Frontier Health develops and maintains an outcome management system that focuses on  positive occurrences in consumers' lives. It involves learning ways that improve the quality and responsiveness of the services provided. Frontier Health maintains highly individualized outcomes that are defined by the persons who will utilize our services.

   The final outcome model is a result of input from staff members, the people served and stakeholders. The outcomes model evaluates the effectiveness and efficiency of services and reports the findings.

Quality Update

The staff and management of Frontier Health work together to develop outcome goals that help ensure the highest quality of care.

    Our teams discover local and national programs that we compare Frontier Health outcomes to, helping to measure quality care. The measures, or benchmarks, help set the highest clinical standards for programs that work to help further the Frontier Health vision to be a leader in establishing and demonstrating quality mental health, mental retardation, and substance abuse services.

Quality Update Summer 2007

Quality Update Spring 2008

Quality or Performance Indicators

   The Frontier Health Performance Improvement program works to continually and systematically plan, design, measure, assess, and improve the performance of functions and processes important to consumers and to improve health care outcomes while reducing and preventing medical healthcare errors.

To achieve this objective, the plan strives to:
• Incorporate quality planning through the
  organization
• Provide a systematic mechanism for
  individuals, departments, and professions to
  function collaboratively in their efforts toward
  performance improvement, providing feedback
  and learning
• Focus on the patient care activates that are
  performed throughout the organization and
  how well those activities are performed.

    Frontier Health uses many different methods to improve services. Some of those include:
• Root Cause Analysis
• Corporate compliance reporting lines
• Benchmarking with outside agencies
• Using trend information from Frontier Health
  programs
• Risk Management Teams
• Medical Staff and Clinical peer review systems
• Performance Improvement Model(ACTION)
  Assess, Collect, Take steps to develop plan,
  Implement Plan, Organize and collect data,
  Note improvement
• Process Teams

Outcomes

   Consumer Satisfaction information is obtained on a continuous basis by:
• Comment boxes are at each location for consumers to provide immediate feedback to each program.
• Comment cards are distributed to various stakeholders throughout the year.

Consumer Satisfaction for Mental Retardation and Vocational Services

• A formal satisfaction survey is distributed to the following groups at a minimum of one time per year:

• Consumers currently enrolled in programs.
• Consumers 6 months after discharge
• Family members of currently enrolled consumers.
• Stakeholders.
• Employers of consumers in employment services.

• A quality team reviews results to identify programmatic strong points and opportunities to improve services. Individual program leaders and staff also review the results and look for ways to make improvements.

• Data is always presented with trend information from other like programs and from previous surveys.

Outpatient and Inpatient Clinical Programs

• The outpatient sites of Frontier Health along with Woodridge Hospital and Magnolia Ridge use a standard 36 question satisfaction tool developed by Mental Health Corporations of America.
• National Benchmarks are used to identify strong points in services and opportunist to improve safety and the quality of services.
• Individual sites are provided site specific results with response rates and benchmarks for each question. Cluster responses are provided:

• Overall outcome and reputations
• Client/staff interaction
• Physical environment
• Personal therapy

• Frontier Health consistently scored at or above the national database mean in overall outcome and reputation during the last two years.