Netsmart Acquires Behavioral Pathway Systems To Further Advance Clinical Leadership In Behavioral Health

Leading benchmarking service to help behavioral health providers enhance clinical care and improve business efficiencies

Netsmart, the leading provider of clinical solutions for health and human services organizations nationwide, recently announced the acquisition of Behavioral Pathway Systems (BPS), the leading provider of benchmarking services for behavioral health. Netsmart acquired BPS from Centerstone Research Institute (CRI), a not-for-profit company dedicated to improving healthcare delivery through research and information technology.

BPS serves more than 500 client organizations nationwide, including community behavioral health providers, addiction treatment facilities, and human services agencies. The company provides comprehensive clinical, operational, financial, and organizational benchmarking services.

Benchmarking is a powerful management tool that allows organizations to gauge their performance against others and develop best practices models for their processes. Benefits of benchmarking include improved care outcomes, enhanced clinical research, better risk management and development of quantitative-based best practices, all of which will be critical as health reform pushes healthcare towards lower costs, improved outcomes, better coordination of care and more accountable care payment models.

“The addition of BPS to the Netsmart family of solutions provides our clients with a critical service to help them be strategically successful, clinically innovative and operationally efficient,” said Michael Valentine, chief executive officer, Netsmart. “On a more holistic level, this acquisition is another step in our transformative initiative to develop a national clinical and operational benchmarking and analytics service that leverages aggregate clinical and management data and best practices from across the Netsmart client base and beyond. By linking our network of clients, who today provide care to more than 20 million people, to this powerful set of solutions, we now have the potential to dramatically accelerate the evolution of the use of evidence in this side of healthcare – something that other parts of healthcare have done for some time now. We are thrilled about the possibilities created by tightly integrating our mutual strategies.”

BPS's offerings will also be integrated into Netsmart's myAvatar, TIER, Insight and CMHC/MIS enterprise electronic health record (EHR) solutions to make it seamless for Netsmart clients to use BPS services. Future plans include integration with other information technology platforms as well.

All BPS staff will join Netsmart. Paul Lefkovitz, Ph.D., president of BPS, will serve as general manager, Benchmarking Services, for Netsmart. Lefkovitz is an acknowledged pioneer and leader in benchmarking for behavioral health and other areas of health and human services.

“Healthcare is in the midst of unprecedented complexity and change, and I believe benchmarking will be a key framework that helps providers manage for the future,” said Lefkovitz. “Our joining with Netsmart will provide additional resources and enable BPS to further fulfill our vision – to contribute meaningfully to the body of knowledge about best practices in behavioral health and to assist organizations in enhancing their efforts to achieve organizational excellence.”

In addition to continuing to receive personalized and highly responsive benchmarking services, current BPS clients will have immediate access to Netsmart’s full range of solutions and the benefits of being part of behavioral healthcare’s largest community.

For more information about Netsmart’s benchmarking capabilities visit www.ntst.com/benchmarking.

About Netsmart
Netsmart helps health and human services organizations transform care through the collaborative, coordinated management and exchange of clinical data across the care spectrum and through effective practice management that improves revenue cycle management. More than 18,000 client organizations, including 350,000 care providers and more than 40 state systems, use Netsmart products to help improve the quality of life for tens of millions of people each year. Netsmart clients include mental health and substance use treatment agencies, psychiatric hospitals, private and group mental health practices, public health departments, social services and child and family health agencies, vital records offices, and managed care organizations. Netsmart’s products are full-featured information systems that operate on a variety of operating systems, hardware platforms, and mobile devices, and offer unlimited scalability.

Netsmart provides the solutions and expertise that help its clients meet all the criteria for Meaningful Use of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009.

Building upon Netsmart’s Complete ARRA-Certified EHRs, Netsmart clients can also create a complete connected care environment encompassing e-prescribing and order entry, sharing clinical information and lab results, and using Web portals to provide secure and private consumer access to care information.

Netsmart is also pleased to sponsor www.everydaymatters.com, an interactive, informational forum for clinicians, practitioners and consumers to share stories, celebrate successes, become enlightened and inspired, and debunk myths and stigma about mental health and public health issues in an effort to highlight the positive clinical and financial impacts provided by the behavioral and public health community.

For more information, visit www.ntst.com.