Client interview with Joe Roszak, CEO
Meeting the Triple Aim with the Support of Relias
Kitsap Mental Health Services (KMHS) is a private, not-for-profit community behavioral health center that provides both mental health and addiction services to children, families, adults, and seniors in Kitsap County. KMHS’s mission is to shape the future of mental health through state of the science service delivery, community partnerships, and advocacy. KMHS is an awardwinning recipient of a CMMI’s Innovation Award that resulted in the successful integration of mental health, addiction services, physical health, and dental services to provide whole person care and impact overall population health while bending the cost curve.
Challenge
KMHS was a successful organization facing significant economic and cultural challenges when Joe Roszak came on board as CEO in 2007. The founder (and only CEO Kitsap had ever had) retired that year. Adjustments became necessary as initiatives to transform the agency into a 21st century behavioral health organization were implemented. The push for more innovation came up against the “how we’ve always done things” mentality, so the switch from traditional paper/ spreadsheet/live training to an online system took some time and adjustment.
Solution
When asked how he manages to stay successful and strategic, Joe replied, “acknowledge that you can’t do it alone–that you need strategic partners–expand services and work with the community.” KMHS has used Relias Learning as a partner in staff development and training for the past 5 years to support its organizational growth and innovation. KMHS currently uses the system in three main areas: Human Resources, Leadership Development, and Course Development.
“We have a 58% internal promotion rate. We hire the best and end up promoting them. We want to make sure behavioral health isn’t a dead-end job. That philosophy encompasses Relias; our culture now includes employees using Relias to learn the skill sets to get promoted in the agency.”
Human Resources:
Relias is an integral part of a performance improvement plan when employees are struggling. Management really wants to support employees by giving them the tools to do their job effectively, so they use Relias to fill in any deficiencies an employee may have.
Leadership Development:
Often behavioral health organizations are so focused on service delivery that they neglect training employees how to be managers when they are promoted. Skills like accountability, decision-making, managing others, and monitoring productivity are ones that need to be taught, practiced and developed. Relias offers training in these areas, providing opportunities for leadership development. This fits perfectly with KMHS’s plan to create a formal program for manager training and career development.
Course Development:
As a 24/7 organization providing services across multiple programs from a variety of work sites, with more openings in the near future, staff often can’t access experts and training. When outside experts do come in for training, only the staff who are able to attend benefit, but others miss out. Now, KMHS, with permission from the expert, records the training and loads it into the Relias LMS to distribute to all staff for initial training, retraining and new hire orientation.
