LET'S CHAT OVER COFFEE - CALL US @ (925) 315-5678
A person presents to a group in a conference room. Laptops and gift bags are on the table. The atmosphere is professional and focused. Presenter speaking to a group at a conference table, framed in a dark blue circle

Strategic Plans

  • Set the Stage Establish the framework for the strategic plan by defining the organization's goals and core values.

  • Gather Insights Collect information from key internal and external stakeholders and through document review.

  • Develop Strategic Plan Turn the findings into goals, priorities and the initiatives that serve them, tested with the people who will have to deliver them.

  • Develop Roadmap/Implementation Plan Outline the steps and timeline for executing the strategic plan effectively.

Get Started
CASE STUDY

Behavioral Health Data Modernization for OhioMHAS

Client Overview

The Ohio Department of Mental Health & Addiction Services (OhioMHAS) funds and oversees behavioral health care delivered through county ADAMH boards and local treatment providers, and data has to move in both directions between all three. OhioMHAS needed a strategic plan to modernize how that happens. Acuvity Consulting delivered the engagement from August 2023 to July 2024 as a subcontractor to Ardent Technologies.

Challenge

Reporting was manual, duplicated and mistrusted. Nearly half the county boards spent 60 or more hours on a single fiscal reporting cycle, and many said they were unsure whether they were doing it correctly or what the department did with the result. Providers submitted overlapping data to the department, to boards and to managed care organizations in different formats through different systems. Obtaining staff with the necessary data and technology skills was a challenge concentrated in rural counties, with 31% reporting insufficient resources. And the reporting that did happen was not being used: 27% of boards did not use the metrics sent back to them, and 57% had to adjust them first.

Solution

Two phases, in that order: establish what was actually happening, then build the plan on what the evidence said — rather than write the plan first and gather evidence to support it.

  • Current State Assessment

    Analyzed approximately 150 documents, mapped 15 process flows and 6 systems diagrams, and ran 16 stakeholder interviews reaching around 200 people. Four surveys went to 904 recipients and 264 responded; four focus groups tested what they returned.

  • Findings Synthesis

    More than 580 findings reduced to over 50 distinct pain points and grouped into 8 themes, each classified as a people, process, technology or metrics problem and mapped to the system it affected.

  • Strategic Plan and Roadmap

    8 target capabilities mapped from the pain point themes, broken into 23 defined implementation projects and sequenced across four horizons with dependencies and resourcing accounted for.
Three colleagues at an office desk reviewing printed charts, with a laptop and pen holder in front
Results

  • Reporting Hours Back to the BoardsAPI integration with provider record systems and a replacement for the manual, Excel-based fiscal reporting process are designed to remove the duplicate submission that costs nearly half of county boards 60 or more hours a cycle, and to eliminate the manual submission errors behind much of the support load carried by the department.

  • Data the Department Can Act OnData standardization and a consensus-driven governance framework target the root of the 27% of boards who do not use the metrics sent to them and the 57% who adjust them first — reporting reliable enough to act on without correcting it first.

  • A Roadmap That Can Be Started23 implementation projects across 8 capabilities, sequenced through pre-planning, foundational, modernization and transformational horizons with dependencies and resourcing mapped, so the department could fund and begin in order rather than all at once.

ConclusionA strategic plan is only as good as the evidence under it. OhioMHAS took delivery of a roadmap whose every recommendation traced back to a documented finding, and to the stakeholders across more than thirty county boards who raised it. The benefits above are what the roadmap is built to deliver on a timeline running to 2028, not results already banked.