Massachusetts created the Behavioral Health Supervising Clinicians Incentive Program (SCIP) to increase access to clinical supervision for people working toward behavioral health licenses and certifications.
For organizations participating in the program, that also means keeping good records.
The challenge: Supervisors needed to document who they supervised, when the supervision occurred and the activity involved. That information is needed to support quarterly SCIP reporting and may need to be produced during an audit.
What changed: ThreeWill created a SCIP clinical supervision app that gives supervisors one place to record their activity. More than 3,336 entries have now been logged in the system.
The impact: Administrators have a centralized record they can use when preparing quarterly SCIP reports and invoices, reviewing supervision history or responding to an audit.
Why SCIP requires good recordkeeping
SCIP is a two-year Massachusetts program intended to increase the availability of clinical supervision for students and clinicians working toward approved behavioral health licenses and certifications.
Qualified supervisors can receive an incentive of $500 per supervisee slot per month. Funding is distributed quarterly based on supervision that actually occurred.
Participating organizations have to provide information about that supervision as part of the quarterly process. That includes information about the supervisor and supervisee, their credentials and the dates supervision was provided.
Those records matter beyond submitting the quarterly report.
Public Consulting Group (PCG), the third-party administrator for SCIP, also conducts audits. During an audit, PCG can review quarterly reports and confirm that the supervision included in those reports actually took place. The SCIP program guide recommends maintaining an internal tracker and supporting records for that reason.
Building a system around the SCIP process
Before the app, the organization did not have a dedicated system for keeping its SCIP supervision records together.
ThreeWill worked with the organization to create one.
When supervision takes place, users can record the supervisor, supervisee, date, hours and the mentoring or supervision activity performed. The information is stored centrally and can be searched and reviewed later.
That gives administrators a running record throughout the quarter rather than requiring them to assemble the same information when the quarterly SCIP report and invoice are due.
At this point, the app contains 3,336 entries.
That number is useful because it tells us something that is often difficult to show in a success story about an internal application: people are actually using it.
Supporting quarterly SCIP reporting
The records collected in the app give administrators the underlying information they need when preparing the organization’s quarterly SCIP reports and invoices to PCG.
They can review previous supervision activity, confirm dates and hours, and look at the history for individual supervisors and supervisees.
The same information is available if the organization needs to support what was submitted later.
That matters because SCIP audits can include verification that reported supervision occurred and that incentive payments were handled according to the program requirements.
3,336 entries and counting
During a quarterly review, the SCIP app was identified as one of the organization’s highest-impact solutions.
Usage has also reached the point where the organization and ThreeWill have discussed how the app may need to scale as the number of records continues to grow.
Today, the organization has a single place to capture its SCIP supervision activity as it happens and use those records when quarterly reporting or audit questions come around.
For a program built around documenting supervision that clinicians are already providing, 3,336 entries is a meaningful indication that the process has become part of the way the organization works.
