With all of the work involved in attracting new residents and walking current residents through the phases of recovery, it’s easy to ignore your treatment center’s MVP—your alumni.
Just because they’ve “graduated” from treatment doesn’t mean that your alumni don’t still need your care and attention. In fact, building strong relationships with your alumni is a win-win for both your organization and the people who have received treatment there. A solid alumni base can act as cheerleader, mascot, and referral machine for your organization, driving new patients to your doors for years to come.
Today, let’s look at how to nurture your alumni and set them up for success after their stay at your treatment center ends.
Make a Plan
Discharge planning is an important part of treatment planning. Make sure that your counselors are making detailed and personalized discharge plans with each of their patients. A good discharge plan includes plenty of relapse prevention planning and lots of sound community support. Make sure your patients have a plan for recovery community connection after they leave treatment. Ideally, these connections should start before they are discharged. (For example, they should begin attending meetings in the community while still at your treatment center.) This helps ease the transition from sober institutional living to sober living “on the outside.”
You can use BehaveHealth to track all community connections your patient makes to help facilitate recovery meeting attendance, social work appointments, and job placement services while your patient is still at your facility. After they graduate, their account converts to alumni status and all of the information you’ve collected remains in the alumni portal. If they contact you for a phone number or meeting time, you’ll have it on hand. Better yet—they can access that information themselves at any time through the alumni portal.
Stay Connected
Staying connected with alumni is easier than ever. There are lots of ways to connect with former patients to keep the bond between provider and patient strong.
Social Media—Set up business pages on Facebook and/or Instagram and invite alumni to follow you. Remember to never post any HIPAA protected PHI on social media and to never imply in your comments that anyone commenting on a post is or was a patient at your facility.
Newsletter—Send monthly email newsletters to alumni keeping them up to date on treatment center happenings. Invite alumni to share success stories or milestones.
Calls—Pick up the phone and reach out. We recommend you do phone check-ins for recent graduates regularly. Not only does the check-in help them stay on track, It offers accountability and structure that they might otherwise be lacking. Calls are also an important part of the outcomes tracking process.
Reunions—Annual or bi-annual reunions are a popular option for keeping your alumni community healthy and active. Invite former patients to an informal gathering for socializing and celebration.
Alumni Portal—Use an app like BehaveHealth to stay connected to your alumni. After graduation, the app stays on their phone as their account switches to alumni status. All of their previous information—their treatment plan, their discharge plan, their community connections—stays easily accessible in the alumni portal even after they leave treatment. They can send messages, review their treatment, or ask for extra help through the app at any time.
Make it Easy to Return, if Needed
Unfortunately, relapse is a common part of the disease of addiction and it often takes more than one visit to a treatment center to find lasting recovery. Given this reality, why make readmission harder than it needs to be?
Set up a system that makes it easy for patients to reach out for help if needed.
If you use BehaveHealth, your alumni will already have that help loaded on their phone. If readmission is required, their information is still saved in the cloud, easily accessible from the device of your choice. Rather than go through the entire admissions process from scratch, your staff can quickly create a new episode of care in the pre-existing chart. This dramatically cuts down on paperwork time and means your struggling alumni can access care more quickly.
Alumni Are the Lifeblood of Addiction Treatment
Your treatment center graduates are warriors. Treat them to extra perks like frequent check-ins, reunions, and an app made especially for them and they’ll reward you with excellent outcomes data and a steady stream of referrals. BehaveHealth makes it easy to run a robust alumni management campaign with an alumni portal built for addiction treatment alumni. Why not claim your free trial today?