Four Moves to Turn Outcomes Data Into Action 

Forge Health serves a clinically complex population: substance use, co-occurring mental health, complex trauma, and serious mental illness. They deliver that care across 12 sites in four states. By the time Forge was named Kipu’s 2026 EMR Innovator of the Year, their providers had been running reliable outcome assessments for years. What they didn’t yet have was a way to turn that data into something a clinician could act on in session and a leader could act on across the organization, without either of them having to do extra work to get there. 

That gap is the one most behavioral health organizations sit in. The collection work is largely solved: assessments get scored, dashboards get built, quarterly reviews land on the calendar. The harder step is the one after that, where the leadership conversation moves past whether documentation is happening into what the documentation actually means. 

Cynthia Fox, SVP of Front End Operations at Forge, walked through how her team closed that gap in a recent fireside chat. Four moves stand out for any leader trying to do the same thing. 

The instinct when building an outcomes program is to pick instruments and turn them on. Fox flipped that order. “Start with the questions you need data to answer,” she said. For Forge, that meant questions like: how is client well-being trending? Are we identifying acuity correctly at intake? Where are clients stalling, and where are they thriving? Those questions led to the WHO-5, a brief, broadly applicable well-being index, as the foundation before anything else was layered on. The measures came from the questions, not the other way around. 

A measurement program that depends on clinicians remembering is a program that’s already losing. Forge auto-enrolled every newly admitted client in the WHO-5, then on a 30-day cadence afterward. The assessment goes out through the Kipu patient portal so clients can complete it on their own time. Clinicians can administer it in session as a backup, or trigger it manually when something material changes: a level-of-care shift, a significant life event, a clinical concern about deterioration. The administrative work moved off the clinician and into the workflow. 

No single score does the work. Forge layered the WHO-5 alongside the PHQ-9, GAD-7, PCL, diagnosis codes, and self-reported treatment history. The point was pattern recognition. “We didn’t want to look at any one measure in isolation,” Fox said. The interesting clinical moments live in the contradictions: symptoms improving while well-being stays low, or well-being dropping before symptoms surface. Those are the cases worth intervening on early, and they’re invisible to any single instrument. 

This is the move that changed how Forge operates. The same data sitting in the chart for the clinician rolls up, through Tableau dashboards built on a structured export of Kipu data, into something an operations leader can act on: provider trends, regional patterns, the relationship between symptom trajectories and attendance, missed sessions, and early dropout. Forge built a red/yellow flag system that surfaces clients whose intake data suggests a different level of care, replacing random chart spot-checks with a structured, data-driven QA process. The dashboards are de-identified by design. They’re built to find programs that need more support or training, not to grade individual clinicians. 

The result is what Fox calls a shared source of truth. Clinicians, supervisors, ops, and execs are looking at the same data, and the leadership conversation has moved from “are we doing this?” to “what is this telling us?” 

The lesson for any leader weighing an outcomes investment is straightforward. Data collection is the easy part. The harder, more valuable work is making sure the data shows up where decisions actually get made. 

Fox’s closing advice doubles as a useful test. If you can’t name the question a measure is answering, and you can’t name the action the answer will prompt, what you have is a documentation exercise. The organizations that turn outcomes data into action are the ones that build the bridge from one to the other on purpose. 

About the Authors

Travis Moon Travis Moon, Kipu's Content Marketing Strategist, is a seasoned leader in healthcare IT and content marketing, specializing in the behavioral healthcare sector. He develops impactful, data-driven campaigns that support healthcare professionals and enhance patient outcomes. With over a decade of experience, Travis has led strategic content initiatives for major healthcare organizations, including the launch of data visualization tools and thought leadership campaigns.