations that have been developed with people of Colorado. To ensure the information we publish is genuinely useful, we will:
- Work with representatives of the behavioral health ecosystem and the people of Colorado to ensure it reflects their needs.
- Present measures with clear descriptions of what the data shows and how measures have been calculated.
- Publish measures at various levels of the behavioral health care system.
- Be clear and transparent about the quality, usability, and limitations of the underlying data.
- Protect privacy and security of sensitive information. We will not publish data that has small numbers which might make it possible to identify individual people or small, defined groups.
Collaboration and Co-creation
It is important that we listen to the people who use The Performance Hub as we further develop functionality and content. We will design with, and not for, the communities that are most impacted. This is an approach that values and ensures representation of key stakeholders and communities.
BHA has set up a Performance Hub Working Group (PHWG) to guide the initial product design and selection of initial measures. This group has members from providers, advocates, and state agencies.
The PHWG is only one component of our co-creation strategy. BHA will use wider engagement activities to gather feedback and make it possible for all people who use The Performance Hub to provide their input. This feedback will drive regular improvement of this resource.
Future Improvements and Roadmap
The first version of The Performance Hub will be basic, with further developments and improvements to come. New information and functionality will be co-created with the people who will use the Performance Hub so it better meets their needs. For the July 1st launch, the first version of The Performance Hub will:
- Include measures that are already in regular use. This will include measures that cover access, quality, and value.
- Start small. Lack of data quality or availability may mean that measures cannot be added immediately. BHA will publicly share information about measures we have considered but have chosen not to include in The Performance Hub due to lack of data quality or availability.
BHA is developing a longer-term roadmap for data and performance that will include:
- An overarching strategy for data governance and transparency
- The evolution from monitoring to management
- Detailed plans for the expansion of measures including a broadening of scope, geographical, and organizational levels at which measurement will occur in the future (e.g. as the behavioral health system will expand in Colorado with BHASOs)
- Improved data sources (e.g. additional accountability measures for children and youth who are boarding or in extended stay)
Data Quality and Infrastructure
We will work with community partners to co-create new data collection tools that make it easy for providers of behavioral health services to regularly submit accurate data. Feedback from co-creators will help us make our language more culturally sensitive and to lessen the burden of data collection.
Our next steps are to achieve a foundation for high data quality:
- Take stock of what is available now. Use existing data from reliable data sources and choose measures that show whether people can access services and the quality of those services.
- Learn data best practices from other states. Improve data collection so that information is meaningful and accurate. We will ensure that these efforts do not add undue administrative burden on providers.
BHA has set up a data warehouse that has greatly improved our data infrastructure, making us more equipped to store information and use it across other tools. We now hold several data sources that will help us monitor and improve Colorado’s behavioral health system’s performance. BHA will make measures and standards available to the public on The Performance Hub.
Measure Refinement and Selection
We will choose measures for The Performance Hub using a documented, repeatable, and transparent process (see the illustration below). Proposed measures will be tested for reliability, validity, feasibility, and usability. Where national quality groups have already researched and agreed on the quality of measures, we will use them without change.
Illustration of Measure Refinement and Selection Process
View and download a PDF version of this graphic.
Creating a transparency resource like The Performance Hub is a big task, and truth and transparency are at the heart of BHA’s core values. When The Performance Hub launches in July 2024, it will mark an important step in our accountability to the people of Colorado. Stay tuned for updates on how you can contribute to these efforts!
More information
Sources for Candidate Measures for July 1 Launch
Candidate Data Sources
- Colorado Client Assessment Record
- Drug and Alcohol Coordinated Data System
- Data collected for HB23-1269
- CIVHC’s All Payer Claims Database
- BHA’s Licensing and Designation Database and Electronic Records System
- Colorado Health Access Survey
- EMResource
- Grievance and Critical Incident Report data submitted to BHA