Case Study: More Intakes With Less Work

We recently helped a mental health facility upgrade their intake process. As a result of our work together:

This provider saw a 48% improvement in their intake conversion rate. In other words, they started bringing in more patients from the calls, traffic, and referrals that they were already getting.
Staff spent, on average, 4-6 fewer hours per week on intakes. Much of this time saved was on the clinical side – reducing costs and allowing therapists more time and attention to devote to serving existing patients.

Background

This center offers intensive outpatient programs (IOP) in St. Louis, helping people with depression, anxiety, PTSD, and other mental health issues. They use a unique blend of personalized care and group therapy to help people find relief and quickly transform their situation.

Their Two Big Challenges

First, many potential patients werenʼt completing the admission process. Patients would make an initial phone call or inquiry. But despite initial interest, people would often stop responding back to follow-up calls or emails from office staff.

Second, staff were spending too much time on patients who werenʼt a good fit for the program. This IOP provided a specialized level of care and had several requirements for admission. Yet often, the treatment team would only discover late in the process that someone didnʼt meet the criteria – usually after performing a detailed clinical assessment with the therapist.

This wasted numerous hours for staff. And it left patients frustrated and disappointed when they were told the program wasnʼt right for their needs.

Discovery and Insights

We started with a full review of their intake process. We sought feedback from the clinical and admin staff. And we conducted a focus group with past patients.

This showed that patients sometimes felt uncertain or hesitant at certain points along the way. For example, this practice had assumed their mental health clients would prefer to speak with a human on the phone right from the start. Yet focus group respondents said they often felt nervous calling and would rather use digital forms and communication (only speaking with the therapist nearer to treatment).

We also found the process was inefficient at getting the right information from each patient. Patients often had to repeat the same information on multiple calls and forms. And important questions werenʼt being asked early enough to help determine whether or not IOP was an appropriate treatment.

Our Impact

Taking these results, we helped implement a number of changes:

We turned the initial phone intake call into a digital form that patients could fill out at their own convenience (giving another option for those who felt anxious about making a phone call).
We added new questions to better assess up-front whether a patient was a good fit for the IOP. This meant assessments only had to be done when someone was a good candidate for IOP.
We helped reduce uncertainty for patients throughout the intake process. This included adding language to the website and developing phone scripts to ensure people knew exactly what to expect each step along the way.
We streamlined the entire intake process – reducing steps, cutting down the time spent from start to finish, and simplifying paperwork.

As a result, this provider saw a major increase in intake conversion rates, while at the same time, reducing the workload for clinical and admin staff.

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