76 Ways to Improve Your Services: NIATx Promising Practices

If one of your resolutions for 2014 is to try some effective new ways to tackle quality issues in your organization, visit the Promising Practices on the NIATx web site.

What is a NIATx Promising Practice? It’s a simple, effective way to target a specific NIATx aim that you want to improve on. You’ll find Promising Practices for the original four NIATx aims:

• Reduce Waiting Time
• Reduce No-Shows
• Increase Continuation
• Increase Admissions

as well as for aims that emerged from the NIATx Opioid Treatment Provider projects, and from projects focused on building capacity to bill and increase reimbursements. 

You can use the “search” function on the Promising Practices page to search for a PP by aim, ease of implementation, expected benefit, or financial impact. 

The Promising Practices have been field tested and proven effective in organizations across the country. One or more brief case studies accompany each Promising Practice, to give you an idea of how another organization tested the practice and the resulting benefits. 

Expert NIATx coaches Elizabeth Strauss and Don Holloway developed the Promising Practices based on their experience coaching organizations in multiple NIATx projects. Strauss and Holloway included forms and templates to make easy for any agency to get started with a Promising Practice. You’ll find that many of the Promising Practices include a suggested “tracking measure”—the metric you’ll use to measure the effectiveness of your change project, along with templates for data collection that you can download and adapt as necessary. 

In 2013, one of NIATx Promising Practices visited most frequently was Follow-up with No-shows. This Promising Practice targets two NIATx aims: Reduce No-shows and Increase Continuation. With the potential to increase revenue and boost staff morale, the expected benefit for this Promising Practice is high. 

Was your agency among those that used a NIATx Promising Practice in 2013? Did you tweak the Promising Practice to fit your unique environment? How did it work out? We’d like to hear from you! Contact NIATx editor Maureen Fitzgerald (Maureen.fitzgerald@chess.wisc.edu) to share your story and be featured in an upcoming issue of the NIATx E-news!