Speakers
Amanda Robins is the Director of Clinical Operations at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. She began her career at CAMH as a Research Analyst in the Social, Prevention and Health Policy Research Department after completing her Master’s degree in Criminology at the University of Toronto. She moved on Research Operations in 2003, before joining the Clinical Operations team as the Manager in 2005. In her role as Director of Clinical Operations, Amanda is responsible for developing and evaluating measurement tools and indicators for the Clinical Balanced Scorecard, the CEO Goals and Objectives and the Clinical Programs Dashboard – a snapshot of clinical activity underway at CAMH. She also works closely with the Clinical Leadership Team, Decision Support, and the Executive Leadership to ensure the relevancy of indicators, and program performance and accountability.
Peggie Willett is the Director of Decision Support at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). After receiving her Master’s degree in measurement and evaluation, she joined the Addiction Research Foundation (one of CAMH’s four founding organizations) in 1985 as a research assistant, and has been involved with – and passionate about – data ever since. As Manager of Performance Measurement she led the development of CAMH’s first Balanced Scorecard, and has been involved in numerous initiatives defining and developing indicators across the organization. Peggie also co-developed and currently teaches two courses in Hospital Information Management at Ryerson University. Following an 18 month secondment to Canada Health Infoway as benefits evaluation manager, she returned to CAMH in 2005, in large part because she missed mental health and having her ‘own’ data.
Details
The Balanced Scorecard was chosen to be the performance measurement framework for the newly formed Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in 1998. Major challenges at the time included developing clear measures and indicators, getting buy-in from staff, as well as merging separate data systems.
In the ten years since CAMH’s first Balanced Scorecard, the report has gone through several incarnations. The earliest days were riddled with pool data quality, but the Scorecard was an important first vehicle to pull information together from the four founding organizations. As acceptance of the scorecard broadened, so did the demands place upon it, to the point where it became unwieldy. In an effort to return to an indicator-based format, the scorecard was redesigned and stream-lined, but lost the richness of the previous versions.
Part of the gap has been filled with the development of the Clinical Balanced Scorecard, which provides clinical care information at the program level. While other portfolios are at various stages of developing their own scorecards, the Clinical Programs portfolio was the first to accomplish it and their scorecard has been in production for two years.
In addition, parallel initiatives related to Strategic Planning have resulted in the creation of other reports that command the bulk of attention of the organization. The challenge now is to align the Balanced Scorecard with the Strategic Planning reporting, so that the scorecard is used as it was intended.