Valued Voice

The WHA Information Center (WHAIC) was established in 2003 to help Wisconsin providers, policy makers, researchers and others turn data into actionable insights that are used to enable timely and reliable decision making.  

For Mental Health Month, WHAIC is highlighting two tools that specifically focus on providing actionable insights into mental health care: The WHAIC Behavioral Health Data Dashboards and the WHAIC Psychiatric Bed Locator and Medical Clearance Tool.

WHA Information Center Behavioral Health Data Dashboards

Launched in 2023, the WHAIC created 10 free, public dashboards of inpatient and emergency department mental health trends in Wisconsin, utilizing Chapter 153 hospital discharge data submitted quarterly by all Wisconsin hospitals and data gathered by the WHAIC Psychiatric Bed Locator.

Created and provided without any state or federal funding, WHAIC developed these dashboards to provide informative, actionable information to the public to help inform local, regional and state mental health needs assessment and planning.

These dashboards allow users to query information by quarter since 2017 regarding mental health admissions, discharges, facility type, payer mix, top diagnoses, general patient demographics such as county of residence and age group, and other information. 

The query design was developed through the work of the WHA Member Mental Health and Addiction Care Forum and the Milwaukee Health Care Partnership over the course of multiple months to identify and present relevant, actionable and understandable data for guiding mental health service planning.

The information on the dashboards is updated quarterly and currently reflects information through the end of 2024. 

The WHAIC Behavioral Health Data Dashboards can be found here. For more information on WHAIC’s analytics and data products, visit www.whainfocenter.com.  

WHA Information Center Psychiatric Bed Locator and Medical Clearance Tool

In 2016, the WHAIC developed a Psychiatric Bed Locator Tool to assist authorized users to locate the potential availability of psychiatric beds for the purpose of accelerating the referral of patients for care.  

Under the voluntary program, hospitals with psychiatric beds are asked to provide how many psychiatric beds the hospital currently has available for potential admission twice per day.   

• 24 of 25 private hospitals with inpatient psychiatric units provide information to the Psychiatric Bed Locator.  
• In 2021, the Psychiatric Bed Locator Tool was expanded to include crisis stabilization facilities and peer run respite facilities. 
• In 2023, following several months of work by the WHA Member Mental Health and Addiction Forum, new functionality was added to the Psychiatric Bed Locator for inpatient psychiatric units to post a basic, customizable medical clearance form developed by the Forum that is modeled on the SMART form.  

More information on the Psychiatric Bed Locator can be found here. Information and FAQs on the medical clearance tool can be found here.