Discovery House
About Discovery House
Discovery House is a national outpatient addiction program with
20 clinic locations in six states. Richard Froncillo, Executive
Director for the Quest for Excellence at Discovery House, enrolled his
organization in the ACTION Campaign, and quickly saw the benefit of
conducting a walk-through.
Project Information
"Using the walk-through and other ACTION Campaign [methods] is
connected to Discovery House's strategic plan," comments Froncillo. "We
are continually looking at performance measures and asking ourselves
how we can do better."
The Discovery House leadership team sought customer feedback through
focus groups, and surveys. These strategies revealed that customers
valued Discovery House for providing access to treatment as well as
offering results.
Yet, the walk-through exercise yielded even more information. "We
conducted telephone and in-person walk-throughs of all of our clinics,"
explains Froncillo. "We put this together with available information
about our competitors in our states of operation. We then asked
ourselves 'What do we learn from this information?'"
Goals
The walk-through results helped the leadership team identify three key goals:
- We have to get new customers in the door as quickly as possible (access)
- We have to get new customers their first dose as quickly as possible (results)
- We have to get new customers to stay at least 90 days in order for them to get connected to their treatment (results)
"We felt that if we pursued these three broad concepts we would
accelerate our strategic goals to improve 'census' and 'retention'."
The team also felt it would promote a performance indicator that they
identified as "customer delight."
Changes Implemented
The First Key Process: Get in the Door, Get Connected, Stay 90
The walk-through results led to a system-wide tactic connected to
the Discovery House strategic plan. Named the "The First Key
Process," it consists of three phases:
- Get in the Door: this is the time from customer first contact to
the time of first face-to-face appointment. Discovery House set a
performance measure of "within 24 hours" for this phase.
- Get Connected: the time from customer first contact to first dose.
Discovery House set a performance measure of "within 48 hours" for this
phase.
- Stay 90: getting new customers connected to their counselor,
treatment plan, and other clinic resources so that we do not lose them
early on in their treatment. "The performance measure for this is our
discharge report for "discharged less than 90 days," says Froncillo.
A Chain Reaction
To make The First Key Process part of the organizational culture,
all Discovery House clinics had to assess how they do business,
collaborate with each other, and design/re-design processes.
Changes made by the clinic included:
- Reevaluation of phone systems to ensure that new customer contacts
translated into timely first appointments. "We did an analysis of when
phone calls came in for each clinic so we could assess the capacity of
our phone system," explains Froncillo.
- Reassignment of phone answering responsibilities
- Re-design of the intake assessment to conduct prescreening on the
phone. "This allowed us to gauge new customers appropriate for our
level of care and also allowed new customers time to gather necessary
documents."
- Creation of new schedules for physicians and nurse practitioners to coincide with getting new customers in as soon as possible
- Implementation of "We care calls" for new customers to make them
feel welcome, assess first dose response, catch early dropouts, and
remove transportation barriers.
- Redesign of their approach to new customer orientation groups and
introductory groups in order to solidify customers' initial connection
to the clinic and its personnel.
Results
Overall, the walk-through exercise started a chain reaction of
improvements to the Discovery House access system. "The walk-through
tool is a great way to get started with the ACTION Campaign practices,"
concludes Froncillo.
Last updated 04/15/2011