Catholic Family Services (CFS) provides outpatient counseling and mental health services to more than 7,000 individuals, couples, families, and groups each year without regard to gender, age, race, religion, or disability. The organization serves its constituents from six locations throughout the St. Louis area.

ETO Motivations

CFS needed to accurately and efficiently collect and process demographic and other data to ensure continued funding from a number of sources including the United Way. They also needed to better track and manage outcomes and staff productivity, and better support case record reviews and clinical documentation. Moreover, CFS needed to be able to quickly and easily generate reports based on the information they were collecting and tracking.

Success Hurdles

CFS’s top concerns were (a) fostering staff adoption of new tools and processes, (b) preparing for customization of the ETO Software®, and (c) managing the time investment in learning to effectively work under the outcomes-focused paradigm.

Lessons and Achievements

By becoming engaged early in the change process, key CFS team members were able to affect the design and content of the software tools and thereby had a personal stake in the tools’ adoption and success. Staff also completed training in the organizational change work of William Bridges in advance of customizing their ETO Software, which supported both adoption and the customization effort. CFS determined that a phased approach to implementation, supported by a ready-reference tool for identifying outcome types (specific/participant versus general/organizational), would better support the transition to the new operational model.

In the six months following deployment of the ETO Software, CFS compiled all necessary demographic data for funders, entered case records and clinical documentation, and built at least 50 customized queries. As a result, the tool’s reporting capabilities have been utilized extensively to create both standard and custom reports for staff and a variety of financial supporters. One report, which formerly took two hours to compile, can now be created in 10 minutes. Furthermore, clinician productivity and work quality are now being tracked in support of annual performance management and compensation, and the ETO Software is being used to determine the organization’s overall performance using a balanced scorecard approach.