Spring Health Launches The First Pay-for-Performance System in Mental Healthcare Based on Patient Outcomes

We are proud to announce Candela, our new system for measuring the quality of care delivered by our network of providers. Candela ensures Spring Health members are consistently receiving the highest-quality care while also supporting our provider’s professional growth with data-driven insights and coaching. Candela enables us to incentivize our providers for high-quality performance, making it the industry’s first pay-for-performance system based on real clinical outcomes.

As individuals (76% of U.S. employees) continue to navigate increased burnout, economic anxiety, racial trauma and other mental health impacts of the pandemic, it’s more important than ever for employers to focus on improving employee mental well-being. Employee stress rates are reported to be higher than they were in the early days of the pandemic, leading to less concentration, negative feelings and overall reduced work performance. We developed Candela to support our providers’ growth and ensure members receive the highest quality of care, with methods proven to increase patient outcomes while reducing healthcare costs.

“A commitment to providing quality care shouldn’t stop with the initial vetting of your providers. It requires keeping a constant pulse on the quality of care your network provides and ensuring you have the correct processes in place to improve upon it,” said Dr. Millard Brown, our SVP of Medical Affairs. “With Candela, Spring Health is setting the standard for providing the best care for our customers by ensuring providers are equipped with the necessary tools to consistently grow and perform to our high standards.”

The goal of Candela is to continue to strengthen our results-driven provider network. The system is powered by data and insights that increase provider performance and experience, decrease customer’s time-to-remission, drastically reduce the cost of care and improve overall care quality. Our current average patient satisfaction score is already 9.4 out of 10 and the average turnaround time from booking an appointment to seeing a therapist is one day versus the industry standard of three or more weeks.

Measuring beyond the operational aspects of performance to take into account real, clinical outcomes as a result of care, Candela provides a holistic view of care quality for our providers. The system was developed based on three core components:

• Candela Dashboard: An internal dashboard that tracks the performance of Spring Health’s providers across a variety of metrics including clinical outcomes such as depression/anxiety improvement and depression/anxiety remission.
• Provider Reports: Monthly reports that are sent to each Spring Health provider summarizing their volume of work, scores and percentile ranks in each metric and visualizations of their historical month-to-month performance in each metric.
• Incentives: Candela enables Spring Health to reward our top providers with cash bonuses for high-quality performance, while offering expert coaching to empower providers to consistently improve their performance.

“Candela is a great way to gauge how clients directly experience our service,” said Mark Tovar, LPC-S and Spring Health provider. “It lets me know what I should continue doing and continue to improve so I am at my best performance levels, even after 20 years of clinical work.”

To learn more about Candela and our provider network, download our Care Network Guide.

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