DC Department of Behavioral Health (DBH) Integrated Technology Engine (ITE)
DC Department of Behavioral Health
Developing a comprehensive health insurance marketplace for Massachusetts residents
Challenge
The District of Columbia's transformation of Medicaid services and payment model required DBH to reform its data management practices and establish a new mechanism for collecting behavioral health supplemental data (BHSD) from 70 community-based healthcare providers. The leadership and staff at DBH needed timely and centralized access to data to support data-driven decision-making. Additionally, there was a need to develop data governance strategies to realize the vision of Whole Person Care and Population Health in the District of Columbia.
Solution
IdeaCrew developed the Integrated Technology Engine (ITE), a centralized, cloud-based data hub application that features standardized data collection from various providers and instant data validations, along with Tableau dashboards and data governance strategies to enable efficient data collection, accurate reporting, and meaningful analysis.
Project Overview & Accomplishments
The Department of Behavioral Health (DBH) is responsible for providing prevention, intervention, and treatment services to children, youth, and adults with mental and/or substance use disorders in the District of Columbia. DBH oversees nearly 70 behavioral health care providers serving over 30,000 adults and children with Serious Mental Illness (SMI)/Serious Emotional Disturbance (SED) or substance use disorder (SUD).
The District’s Medicaid program began transitioning to the carve-in model, where behavioral health services were integrated into the managed care plans. This transition required DBH to reform how it collected data from these providers. As the District’s behavioral healthcare authority, DBH also needed timely and reliable data to make data-driven decisions to implement the vision of whole-person care service delivery, outcome-based care, and population health.
Starting in March 2022, IdeaCrew partnered with DBH to assist in their mission. IdeaCrew successfully developed and implemented the Integrated Technology Engine (ITE), a unique data hub application in the Azure cloud environment. ITE enables DBH to gather and integrate various data from different systems, including a feature that instantly verifies the accuracy and quality of data provided by healthcare providers. IdeaCrew also introduced and utilized advanced data science techniques in analytics through Tableau and Python. We created interactive dashboards and storyboards with powerful visualizations and dynamic features. User-friendly data monitoring tools facilitated data-driven decision-making among DBH leadership. A Master Data Management (MDM) model incorporating a machine learning (ML) algorithm established the foundation for implementing whole-person care by intelligently identifying unique clients served by various healthcare providers with high accuracy.
One of the main reasons that led to the success of this project is our business-driven approach. IdeaCrew consistently placed the business goals and perspectives at the core of the application development strategies. IdeaCrew used an agile method to scope, design, develop, test, and deploy the ITE components, providing DBH maximum flexibility to prioritize functionalities that best align with the organization’s evolving business needs.
Examples of our Key Accomplishments
- Conducted a comprehensive evaluation of DBH’s organizational data needs.
- Developed the ITE vision, roadmap, and data governance strategies.
- Developed and deployed operational ITE applications, including the Provider Gateway, a platform for collecting Behavioral Health Supplemental Data (BHSD) from healthcare providers and instantly validating and summarizing BHSD data for DBH and providers.
- Published the BHSD companion guide, outlining BHSD reporting guidelines and data validation rules, and distributed it to over 70 providers.
- Integrated and reconciled over 20 million Medicaid behavioral health claim records.
- Constructed analytical and interactive dashboards in Tableau with Medicaid claims data and BHSD.
- Created user-friendly data monitoring tools to track and analyze BHSD submission patterns and data quality by provider and data domain.
- Developed MDM strategies and a machine learning (ML) based model that consolidates client data residing in disparate systems and produces golden records of master client information.
- Developed a whole-person view mechanism and user interfaces that allow authorized users to search and display a single view of clients.
- Provided business and technical consultation as a subject-matter expert (SME) in behavioral healthcare data and analytics.
