The Clinic Optimization Program (COP) is a program designed for military treatment facility (MTF) behavioral health clinic managers and other key personnel to provide them with additional training and resources to optimize the performance of their clinics. The COP places a strong emphasis on the delivery of evidence-based psychotherapies (EBPs) to improve access-to-care and other command-driven, clinic-level metrics while also efficiently offering quality patient services and improving treatment outcomes.
The COP has three primary goals:
- Provide information about the challenges behavioral health clinics face in providing evidence-based care
- Provide education about best practices in optimizing care in behavioral health clinics
- Provide a set of ready-made tools that clinics can use to implement these best practices
Background and Rationale for developing the COP:
The clinic optimization program is an outgrowth of some of the Center for Deployment Psychology’s (CDP) past work in supporting DoD (MTF). Many of the tools in the COP toolkit were initially developed as part of work with the DoD under a program funded by the Joint Incentive Fund (JIF), which aimed to expand the use of EBPs at several MTF clinics. This set of tools was later expanded upon as part of CDP’s contribution to a Congressionally Directed Medical Research Program (CDMRP) funded multi-site project, Targeted Assessment and Context-Tailored Implementation of Change Strategies (TACTICS). You can read more about these two programs here.
As part of CDP’s work in these and other programs, we have cataloged a series of barriers to using EBPs within the DoD, along with other barriers to optimal performance for clinics (For more information on the barriers and issues CDP and its partners have identified, please see these publications: Barriers and Potential Solutions to Implementing Evidence-Based PTSD Treatment in Military Treatment Facilities and the CDP Lessons Learned Manual.
These barriers, along with other factors have created challenging situations at some sites, where clinics have:
- Difficulty meeting access to care requirements for intake appointments
- Long wait times for individual therapy appointments
- Challenges to the routine use of EBPs
- Low provider morale and high turnover
Even though clinic managers and providers desire to make improvements that address issues such as access to care, they often lack the bandwidth or tools to make substantial changes. Additionally, many of the identified barriers are interconnected, meaning that efforts to address one barrier in isolation will be less impactful.
CDP created the COP to help clinic managers and staff at sites struggling with these barriers to make changes that optimize care within their clinic using a set of ready-made tools and trainings.
Target Audience
This program was developed for current or future DoD clinic managers and leaders who are motivated to create change within their clinics. Even though the materials were developed with MTF-based clinics in mind, a substantial proportion of the information in the program will be useful to non-DoD clinics (e.g., the module on Best Practices for Expanding Group Therapy Utilization).
Components of the COP:
- A series of self-paced asynchronous trainings on various aspects of clinic optimization
- A toolkit that contains templates, handouts and other resources to help clinic managers streamline clinic functions
Accessing the Training and Tools:
The content of the COP is organized into seven modules, each of which covers a separate topic.
The modules are listed below with a short description. Each module has an introductory training and a set of associated toolkit items. The introductory trainings give an overview of the associated topic, covering best practices as well as introducing relevant toolkit items.
Click the module you would like to explore further. There you will be taken to a separate page with more detailed information about the module and a brief description of each tool. You will have the ability to download individual tools or a zip file with all of the tools in the module.
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Clinic Gap Analysis: analyze the skillset of providers and the needs of patients in the clinic to identify any training needs and gaps in services |
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Patient Management: manage the influx of patients into the clinic, their flow through the clinic, and their exit from the clinic |
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EBP Utilization: increase the use of EBPs within your clinic |
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Group Therapy Expansion: expand/develop a robust group therapy program to increase access to care, EBP utilization, and better manage patients in the clinic |
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Technician Support: utilize behavioral health technicians (non-licensed staff) to expand groups and improve patient management in the clinic |
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Metrics: utilize patient-level metrics to inform treatment planning and manage patients in the clinic and clinic-level metrics to inform and measure process improvement |
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Evaluation: plan, implement, and measure process improvement in the clinic |
Contact us:
Please feel free to reach out to our program staff at COP@USUHS.edu. We welcome you to share:
- Additional best practices that would be good for others to know
- Suggestions for new toolkit items or trainings
- Feedback on our existing content, whether in the training decks or associated tools