Service Delivery Archives - Partners Behavioral Health

Community relationships for autism service providers

Partners Admin — Tue, 03 Oct 2023 09:59:59 +0000

Building community relationships can go a long way for stakeholders involved with autism services (and beyond).

Small business owners and operators in our communities may have interest in building relationships with, and supporting the autism and special needs communities more broadly (even if they don’t know that YET), which works out well since autistic people have all different sorts of interests, preferences, and skills… even if THEY don’t necessarily know that yet. Exposure can be good for everyone too.

💄💇‍♀️💈Cosmetologists, salons, hairdressers barbers

☕️ Coffee shops

🧺 Laundromats

🧁 Bakeries

👩‍🔧👨‍🔧 Contractors of various types

🚘 Auto repair

🏠 Homeless shelters

🐈🐕🐇 Pet stores, grooming, boarding, animal shelters

🏋️‍♀️ Gyms

🌼 🌸 🌻 Flower shops

🍲🍺 Breweries or restaurants

🏫 Daycares, educational centers

🩺🏥 Therapy or medical facilities

These arrangements can build awareness about autism and special needs in general, and they can yield meaningful community relationships among all pertinent stakeholders – personal and professional, including, and most importantly, our clients.

What are your thoughts or experiences with this from the perspective of a therapy provider, caregiver, autistic person, community business operator, or anyone else?

Brandon Herscovitch, Ph.D., LABA, BCBA-D

Partners Behavioral Health – higher standards, brighter futures.

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Our history, our why

Partners Admin — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 16:08:25 +0000

Good scientific service delivery, organizational ethics, and company culture require planning, budgeting, and guidance by qualified industry and healthcare leaders. Building a model around standards and outcomes for quality and compliance, their costs, and changing market trends over time should not be an afterthought, and is imperative in building an ethical, sustainable, and scalable model.

Eileen and I started Partners Behavioral Health to support current and future ABA business owners and operators at all stages of their lifecycle to scale ethical practices that strive for the highest standards and outcomes.

We are proud to be working with industry leaders, operators, and strategists from ABA and other more established healthcare professions who pave the road we walk and who have walked the road that’s yet to come for our industry and practice leaders.

A big shout out to our friends, colleagues, and social media communities who have supported us along the way.

Feel free to DM me directly or drop a comment and let me know other area experts or services that can help best position ABA practice leaders and our industry for long term success.

Brandon Herscovitch, Ph.D., LABA, BCBA-D

Partners Behavioral Health can help with your clinical and business standards, compliance, and outcomes. We can help you scale an ethical ABA practice you’re proud about. DM me for more information.

The post Our history, our why appeared first on Partners Behavioral Health.

Accountability and ROI for the services we deliver

Partners Admin — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 14:49:19 +0000

People pay a lot for our services. As both clinicians and clinic operators, we have to ask ourselves when we’ve delivered.

My perspective has changed over time on this, and in general on what qualifies as good “science as a service”. I used to be more focused on things like preciseness of data collection, technical accuracy and verbal behavior of my clinical team, teasing apart the conditions and contingencies in our analyses and treatment plans, and a great deal of reinforcement was derived from looking at or “consuming” graphic displays with desired trends.

While these things are important, I evaluate whether I’ve delivered on different metrics now. Now, I feel I’ve delivered when I could show positive outcomes for the following across my practice:

*Patient and client satisfaction and experience*
*Clinical outcome measures*
Procedural fidelity
Interobserver agreement
Demonstration of functional relations (in practice could be as simple as reversal probes, or something comparable, here and there. I will discuss this another time).

Together, these 5 things tell a story… and it goes a little something like this…

“We’ve shown that while working with us, therapeutic progress has been made. My client and specifically my patient agree that changes made were meaningful to them, and that they enjoyed working with us! We’ve demonstrated that we implemented what we said we would, we’ve accurately tracked and reported progress, and that changes made were a direct result of working with us and not something else.

Put differently, we’ve shown our clients a solid return on investment and a positive customer experience for engaging with our team for our services.

Brandon Herscovitch, Ph.D., LABA, BCBA-D

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🕷 🕸With great power comes great responsibility🕷 🕸

Partners Admin — Sat, 24 Jun 2023 10:39:29 +0000

As behavior analysts we are in a position of power over others and it’s important we continue to be hypervigilant about that.

Let’s pan out for a second – consider performance management systems for clinicians. Though our intent in how we arrange contingencies for our BCBAs, or even seek them out for OURSELVES, may be noble, the outcome or impact perhaps not so much. I.e. consider burnout.

If our well intentioned implementation of performance systems or arrangements for those who are by any lay definition free to make their own decisions are backfiring, and those people (all of us BCBAs) are able to speak out about the burn out, then what a reminder of how important it is to be aware of the impact, unintentional as it may be, with those who don’t have that same level of autonomy or in some cases ability to communicate their experience.

In our quest to impact meaningful change for those we serve, let’s always remember to balance outcomes with experience.

Brandon Herscovitch, Ph.D., LABA, BCBA-D

Partners Behavioral Health can help with your clinical and business standards, compliance, and outcomes. We can help you scale an ethical ABA practice you’re proud about.

The post 🕷 🕸With great power comes great responsibility🕷 🕸 appeared first on Partners Behavioral Health.

Applied behavior analysis (ABA): A framework for understanding people and how to support them in a meaningful way

Partners Admin — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 23:50:50 +0000

Applied behavior analysis (ABA): A framework for understanding people and how to support them in a meaningful way

As an applied behavior analysis (ABA) professional, I have seen firsthand the incredible impact this approach can have. We can help individuals develop essential life skills, build social connections, and improve their overall quality of life with evidence-based techniques.

But the power of ABA extends beyond the autism community. This approach can improve performance, productivity, and quality of life in various settings. Whether in healthcare, corporate culture and productivity, education, sports, or technology, ABA professionals find new and innovative ways to apply the science and their expertise and help individuals achieve great things.

From helping individuals with disabilities or differences more effectively communicate their needs to coaching corporate teams on effective communication and collaboration, ABA is a versatile and effective tool for achieving positive outcomes.

As professionals in this field, we have a unique opportunity to make a real difference in the lives of others, and I am proud to be a part of this vital work.

Brandon Herscovitch, Ph.D., LABA, BCBA-D

Partners Behavioral Health can help with your clinical and business standards, compliance, and outcomes. We can help you scale an ethical ABA practice you’re proud about.

The post Applied behavior analysis (ABA): A framework for understanding people and how to support them in a meaningful way appeared first on Partners Behavioral Health.

Two actionable steps to drive improved clinical outcomes, patient experience, and stand out from the competition in recruiting and retaining clinicians

Partners Admin — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 21:29:28 +0000

Two actionable steps to drive improved clinical outcomes, patient experience, and stand out from the competition in recruiting and retaining clinicians:

✔ Step 1: Identify and objectively define quality outcome measures and metrics. INCLUDE RELEVANT STAKEHOLDERS IN THIS PROCESS; i.e. clinicians and even clients. Starting small is better than not starting at all – maybe one clinical and one stakeholder satisfaction.

✔ Step 2: Aggregate the data and report out on those measures. Maybe even post some of those measures on your website (this may be more appropriate for some measures than others).

👍 And, there we have it.

For patients who are unable to self-advocate, this may be more difficult. You can look to the research and consider other creative things you might do, even if just as a starting point. I’ll plan to post on this at some point.

Brandon Herscovitch, Ph.D., LABA, BCBA-D

Partners Behavioral Health can help with your clinical and business standards, compliance, and outcomes. We can help you scale an ethical ABA practice you’re proud about.

The post Two actionable steps to drive improved clinical outcomes, patient experience, and stand out from the competition in recruiting and retaining clinicians appeared first on Partners Behavioral Health.

Important outcomes measures in applied behavior analysis: A call for the collection and dissemination of person centered measures

Partners Admin — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 17:52:00 +0000

Applied behavior analysis (ABA) service delivery, similar to other healthcare, educational, coaching, or professional services, operates within an economy. In that economy, our science is our asset. Improving the patient care paradigm and changing public perception of ABA without watering down the science, is as important now as ever before for the evolution of our field.

Behavior analysis is distinct in that it treats behavior as a subject matter in its own right. This concept is sometimes misunderstood to mean that thoughts, emotions, or feelings, and reports or other collateral measures thereof, are not only off limits, but that any reference thereto dilutes our science. The purpose of this article is not to discuss the inclusion of emotions or other private events in the context of experimental or contingency analyses (see Friman, 1998), but instead, in the context of a consumer analysis.

Caregiver feedback is a very important component in evaluating customer satisfaction, but it is distinct from patient feedback, which is paramount. Patient centered measures may include measures of experience and satisfaction (Larson et al., 2019), and are a meaningful part of a thoughtful consumer analysis. Again, consumer and experimental analyses are distinct, but pertinent and interrelated components of our service deliver paradigm and process.

Following from Prakash (2010), measures of patient satisfaction can be valuable in improving outcomes, retention/ongoing treatment, malpractice claims or [ethics violations, and even public perception of ABA]. In fact, “research shows that high [consumer] satisfaction leads to greater customer retention, higher lifetime value, and a stronger brand reputation” (Zendesk). And, branding is relevant.

Considering patient preferences in treatment decisions and outcomes is being increasingly recognized as an important part of healthcare service delivery and medical decision making (Van Hoorn, 2016). Although this concept is not entirely foreign to applied behavior analysis (Hanley, 2010), we have not even begun to provide this sufficient attention.

More research is needed to better understand how patient satisfaction reports impact clinical outcomes and quality of care in ABA and healthcare more broadly. Person centered measures (i.e. patient experience and satisfaction) should be used in addition to, not in replacement of, observable and objective data. It will be important to expand procedures for evaluating patient satisfaction and treatment preferences for people with limited communication repertoires and who can’t as easily self-advocate (see Hanley, 2010). Additionally, for all people we serve, it’s important to be sensitive to power dynamics in evaluating this topic.

Evolutionary ethics and value changes are as pertinent in applied behavior analysis as they are in medicine (see Calman, 2004). This is a concept worth understanding and embracing. I am not convinced there is a need for a rebranding of our science (i.e. “the new ABA”), although I suppose time will tell. Regardless, we need to intensify focus on learning from the people we serve and improving the patient care paradigm in applied behavior analysis. Doing so will only benefit the profession, and people we serve.

What do you think? Share in the comments.

References

Calman KC. Evolutionary ethics: can values change. Journal of Medical Ethics 2004;30:366-370. https://jme.bmj.com/content/30/4/366

Franklin, Alaina. “What is customer satisfaction? Definition + importance.” Zendesk. January 23, 2023. https://www.zendesk.com/blog/3-steps-achieving-customer-satisfaction-loyalty/

Friman PC, Hayes SC, Wilson KG. Why behavior analysts should study emotion: the example of anxiety. J Appl Behav Anal. 1998 Spring;31(1):137-56. doi: 10.1901/jaba.1998.31-137. PMID: 9532758; PMCID: PMC1284106. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1284106/

Hanley, G. P. (2010). Toward effective and preferred programming: A case for the objective measurement of social validity with recipients of behavior-change programs. Behavior Analysis in Practice, 3(1), 13-21. Retrieved from https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/toward-effective-preferred-programming-case/docview/851234519/se-2

Larson E, Sharma J, Bohren MA, Tunçalp Ö. When the patient is the expert: measuring patient experience and satisfaction with care. Bull World Health Organ. 2019 Aug 1;97(8):563-569. doi: 10.2471/BLT.18.225201. Epub 2019 May 28. PMID: 31384074; PMCID: PMC6653815. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6653815/

Prakash B. Patient satisfaction. J Cutan Aesthet Surg. 2010 Sep;3(3):151-5. doi: 10.4103/0974-2077.74491. PMID: 21430827; PMCID: PMC3047732. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3047732/

Van Hoorn, R., Kievit, W., Booth, A. et al. The development of PubMed search strategies for patient preferences for treatment outcomes. BMC Med Res Methodol 16, 88 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12874-016-0192-5

Brandon Herscovitch, Ph.D., LABA, BCBA-D

Partners Behavioral Health can help with your clinical and business standards, compliance, and outcomes. We can help you scale an ethical ABA practice you’re proud about.

The post Important outcomes measures in applied behavior analysis: A call for the collection and dissemination of person centered measures appeared first on Partners Behavioral Health.