Striving for Success

Please allow me to introduce Mid-Erie Counseling & Treatment Services. Mid-Erie is a private, not-for-profit, licensed community mental health center that provides outpatient mental health and chemical dependency services to children, adults and families. Mid-Erie’s Board of Directors is composed entirely of community volunteers. The core of Mid-Erie’s services are provided on the East side of Buffalo. Buffalo has been ranked the third poorest city in the U.S. For over 37 years, Mid-Erie has been serving residents who live in the poorest zip codes within the Buffalo, delivering critical services to one of the most vulnerable groups in our society – those with mental illness.

Mid-Erie’s mission is to promote recovery and wellness through the provision of an array of comprehensive and integrated community behavioral health services. These services consist of treatment, rehabilitation, education, and support services for children, adults, and families facing serious emotional disturbance, mental illness, or chemical dependency. Mid-Erie is recognized as a leader in the provision of services to children.

In 2008 Mid-Erie served over 4,000 clients with annual expenditures of 6 million dollars with 120 staff in 13 locations. As a not-for-profit, Mid-Erie strives to ensure that our resources primarily support client services.

We are challenged to continually improve the quality and efficiency of our service delivery. Program activity must be managed closely so that current expenditures do not exceed the funding levels as well as support effective calculation of the future funding requirements as the organization grows and community needs evolve.

Just a few years ago Mid-Erie had only 20 computers across our whole agency. We have made a concerted effort to integrate technology into our programs to optimize our service delivery. The results have been astonishing but we still have a long way to go.

Currently Mid-Erie has 120 computers including laptops. We are using a whole host of Microsoft products such as Microsoft Outlook, Access, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Office. Via a generous grant from the New York State Department of Labor in 2006, Mid-Erie was able to have all of our staff trained in the use of Microsoft products. This training was essential because we needed to be able to effectively use technology to improve our outreach, marketing and quality improvement efforts. As staff became more proficient in the use of Microsoft products, amazing things began to happen.

With Microsoft Excel we were able to better manage our program budgets in order to cut costs where we most needed to in order to survive these hard financial times. With more accurate data and streamlined procedures, we now have more effective financial management practices.

We also are using Excel to manage our demographic and clinical outcome information to be able to prove our services are effective and keep track of where the need for our services is most profound in the communities we serve. Excel has also been instrumental in Mid-Erie’s development of internal reports, state and county reports as well as tracking mechanisms for treatment plans, assessments and other clinical forms.

Microsoft Word, Publisher, Excel, and PowerPoint have been used to disseminate materials and train staff on evidence based practices as well as:

§ Family Support Materials

§ Wellness Screening for children and adolescents

§ Brochures for all our programs are now produced in-house at a significant savings

§ Client handouts

§ Tracking attendance and school grades

§ Expediting linkages to our services from the hospital

§ Marketing our services to improve access

§ Conducting community education seminars to raise awareness of behavioral health issues and reduce stigma

As a result of our improved use of technology and Microsoft products in particular, Mid-Erie has been able to form new community partnerships with schools, other agencies, and the legal system to improve access to our services. We have screened over 700 children for early identification of emotional problems and are more efficiently tracking and reporting on all of our data and most importantly a visible presence in the community educating people on the importance of good mental health.

Our goal is to continue to improve our understanding and use of technology in order to maximize the delivery of our services. More and more of our staff are based in the community so offsite access and technology is crucial. We also need to upgrade much of our technology infrastructure since it is now dated. It is more critical than ever to be able

to implement quality improvement practices and technology is an essential part of the process.

Most importantly we are now a visible presence in the community educating people on the importance of good mental health. The number of people we have been able to serve has been dramatically increasing as shown by more than tripling the amount of clients we serve in a year. Microsoft products have allowed us to better evaluate our services and specific interventions and procedures to maximize our effectiveness so not only can we reach more people via Microsoft we have also been able to improve clinical outcomes.

Mid-Erie Clients Served

Projected 2009 6,570

Actual 2008 4,123

2007 3,932

2006 2,184

Thank you for being part of our succss and we look forward to our continued partnership in helping people in our community with mental illness.