What is a Decision Point?

Behavioral health treatment is complex. People in care navigate a world full of requirements, demands, and norms that are difficult, even overwhelming, to manage. Providers have to help their clients develop the resources needed to navigate care more successfully, while managing organizational and system demands on their own time, attention and resources.

It’s easy to get caught up in this whirlwind of contingencies and interactions. Yet as people dedicated to improving care, we have to find a practical way to organize these interactions. We have to be able to 'dynamically size': to step back and look at the whole picture of care, and then to zoom in and look at individual care processes. Using the Decision Points framework facilitates this zooming in and out.

Decision Points are a set of interactions to act on to create a more effective, equitable system. Decision Points are what families want to experience from care. In a successful episode of care a person experiences, in rough order: Access to care, Engagement with the practitioner, selection of Appropriate services, Effective relief and strength development, and Linkages to formal and informal supports. Each of these care processes is a Decision Point. We can assess each to understand how care works or fails to provide value.

At each care process, we want to make sure that caregivers and youth experience timely, collaborative, useful interactions. Our research shows that the experience of each process in care influences the next process. The better designed each process is to engage and help youth and families, the more likely it is that youth and families will achieve their health and wellness goals. For more information on Decision Points and how they are used to improve care, check out our System Design resources.