Build the engine required to develop, implement and sustain needed change in the interest of serving our entire universe of customers including clients and families, staff, contractors and the full range of partners beyond.
Realizing all aspects of Goals 1 through 3 of this Strategic Plan will require an extraordinary amount of change. To be successful, the department must optimize its structural design, streamline its internal processes and its interface with partnering systems and assess its own performance across the board. Goal 4, therefore, frames out the key strategies for building an efficient and effective organizational engine that focuses on entrepreneurial but disciplined financing, right-sized staffing, improved contracting and contract monitoring, better use of technology and proactive approaches to space utilization as well as facilities development while always embracing principles of ongoing organizational learning and improvement – e.g., a department driven by outcomes that leverages training and many other tools to operationalize continuous quality improvement.
Structure (Strategy 4.1)
Organize a structure to effectively drive and manage the change needed to realize departmental goals.
- Develop an organizational structure that effectively supports community-based care and partnerships
- Ensure clinical and administrative programs and support staff can quickly adapt to meet changing community needs
- Improve and integrate data systems within DMH and across departments and agencies
- Facilitate coordinated, whole-person and high-quality care through the effective utilization of electronic medical records (EMR), health information exchanges (HIE) and other critical health information systems
- Optimize existing funding streams and gain access to new funding streams
- Engage and facilitate partnerships with the County Medi-Cal managed care plans in the context of CalAIM and the future of payment reform
- Redesign payment and documentation systems to promote whole-person care
- Allow for the right care activities at the right time, regardless of the setting
- Ensure adequate staffing throughout the department
- Meet the needs of clinical services and administrative staff so that they are well resourced
- Refresh DMH facilities and workspaces
- Use these spaces effectively and efficiently, including through alternative work arrangements, to meet the needs of our communities in the modern era
Process (Strategy 4.2)
Engineer and support the core administrative processes needed to empower both internal and external customer service.
- Streamline and improve processes for developing contracts, soliciting proposals from the community and supporting new contractors
- Build an empowered and effective network of community partners
- Overhaul processes for recruiting and hiring new staff to enable quicker program development and to more competitively attract talented hires
- Develop improved systems for training, deployment and retention of staff to build out and maintain an effective and high-impact workforce
- Provide premier customer service to our network of contracted community partners (e.g., legal entities)
- Recognize and elevate these contracted partners as an asset and a critical resource in our communities
- Gather and align departmental planning and budgeting processes
- Blend the many available funding streams to support DMH’s mission
- Develop unified and coordinated processes to monitor providers’ quality of service
- Include fair mechanisms for quality assurance when standards are not met and provide support as needed to proactively sustain high-quality service
Outcomes (Strategy 4.3)
Establish an impact-driven system characterized by listening, learning and continuous improvement.
- Actively manage change throughout the department
- Enhance listening among leadership to ensure staff are efficiently, effectively and sustainably achieving strategic goals even as change is underway
- Enhance multidirectional communication between DMH and key stakeholders to help inform strategies and change
- Provide transparency through consistent communications with Service Area Advisory Committees (SAACs), Underserved Cultural Communities (UsCCs), the Faith-Based Advocacy Council (FBAC) and other critical stakeholder networks
- Optimize DMH’s services from the ground up with the values of a Just Culture and continuous quality improvement
- Identify and leverage outcomes to drive needed change throughout the system to better support our staff to do good work
- Process consumer grievances, complaints and appeals through the lens of culture relating to the background of that individual
- Ensure equity in the reviews to help address racial and ethnic disproportionality in access to and delivery/quality of care
- Improve training and professional development to increase the skills and capabilities of departmental staff
- Create a true learning organization by building the capacity for staff to manage projects and improve the quality of programs and services
- Infuse cultural competency training in every new employee orientation
- Conduct regular and frequent staff trainings to increase their cultural competency, with a focus on staff who directly engage with clients in outpatient and inpatient settings
- Collect and utilize data to analyze service utilization by communities of color to address disparities and inequities in the system of care
- Conduct cultural competency assessments to better understand the demographic characteristics of communities
- Work to improve data collection to track and specify the cultural composition of DMH consumers beyond broad ethnic category labels, e.g., “Latino,” in order to provide enhanced culturally specific services
- Translate key documents for DMH consumers into the top 15 languages spoken in LA County to capture the elements of culture
- Ensure documents like consent for services, treatment plans and assessments are widely available in-language and capture culturally specific details that will help enhance the delivery of care to the consumer