Mentorship and QI Tools Help the Southern Nevada Health District Serve More Behavioral Health Patients & Eliminate Waitlists
Success StoriesRich Hazeltine, Quality Improvement (QI) Accreditation Manager for the Southern Nevada Health
District, tells us how his agency transformed their behavioral health scheduling process after Rich
connected with a QI mentor at NNPHI’s 2023 Open Forum: Next Generation event, an initiative
supported by the Public Health Infrastructure Grant (PHIG). Using quality improvement tools and
processes he learned from his mentor, his team reduced bottlenecks, streamline their scheduling process, and test out artificial intelligence (AI) tools to predict cancellations. The impact has been huge — patients are getting timely care, waitlists have disappeared, and staff are working more efficiently. This success story highlights how mentorship and QI strategies can make a powerful difference in public health services.
Video Transcript
How Have You Been Able to Use PHIG Funding?
Public Health Infrastructure Grant (PHIG) funding has enabled us to build our network. I’ve been able to
meet people across the country in similar sized agencies, gathering best practices. The PHIG
infrastructure has curated some of these resources for us through websites and again, the connections
I’ve made. Also, they have a formal program [NNPHI’s Open Forum: Next Generation event] for me to
obtain a mentor who runs quality improvement for their state. I asked for that, that’s exactly what I got,
and I feel like I got the best person on the planet to help me learn and also adopt new QI tools to help us
have a bigger impact.
What’s Been the Biggest Outcome?
The biggest, quickest win we have so far with these new QI tools – which help us not only run projects,
but how to track those in a system where everyone can see – to give us more recognition and
reinforcement of this new, higher QI mindset. Biggest outcome we have so far is better access to
behavioral healthcare, and that’s one of our big growing areas in our agency. And I call this a medium-
sized project, but the impact has been huge.
By working through our call center, and our therapist, and our front desk, and the whole scheduling
system – we had some bottlenecks. And by making some changes through a structured QI project, that
is this QI template that’s new for us, we’ve been able to streamline our call center process as well as the
folks at our front desk that greet patients. That’s enabled us to have one source of scheduling, but also
we’ve got some AI tools in development that we’re testing in our clinic, soon to be in behavioral health,
to predict when patients are going to not show up for their scheduled appointment.
This is going to help us to keep these providers busy when they’re on schedule, being able to serve as
many people as they can. So it’s already enabled us to serve more patients with the same number of
staff, and I see that just increasing as we as we go along.
What are the Benefits to Your Staff and Community Members?
Tabitha is our behavioral health manager. She tells us, “Today we had a non-established, Spanish-
speaking patient who needed behavioral health services. We met with them, did a brief intervention,
and scheduled them with Norma, our only Spanish-speaking BH (behavioral health) provider for next
week. This teamwork and communication between departments is commendable.
She also tells us that Norma is now booking out to early October. That’s about 3 weeks from now. Prior
to this project taking place, her backlog was at least three months to see a brand new patient. So this is
a huge impact on folks, especially for this population that needs the help.
One more story from Cassandra, who’s our clinical office supervisor: “We continue to have success with
the call center scheduling last-minute cancellations. There is currently no wait list for behavioral health.
All patients have been placed so far.” This is a huge improvement from where we were just a few weeks
ago with this project.