Above: Co-CEOs Ryan Lechner and Nico Gimenez look forward to continuing to embrace partnership, quality, and strong values in 2024.
As we wave goodbye to 2023, we find ourselves reflecting not just on our achievements but on the vibrant stories that have shaped The Change Companies. We’ve met with dozens of individuals who have changed their lives, their families, and their communities for the better. And it's these narratives that fuel our commitment to over 5,000 organizations, thousands of facilitators, and countless individuals on their journey towards a more fulfilling life.
The Challenge We Embrace
In the world of healthcare, we too often hear tales of where failure to adhere to best practice has led to harmful results – surgeries gone wrong, critical misdiagnoses, and avoidable spread of disease. High quality healthcare is easy in theory, but maintaining quality of care is challenging to execute at scale. And the truth is, quality assurance is even more challenging in behavioral healthcare, with outcomes and success rates varying even more wildly across agencies.
As we’ve spoken with our partners, a common thread has emerged: the hurdles in delivering quality care are substantial, but not insurmountable. Themes we hear time and time again are:
- Confronting Staff Shortages: Organizations are staff constrained, which limits their ability to provide effective counseling, therapy, and support, and contributes towards a downward spiral of burnout and fatigue. It’s our vision to streamline, automate, and reduce non-clinical work so organizations can put greater attention into delivering evidence-based care.
- Empowering Change: The Change Companies was born from a simple yet revolutionary idea: to place the individual at the heart of their behavior change process and support them on their journey to a better life. Techniques like motivational interviewing have been shown to evoke and empower change, but such practices are difficult to utilize with fidelity at scale. Training is a critical and necessary component, but is often insufficient for instilling a culture built of evidence-based practices.
- Individualizing Treatment: Individualized treatment is appreciated as a best practice model, but again, many providers fall back onto more programmatic-driven models. This is especially true in group settings, which are becoming more widely used during periods of staff shortages.
- Measurement-Informed Care: There's a critical need for infrastructure to measure treatment engagement, progress, and efficacy and their impact on long-term health outcomes. However compared to other public health environments, this critical infrastructure tends to be lacking in many organizations providing behavioral healthcare and cognitive-behavioral interventions.
Introducing Atlas: Our Quality of Care Platform
We’re gearing up in 2024 to tackle these challenges head on. Our primary focus will be on delivering Atlas, a software platform designed to extend and enhance Interactive Journaling® while more acutely tackling common hurdles in the field. Here’s how it will work:
- Client engages: Clients will find more ways to engage in their treatment and behavior change program. In addition to delivering a mobile-rich version of Interactive Journaling®, Atlas will provide a robust multimedia library, greater individualization, celebrations of success, and eventually more micro-exercises and nudges.
- Staff interacts: Facilitators can monitor progress, assign curricula, and engage with clients.
- Organization measures: Analytics capabilities and engagement tracking will provide insights into program effecicacy down to the site and curriculum level.
Elevating Our Approach
While providing supporting technology will be a core focus, we also will continue to enhance and evolve our offerings to address the needs of our partners heads on. In 2024, we will also focus on:
- The Fidelity Program: Replacing our Train The Trainer model, this program focuses on mastery of evidence-based practices and achieving fidelity through ongoing coaching.
- ASAM Criteria Implementation: Utilizing a blended learning approach, we support the utilization of both the 3rd and 4th editions of The ASAM Criteria.
- My Life in Recovery Update: Our flagship addiction treatment curriculum incorporates the latest science and best practices.
Our Commitments
While we are excited about the possibility of doing more and innovating, there are certain parts of The Change Companies that will not change:
- Our Commitment to Partnership: We view each partner organization of ours as just that: partners. We are committed to bringing the human touch, being genuinely helpful, and having our partners' best interests at heart.
- Evidence-based: Our mission is to take the best research in behavioral health and translate it to formats that are engaging and effective. In other words, our job is to make delivering “what works” achievable and scalable. Equally important, we are committed to being person centered: After all, that is where real and lasting change comes from.
- Our Values: We feel honored to have built a team that lives by our values, which are "Humble, Hardworking, and Honest." We challenge ourselves and each other every day to do the right thing, to do our best work, and to put helping others at the center of what we do. It’s what you should expect from The Change Companies, and what we expect of each other.
Let’s step boldly into 2024 together, armed with innovation, driven by passion, and united in our quest to transform behavioral healthcare. We encourage dialogue, your thoughts, and your support to make the field of behavioral healthcare better. Reach out any time to share your thoughts and perspective. We’re here for you.