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In this issue:
User's Conference
FootholdConnect Events
Highlights from the Project Pipeline
HIPAA / Security Notes
This Month in HMIS
Tip of the Month - Troubleshooting Site Access Issues
Foothold News & Blog
Planning is now underway for our eleventh annual User's Conference! We will be sharing some exciting changes to the structure of the day in upcoming communications, along with an event description, session topics, pricing, and more. Stay tuned!
In the meantime, mark your calendars to join us on June 28, 2018 for a day of learning, networking, and, of course, some fun.
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For more information on upcoming FootholdConnect events, please go to FootholdConnect on the AWARDS Home screen's navigation bar, or visit the Upcoming Events page of the Foothold Technology web site. And don't forget... If you've missed any recent FootholdConnect events, you can access the recordings for those in Online Help here!
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Highlights from the Project Pipeline
A Letter from the CEO
Hello Foothold Customers,
I wanted to start off the new year by taking some time to highlight the various ways we work throughout the year to provide you - our valued customers - with a true vendor partnership. While we are very proud of AWARDS, we take even greater pride in the comprehensive services we offer our customers, above and beyond the actual software tool.
Before I dive in, however, I would be remiss if I didn't highlight some of our hard work on AWARDS in 2017. Most noticeably, we made continued strides in our ongoing efforts to update the look and feel of AWARDS, with many sub-modules making the transition and the deployment of the very exciting Home Screen Menu Fly-Outs feature! As usual, we worked on various state and federal regulatory and billing requirements, and are very proud to announce that we were officially approved as a 2015 Federally Certified Edition EHR by ONC, as well as a certified HCBS Vendor in New York State! As you know, the 2015 Edition is the most recent MU specification. The AWARDS Interoperability Center also continued to grow with additional RHIO connections, and ongoing work to keep us up-to-date for Care Coordination models rolling out across the country. This past year also saw the deployment of our new dynamic Providers module, the much needed Gender Flexibility project, and the very long-awaited PlanBuilder - complete with new and improved electronic signatures capability. You can learn more about the 2017 AWARDS features by joining the upcoming Best of 2017 webinar.
Larger projects like those mentioned above have been the core focus of our development calendar each year. In our ongoing effort to partner closely with our customers, we made an exciting change to this process during 2017. A dedicated team was formed to keep track of, sort through and prioritize smaller requests, with the goal of moving one or two forward during each deployment period. Items shepherded by this group that you may have noticed this year were things like having ReportBuilder Excel file exports include the full content of text fields, the search field in File Cabinets and the option to limit who can delete File Cabinet documents via permission. We have a lengthy list to work with for 2018 and are looking forward to our first new feature - the ability to set a FormBuilder form to be included by default in locations like Progress Notes and Incidents. Stay tuned to FootNotes for news on these small and exciting projects!
As the only Behavioral Health EHR in the HIMSS Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA), our voice is critical and we make sure it is heard loud and clear. Recent areas of focus for this group have been supporting common data standards, using technology to improve care and efficiencies, as well as developing EHR codes of conduct to set standards for how EHRs should operate with consistency.
In addition, we also focused a great deal of attention on information sharing and collaboration with our customer community. Hopefully you saw some of our many blog posts, which highlighted these varied efforts. In March, we joined associations from across the nation to celebrate Developmental Disabilities Awareness Month, and in June we awarded three Foothold Technology customers with Impact Prizes for their innovative use of AWARDS and their data. We are also enjoying our behind the scenes support on a project with NJHMIS and Rutgers University to use Medicaid and homeless data to drive policy, support decision-making, and provide a deeper analysis of outcomes. And hearing from all of you about how you are using data from AWARDS to advocate for change in your communities has been especially exciting this year, like this story highlighting some examples in Michigan and Florida, this podcast from Sequel Alliance Family Services in Idaho, this video series featuring Fellowship House in Florida as well as helping agencies in Nevada learn from each other. We're grateful for the impact you are creating in your communities and we want to hear and share more of your stories in 2018.
And of course 2017 also saw a continued focus on security, with much time and energy going into ensuring our systems and your data are safe and secure. As we move into an age of ever increasing cybersecurity threats, security has been and continues to be a high priority for everyone at Foothold. This year we expanded our ongoing security work beyond internal initiatives to help educate our users as well. Among our efforts, we've added a HIPAA / security notes component to our monthly Footnotes newsletter, providing helpful tips and tricks designed to increase security awareness at the individual user level. We've also offered a series of focused webinars with our own security consultant, GreyCastle Security, in order to bring more awareness at the organizational level. We look forward to continuing these educational opportunities with all of you in the coming year!
This year, you should expect to see more usability improvements in AWARDS along with more updates to electronic signatures functionality, care coordination and data sharing in AWARDS, with our Interoperability Center gaining new features that offer true bi-directionality, data sharing connections with new partners, as well as a more streamlined process for BillingBuilder customers to transfer claim files to their many payers. And we will be releasing our full 2015 Certified Edition of AWARDS, with new bells and whistles for Meaningful Use, as well as improvements in tracking encounters and visits in AWARDS for all customers.
We are looking forward to continued partnerships in this new year, as we tread together through this constantly changing behavioral healthcare landscape. We greatly value the critical work you all do every day, and are committed to continuing our advocacy work, information sharing, and software development efforts on your behalf.
That's all for now. Please feel free to drop me an email if you are so inclined.
Sincerely,
Marlowe Greenberg, CEO
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Mobile Device Security
With the wide variety of technology available to each of us, it's a pretty safe bet that for most people a desktop computer is no longer the sole means of getting work done; instead, mobile devices are often our go-to tools. What some of us fail to realize is that the security concerns around mobile devices can be different than those in a basic computing environment. Further, we often don't factor in that if we're using our personal devices for work purposes, we should be ensuring that the security on those devices is in compliance with our employer's requirements. When the work done on mobile devices involves regularly accessing protected health information (PHI), it raises the stakes even further. This fall, the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) dedicated their cybersecurity newsletter to this topic. We encourage you to take a look; it's full of great information to help you stay in compliance with HIPAA and similar regulations.
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What's New...
2018 PIT Count
The 2018 PIT Report will be available on January 18th and will contain the following HUD-mandated changes:
2018 PATH ARS
The new PATH ARS is now available to those who had the 2017 PATH ARS turned on under the Fiscal menu. The report contains the following HUD-mandated changes:
What's Coming Up...
Waiting List Enhancements
We've incorporated much of the feedback we've heard from agencies into the second phase of this project and are excited for this group of enhancements, which are aimed to improve our waiting list functionality.
Auto Discharge
This project will allow agencies to set a program to auto-discharge clients when they lack service documentation or Face Sheet updates. This feature will be set by us behind the scenes, based on your preferences, per program.
Look for further news on these and other enhancements in upcoming months!
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Tip of the Month - Troubleshooting Site Access Issues
Did you know...
In December there was a significant multiple day outage on the part of Internet service provider Time Warner/Spectrum that impacted the ability of many of our users to access AWARDS. Because of how Internet traffic is structured and routed, the outage meant that for some users they could access a wide variety of websites, but could not reach AWARDS. Naturally many users reached out to us for assistance, but on our end everything looked great - all servers were up and running with no issues, and we could see users logged into their AWARDS databases and working. We could also access the sites ourselves with no trouble. The solution for impacted users was simply to wait until Time Warner/Spectrum resolved the issue and to reach out to them for information directly.
(Our favorite analogy in situations like this - you may have seen us use it before - is to think of the internet as a series of roads. There might be an accident on one road that's preventing you from getting there to AWARDS, but it's not closing all of the roads so you can still get to other destinations. The accident is not something that either you or I can do anything about; we have to wait till the highway patrol comes and cleans things up, in this case the highway patrol being the service providers that control that stretch of internet traffic.)
If you're ever unsure whether difficulty accessing a website (be it AWARDS or any other site you use regularly) is the result of that site being down or the result of Internet traffic issues or outages, a quick and easy way to check is to use an online resource such as http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/. On that site, enter the URL you're trying to reach into the available field, and then click or just me?
It'll give you a quick snapshot of the site's current health. If it shows as being down, you can then use that information to reach out to the site's owner for assistance.
Bonus Tip!
Other troubleshooting steps you can take if you ever have trouble accessing a specific website include:
trying from a mobile device on another network (if you can access from one but not another, the problem may be with the network/service provider)
trying from within a different browser
resetting your modem and router
resetting your browser settings
making sure that your computer's date/time settings are correct (if they're not, it may prevent you from accessing secure - https - websites)
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Check out the latest in Foothold news and recent entries from the Foothold blog!
Finding, Choosing, and Implementing an Electronic Record: A Video Series of One Agency's Journey
Recently, Foothold sat down with one of our Florida clients, Fellowship House, a psychosocial rehabilitation center for individuals who experience severe and persistent psychiatric disabilities, and captured the agency's story of how it found, chose, and implemented AWARDS. We are excited to announce the premiere of our video series "Finding, Choosing, and Implementing an Electronic Record: A Video Series of One Agency's Journey." Click to watch now!
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