Over the past ten years, Foothold Technology and our community of providers have evolved, transformed, explored, and grown. 2017 marks Foothold's tenth annual conference. With a decade of Expos under our belt, we've learned a few things along the way, so EXPO TEN will be our biggest and best Expo yet. Whether you're hoping to enhance your knowledge of AWARDS functionality, strengthen your agency's operations, or gain a better understanding of the changes on our industry's horizon, EXPO TEN is here to provide you with the knowledge you need. Join us on June 22, 2017 for a day of learning, networking, and, of course, some fun.

AWARDS-Impact Impact Prize is back!!! Tell us about the most impactful, inspirational things you've accomplished using AWARDS. We'll reward the most innovative achievements with a cash prize and a trip to our 2017 Expo in New York City!

We are pleased to provide you with a special installment of "Highlights from the Project Pipeline," where CEO Marlowe Greenberg offers an update on our 2016 successes and 2017 development plans here at Foothold Technology.

I want to take this opportunity to bring you up to date on the goings on here at Foothold, and share an overview of the scope of work we have set for ourselves in 2017.

Foothold Technology continues to spread the word about the benefits of using AWARDS. As part of our outreach we attended or presented at over 65 conferences across the nation. Special thanks go out to the clients and partners who presented with us this year: Mary Simons of Open Doors Homeless Coalition, Daniel Farrell of HELP USA, Briana Gilmore of Community Access, Paul Joslyn of Unity House Cayuga County, Kim Keaton of CSH, Jasper de Guzman of Catholic Charities of Santa Clara County, Pamela Russo of Catholic Charities Diocese of Allentown, Cesar Sosa of NYTC, Stan Chotkowski of Keystone Community Resources, and Michael Blady of the Bridge.  We launched our "Voices of DD" initiative after the success of "Voices of Supportive Housing."  "Voices of" is a collection of short videos featuring individuals sharing their thoughts on why they do what they do, the struggles they're seeing within the industry, the tools they use, and where they see things going.  We continued to expand our client community into 3 new states CO, MN, and WA making us present in over half of the country. 2016 ended as one of the most successful sales years to date and we are looking forward to what 2017 has to offer.

2016 was also a very busy development year at Foothold, with many new features released. In keeping with the current national focus on Interoperability, many releases aimed to provide new data sharing opportunities from AWARDS. During the summer we went live with E-labs, partnering with Change Healthcare to bring electronic lab order functionality into AWARDS - allowing for direct connections with Quest, LabCorp and hundreds of other labs. We also completed our Healthix HUB connection which lets participants in the Healthix RHIO seamlessly exchange data between AWARDS and the RHIO, along with our MedAllies HISP connection that offers provider-to-provider direct messaging from within AWARDS. Other data sharing and Care Coordination related releases included export files for the New York State MAPP system, new Health Home Consent forms added to AWARDS, as well as additional features and reporting options for the MCTAC Output to Outcomes project in New York State. And perhaps most notably, we closed out the year by being named a qualified vendor for Home & Community Based Services (HCBS) in New York State! 

In addition to our focus on Interoperability and Care Coordination, we were excited to release several new modules and features in AWARDS in 2016, including the new Referral Agencies and all inter-related features, as well as the Waiting Lists feature - which allows administrators to design and implement configurable waiting lists to be used for any configuration of agency programs. Our monthly releases also included a tremendous amount of HMIS-related updates - including updates for the new data standards, the new CSV 5.0, as well as several important tools to help communities implement Coordinated Entry Systems. And as always, our monthly releases also focused on making many enhancements to our existing ReportBuilders and BillingBuilder tools, including the addition of the Invoice ID field on all Services ReportBuilders to fully tie together Billing and Services reporting. We also continued our work to transition many AWARDS modules over to the new look and feel, including Employers, Diet Info, Medical Info, and Service Referrals - with many more to come in 2017. And finally, a great deal of work was done on our new PlanBuilder feature - which saw a limited and targeted release in 2016, but will be more fully rolled out in 2017. If you haven't already registered, be sure to join us for the January18th webinar "FootholdConnect - The Best of 2016."

In addition to all of the above noted functionality enhancements, Foothold put significant resources this past year into both Security and Infrastructure. Foothold has worked hard to make AWARDS one of the most secure EHR companies on the market. With growing global concerns about cyber-security, and many newsworthy large-scale data breaches, we decided to partner with GreyCastle Security - a leader in HIPAA compliance and cybersecurity consulting. Through this partnership, we have not only increased and enhanced our existing security efforts, but have also begun and will continue to provide our customers with learning opportunities aimed at helping you enhance your own internal data security practices. 2016 also saw a tremendous amount of work by our Application Development team to ensure Foothold’s hardware and networks were enhanced with cutting edge tools to ensure continued scalability to meet our on-going growth in customers and AWARDS usage. We put a new web stack in place,  completed a tremendous amount of code optimization, and moved to a new source control model to allow for more rapid development work as well as greater performance.

During the upcoming year, we plan to build on this foundation, and have many more infrastructure and optimization projects in the pipeline. In addition to this foundational work, our 2017 forecast has a wide-ranging focus - with flagship projects being Meaningful Use 2015 Certification, a full rollout of the PlanBuilder feature, an increased focus on E-signatures enhancements, as well as moving more and more modules into the new Look and Feel of AWARDS. As with every year, we will continue to meet the on-going and rigorous regulatory changes and requirements of the many entities our customers must report to - with many HUD HMIS-related projects already on tap. We will continue to build new connections in our Interoperability Center in order to help you meet your growing data sharing requirements. And we will ensure the BillingBuilder and ReportBuilder tools continue to grow to meet the changing needs of our customers.

With a new administration in place, 2017 holds the potential to be a year of many unknowns, concerns and changes in the world in which we all work and live. Here at Foothold, we pride ourselves on being a true partner to our customers and keeping our fingers on the pulse of change. Our involvement in various behavioral health technology trade groups, as well as our related advocacy work, puts us in a good position to work together with you to help navigate whatever lies ahead. 

That's all for now. Please feel free to drop me an email if you are so inclined.

Sincerely,

Marlowe Greenberg, CEO

Encryption is a critically important piece of technology in the modern information technology environment because it makes data indecipherable to a malicious actor or anyone who doesn't have the shared "key" to unlock the data. This means that even if someone is able to gain access to a cache of data, if that data is encrypted it will be near impossible to access because a brute force attack could take an infinite amount of time, even with a supercomputer, until the key is "guessed." When you use AWARDS your connection is encrypted, and your data is encrypted. This leaves one part of the chain of custody for ePHI coming out of AWARDS vulnerable: your computer. This means that if you download and export data from AWARDS onto an unencrypted machine you are potentially leaving ePHI exposed.

Apple, Microsoft, and Google have taken great steps in recent years to address this issue, but in many cases it is still up to the user (or system administrator) to make sure they have encryption enabled on their devices. Here's a quick reference for how encryption is handled on different systems:

As we have done in previous months, we are continuing to make available a new set of useful features and functions to users of AWARDS. As always, this round of upgrades is provided free of charge to all AWARDS users and is described below. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask your local Help Desk or your Foothold Client Services representative. We hope these enhancements improve the way you use AWARDS and provide services! 

Deployment Date:  January 18, 2017

BillingBuilder - Program Billing Group Names Locked from Editing

Program Billing Group Names are now locked from editing after they have been created.  If you need to to change the name of a Program Billing Group after it has been created, please submit a request to the Foothold Help Desk and we will update the name for you. 

BillingBuilder - ReportBuilder Label Update

In order to clarify the difference between available reporting options, the BillingBuilder ReportBuilder Display One Row Per option that used to be called "Invoice" has been renamed "Transaction."  This new label more accurately describes the contents of the report, which will include a row for each Invoice, Payment, and Adjustment transaction that falls within the date range selected for the report.

Intake/Discharge/Cloning Enhancements

The following enhancements have been made to our intake, discharge, and optional Cloning functionality to make them more intuitive and user-friendly:

• Intake Cloning Modifications - In order to make Intake Cloning easier, there will now be a Clone icon to the left of each entry on the Client Search results displayed after completing a search.  This icon will enable a user to clone from one program into another (if cloning is turned on in your AWARDS database). After clicking the Clone icon, the user will be taken to Intake/Admission Search with the client's Name and SSN already filled into the search inputs. The program selected on the Intake Search page will default to the program that was listed next to the Clone icon in the Client Search results, but can be changed as needed.

As an additional change, cloning into multi-step programs will be more discriminating regarding which fields are required, making it possible to update a referral form without knowing all demographic data. Users will be able to update the Application Evaluation (referral) without having to answer all the demographic questions.

2017 is promising to be a busy year for HMIS.  There is already talk about completely new comprehensive Data Standards coming in the fall.  The Point In Time report was updated this month, and several other reports are being updated or released in April.  On April 1st, the old APR will finally be retired and communities will all begin using the new APR.  Some significant changes are being made to the new APR and will be explained in the coming months.  A new "HMIS Data Quality" report will also be available by April 1st, which will look at the percentage of missing data, the timeliness of data entry, and the number of inactive records.  This new Data Quality report will be both a standalone report and part of the new APR.  April 1st will also bring the release of the new PATH Annual Report Survey (ARS).

Our Coordinated Entry Systems modifications are well under way following last year's release of the Waiting List functionality.  This month we released several modifications that will make the transfer of clients between projects much more intuitive.  HMIS databases had previously been restricted from using the "Discharge To" functionality because it created nearly blank admission forms which led to poor data quality.  Now this functionality has been completely overhauled and will allow staff to discharge clients directly from one residential program into another residential program, with all of the client's information cloning over into the admission form.  We've also enhanced the way intake cloning works as you can read about above under "What’s New in AWARDS."  Over the next few months several more Coordinated Entry projects are coming which will provide even greater flexibility in setting up Central Intake projects, configuring Consent Forms, and adding FormBuilder Assessments like the VI-SPDAT to new locations such as the Outreach menu.

Finally, at last year's Expo we heard that many communities wished there were more sessions that appealed to HMIS users, so this year we will be having three sessions that will focus on HMIS topics such as waiting lists, data quality, and of course the upcoming Data Standards changes.  Check above out the information above for more details about Expo 2017.  

After implementation, it is not uncommon for agencies to notice certain aspects of the software may need to be altered or updated. In addition, Foothold Technology regularly makes new AWARDS functionality available to all users free of charge. Some of these enhancements are not turned on by default, and instead must be requested so that they can be turned on for you in AWARDS. There are enhancements available for many functions in AWARDS, from intakes and admissions through discharges, and even post-discharge! To aid you in requesting these features, Foothold Technology makes two types of detailed request forms available to you:

• Optional Enhancements Request Forms - These forms detail newly released features and functionality that you can choose to request now or in the future.  Enhancements in these forms are typically grouped by release date, and can be requested at any time.
• Implementation Request Forms - These forms detail functionality commonly configured during an agency/continuum's implementation phase with AWARDS.  Enhancements in these forms are grouped by module or feature, and can be requested at any time, regardless of whether the AWARDS implementation process is complete.

Both types of these "Enhancement Request" forms can be found in Online Help under Additional Resources. If you would like to have one or more of the enhancements detailed in a form deployed for your agency/continuum, you can follow the step-by-step process detailed in Online Help and each individual form. (Keep in mind that a Client Services representative may contact you prior to deployment if, after reviewing your requests, he/she has any concerns about your selections, or if he/she thinks there are enhancements you have not chosen which could be of benefit to you.)

Check out the latest in Foothold news and recent entries from the Foothold blog!