Success Stories

Substance Abuse Center Values The TIER® Product and Appreciates It’s ROI

“We never hear comments about going back to paper; we only hear comments about how to make the computers do more!”
Sherri Layton
Informatics Workgroup
La Hacienda Treatment Center

Located on a 36-acre campus 65 miles northwest of San Antonio, Texas, La Hacienda Treatment Center is one of the largest treatment facilities in the state. Some of its programs include Recovering Professionals, Relapse Prevention, and Christian Focus Groups.

To support their employees in fulfilling organization goals, management needed software that would increase the amount of time each clinical staff member spent face-to-face with patients while decreasing time spent on documentation. Other objectives included having viable, meaningful outcome data for patients available in a timely manner, improving inter- and intradepartmental communication, and making sure care decisions for each patient were consistent among all involved staff members.

In 1997, La Hacienda employed an outside consultant to complete a comprehensive information systems needs assessment to better understand what kind of software would best fit their needs. Frank Sadlak, Executive Director, and Bob Warren, Information Systems Director, checked references, researched the software recommendations made by the consultant, and asked two companies to present their product to the clinical and management staff. As the final decision, TIER® was selected because its software development was more advanced and it had the flexibility needed to make the necessary adaptations to the organization’s needs. Through a collaborative effort, TIER® has been molded into a product that addresses ALL of La Hacienda’s inpatient chemical dependency treatment needs.

TIER® has saved both time and money for this organization. Data analysis between 1999 and 2000 revealed sizable benefits to the TIER® system. A financial benefit of TIER® is represented by; 1,395 more treatment days that were certified for payment by the insurance company (translating to a 6% increase in revenue for the facility). The UR staff attributes this success to having more timely documentation available to them in the electronic record when they do their reviews.

During the first part of 2001 Sherri Layton completed an ongoing series of Continuous Quality Improvement meetings with the nursing staff to identify problem areas in their various departments. Out of the different groups, this one was the most nervous about using a new system. “No one voiced a single complaint about TIER® .”