Treatment plans are an often-overlooked element of quality mental health treatment. Some providers see them as inefficient busywork, a necessary evil to meet compliance standards. However, treatment plans in counseling have value far beyond compliance. They can actually enhance patient care and benefit a practice's efficiency.
Understanding Treatment Plans in Counseling
A treatment plan is a document that records a patient's current mental health status and lays out goals for the outcome of their treatment. It usually includes an assessment and diagnosis, treatment goals and objectives, interventions and strategies that the provider plans to use, and an approximate timeline for the treatment journey. The exact structure and content of treatment plans may vary, but these are the core elements.
This document provides a clear roadmap to ensure treatment stays on track with a client's goals. Treatment plans are often adjusted as the client's mental health journey progresses, so it remains a guiding document to help make clinical decisions and measure progress.
Goals and Objectives
"Goals" in a mental health treatment plan refer to the outcomes the patient hopes to achieve with therapy. For many patients, this will be a reduction in unwanted symptoms, or coping strategies to manage their mental health alongside daily life. "Objectives" are the smaller steps that must be taken to reach those goals.
The goals and objectives section of the treatment plan are regularly addressed as the treatment journey unfolds.
Using SMART goals can increase the likelihood of treatment success. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Laying out such concrete goals and objectives helps the clinician and patient to be clear on both the treatment and anticipated outcomes.
Methods
"Methods" is another way of saying interventions or strategies that will be used to help the patient reach their goals. The methods section will likely lay out what type of therapy is being utilized, any psychoeducation that needs to happen, medications the client is taken, progress monitoring, etc.
Some of these methods, such as choosing a therapy modality, are things clinicians will do for the patient. Some of the methods will be strategies clients need to learn and maintain in their own life -- for example, exposure and response prevention practice for OCD clients, or sticking to a doctor-approved exercise schedule to help alleviate depression.
Timeline
Mental health goals can tend to be vague, since they largely center around subjective internal experience, so setting time boundaries is a way to make sure that the client is truly moving forward. Keep in mind that timelines need not be set in stone. As treatment continues, clinicians may decide that the timeline needs to be stretched or shortened, depending on how the client is responding to treatment.
Timelines are about more than when therapy will be complete. They can also be used to help check on progress markers. Doing this check regularly can help evaluate intervention strategies, which can lead to better outcomes at a faster pace.
Enhancing Patient Outcomes
Far from being a formality of documentation, treatment plans in counseling can actually contribute to better patient outcomes. Laying out a clear picture of a client's challenges and progress can help the clinician target their interventions to match the patient's needs. Being able to refer back to concrete goals can help monitor the success of an intervention strategy, and help see the need for any change to strategies much sooner.
Plus, collaboration with patients to create the plan gives better clarity on what the patient wants from therapy.
Facilitating Communication
Treatment plans can also be a vehicle for better communication with a client. Patients and therapists often use the treatment plan as a guiding document to discuss the steps needed to reach the treatment goal(s). These steps, also called objectives, may often be a client's homework between sessions, so it's beneficial to have them clearly documented from the outset.
On a broader scale, treatment plans give patients language to explain what they want from treatment and what they're experiencing during the process. It also assists in explaining treatment methods. This encourages patients to be actively involved in treatment, rather than passive recipients of a process they don't understand.
Treatment plans also help therapists quickly communicate with other care providers and with insurance by capturing patient information in a standardized way. This allows insurance providers to assess the value and success of a treatment, and it allows providers who may be involved in the patient's care to have a clear overview of their therapy experience.
Providing a Framework
These documents function as a framework for sessions with clients so clinicians aren't trying to pull strategies together on the fly. They also help identify ways to measure patient progress, since goals and objectives are specific and measurable. This is particularly true of outcome measures in a practice, which can be helpful when seeking higher compensation from payers.
Importantly, strong treatment planning increases professional accountability. It gives a standard to measure treatment outcomes against.
Treatment Planning for Mental vs. Physical Health
The documentation of goals for treatment is important to mental health in a unique way compared to physical healthcare. Most physical healthcare services have clear and obvious goals because they're addressing physical problems. Appropriate functioning of the body can often be measured much more easily than appropriate functioning of the mind.
Without deliberate steps to document desired outcomes, mental health treatment runs the risk of becoming murky in its goals. It relies on patients communicating their subjective experiences. Anything that captures goals in a more objective manner can help prevent treatment from becoming aimless and unfocused.
Common Clinician Complaints and Solutions
Despite their value, treatment plans aren't without their problems. Luckily, with the help of modern EHRs and solid treatment planning strategies, it's possible to troubleshoot the snags and make treatment plans an easy part of the therapy process.
Treatment plans done inefficiently may start to feel like more busy work -- more paperwork, more time, more documents to keep track of. However, modern software solutions allow clinicians to minimize busy work and remove the burden of extra time that these documents are perceived to create.
There's a misconception that treatment plans are rigid documents that can't easily capture the nuances of each patient. But when plans are customizable and editable, clinicians can quickly build a basic structure that is easy to tailor to patient needs. Far from being stagnant and useless, customizable treatment plans can be dynamic and responsive from the first appointment to the last.
Navigating Compliance Requirements
Don't forget that treatment plans are part of compliance for many health insurance and governmental regulations. Adhering to this requirement helps smooth the path in the event of audits and inspections. And, because audits also look at the overall clinical care being given to patients, treatment plans are one thing that helps to demonstrate staff's competence in selecting appropriate, evidence-based treatments for each client.
Getting Started with Treatment Plans
To begin integrating treatment planning into a practice, clinicians should take the following steps.
Adopt or Revise A Treatment Planning Protocol
Treatment planning can enhance patient outcomes and communication and keep treatment focused on patients' most important goals. It can help anchor the often-subjective nature of mental health experiences in something specific and measurable to aid in offering patients the best help possible. While some may see these plans as unnecessary or inefficient, they can become an integral part of a practice's daily habits.
About Ram Krishnan
Ram Krishnan is the CEO of Valant, an EHR platform designed specifically for behavioral health professionals in group and solo private practices. Ram joined Valant in 2020 as an experienced technology executive to lead the organization through its next stage of growth. His passion for listening to the customer and building strong teams, coupled with his demonstrated ability to drive scalability, provide a solid foundation for Valant to grow as it finds new ways to serve the behavioral healthcare market.