Maryland Behavioral Health Services

The challenge

The Maryland Department of Health, Behavioral Health Administration set out to create a system of care that delivered consistent, high-quality inpatient psychiatric care across all five of the state’s psychiatric hospitals. The administration brought in IdeaCrew to review its programs and recommend how to implement a single, unified system of hospital care that would raise the overall quality of care statewide.

The approach

IdeaCrew’s clinical consulting team worked with Maryland Behavioral Health Services to identify excellent programs and practices at individual hospitals that could be adopted across the whole system, and to surface the challenges affecting patient care. We:

• Evaluated programs against national standards established by the National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors
• Conducted onsite interviews at all five hospitals with state and local officials, consumers, and line staff, collecting data that identified strengths and challenges across the system
• Developed a series of recommendations spanning leadership, culture and treatment, communication, policies, data, risk and safety, human resources, and centralized admissions

The outcome

Our initial evaluation took two months, and we delivered a deeper analysis of specific programs and processes within five. Our recommendations standardized the treatment of patients in forensic status facing criminal charges, so they were cared for in a manner consistent with patients whose hospitalization did not begin through court intervention, aiding their recovery. The Deputy Secretary for Behavioral Health accepted our recommendations and began implementing the changes as part of the administration’s broader change strategy.