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 has established a performance monitoring system, known as The Performance Hub.
The Performance Hub exists to help BHA understand the quality and access of behavioral health care for people in Colorado. The information it contains will help us improve services and put them in the right places for our communities. The Performance Hub will also help us track efforts to improve the health of all people in Colorado and address health inequalities.
Colorado Revised Statute 27-50-201 requires BHA to put in place a performance monitoring system and make it available to the public, and it has. 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 The Performance Hub’s development.
Last updated: March 28, 2025
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 useful, we:
- Worked with representatives of the behavioral health ecosystem and the people of Colorado to ensure it reflected their needs.
- Presented measures with clear descriptions of what the data shows and how measures are calculated.
- Published measures at various levels of the behavioral health care system.
- Were clear and transparent about the quality, usability, and limitations of the underlying data.
- Protected privacy and security of sensitive information. We do not publish data that has small numbers because that might make it possible to identify individual people or small, defined groups.
Collaboration and co-creation
It is important we listen to the people who use The Performance Hub as we review its functionality and content. We have designed with, and not for, the communities that are most impacted. This approach values and ensures representation of key groups and communities.
BHA set up a Performance Hub Working Group (PHWG), which guided the initial product design and selection of initial measures. This group has members from providers, advocates, and state agencies.
The PHWG was only one component of our co-creation strategy. BHA used wider engagement activities to gather feedback and make it possible for all people who use The Performance Hub to provide their input. This feedback has driven and will drive regular improvement of this resource.
Future improvements and roadmap
The first version of The Performance Hub is 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 1 launch, the first version of The Performance Hub:
- Included measures that were already in regular use. This included measures that cover access, quality, and value.
- Started small. Lack of data quality or availability meant that some measures could not be added immediately. BHA has publicly shared information about measures we 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. (for example, as the behavioral health system will expand in Colorado with BHASOs)
- Improved data sources (for example, additional accountability measures for children and youth who are boarding or in extended stay)
The following roadmap indicates the milestones taken to achieve our initial launch on July 1, 2024.
Data quality and infrastructure
We have worked 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 helps us make our language more culturally sensitive and lessens the burden of data collection.
Additional steps we took to achieve a foundation for high data quality:
- Took stock of what was available at the time. Used existing data from reliable data sources and chose measures that showed whether people can access services and the quality of those services.
- Learned data best practices from other states. Improved data collection so that information was meaningful and accurate. We ensured that these efforts did 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 has made measures and standards available to the public on The Performance Hub.
Measure refinement and selection
We chose measures for The Performance Hub using a documented, repeatable, and transparent process (see the illustration below). Proposed measures were tested for reliability, validity, feasibility, and usability. Where national quality groups have already researched and agreed on the quality of measures, we used them without change.
Illustration of measure refinement and selection process
View and download a PDF version of this graphic.
Maintaining 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 launched in July 2024, it marked an important step in our accountability to the people of Colorado. Stay tuned for updates on how you can contribute to these continuing efforts!
More information
Sources for published measures
Published data sources (as of 3/2025)
- Colorado Client Assessment Record (CCAR)
- Drug and Alcohol Coordinated Data System (DACODS)
- Data collected for HB23-1269
- CIVHC’s All Payer Claims Database (APCD)
- BHA’s Licensing and Designation Database and Electronic Records System
- Grievance and Critical Incident Report data submitted to BHA
- Involuntary Mental Health Treatment data (IMHT 27-65)
- MSO SUD residential treatment waitlists reported to BHA