FootNotes - January 2019







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In this issue:

User's Conference - Save the Date!
FootholdConnect Events
Letter from the CEO
Highlights from the Project Pipeline
Important Training Update
What's New in AWARDS
Tip of the Month - Closing AWARDS Accounts for Former Employees

User's Conference - Save the Date!

The 12th Annual Foothold User's Conference will take place on Thursday, July 11, 2019 in New York City. Tickets will be available starting this month.  For more information and highlights of last year's conference, click here.  If you have any questions about the User's Conference, please email [email protected].

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FootholdConnect Events

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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Letter from the CEO

Hello Foothold Customers,

The past year has been a very exciting period of growth here at Foothold Technology! We saw many new features and enhancements added to AWARDS, and our staff played active roles in the national conversations happening around electronic health records, interoperability, as well as the opioid crisis. And perhaps most exciting, we joined forces with Alpine Software Group.

New Partnership

Let's start with the biggest change first. In our never-ending quest to offer our clients more functionality, better service and a more powerful community in which to work, around this time last year we started looking for a capital partner. We think of private equity and investment banking, probably, in much the same way you do. We don't trust their motives, we don't believe the things they say, and we don't think that kind of aggressive profit-seeking belongs in our space. At the same time, we needed to grow faster, access resources to develop AWARDS faster and build a larger national community of like-minded companies. In our search, we found Alpine Software Group (ASG) and Exym.

ASG is a group of leading software businesses across multiple industries and across the U.S. The businesses within ASG operate independently, but can collaborate with each other to share best practices. Moreover, unlike every other investment company we met, ASG really did seem to have their priorities straight. They understood the culture of the industry we're in, and they know that the trust we've developed with all of you is sacrosanct. This cultural alignment was the most important criteria for us and only ASG exhibited the traits we were looking for. 

We were also drawn to ASG because they owned Exym, the leading Mental Health EHR provider in California, and were fully committed to additional investments in Human Services software. And as of October, we now have another partner, KaleidaCare, the country's leading case management software for foster care agencies.

So what does this partnership mean for you?

First and foremost, as we said a few months ago, Foothold is still Foothold. We'll continue to support you, we'll continue to invest heavily in AWARDS, and we'll continue to improve our own business along the way. What it means to be part of the Foothold family - your dedicated Customer Success representative, the Users' Conference, ongoing software upgrades, etc… - is not changing.

What does change is our ability to improve your AWARDS experience. We now have access to industry leaders across three businesses, rather than one. We now have expertise across 44 states, rather than 26. We now have 120 employees committed to you, rather than 60.

We're still exploring the best way to enhance each of our products. Perhaps that's a common tool, or set of tools, that connects to each platform. Or maybe it's building integrations across the three products so that each of our agencies can benefit from each product. These aren't simple questions, but the answers are all good ones, and we'll keep you informed as we make progress.

While we're incredibly excited about the future, we would not be in this position in the first place without your commitment and trust - in many cases for well over a decade. Thank you sincerely for your partnership as we embark on this journey together.

New AWARDS Functionality

During 2018, many modules were transitioned to the new look and feel and the new Menu Fly-outs feature was added throughout the database. We worked on FormBuilder auto scheduling and default form inclusions, and added External Notification options for Incidents, Help Desk, and more. The new Restricted Census feature improved permissions granularity and offered new auditor-level access. BillingBuilder gained many new features including a connection with the Change Health Clearinghouse, and our Interoperability Center expanded with new connections and increased bi-directionality options. We kept up with many regulatory requirements, including the federal Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) guidelines, and also continued to guide our customers in their use of federally certified software (see our recently released training film on the AWARDS Certified Edition). As always, our technical team worked hard to keep our servers and backup facilities in tip-top shape, ensuring the security of your data, including a new initiative to assess compliance with and maintain NIST Security Standards.

Community Updates

As many of you shared your stories of success over this past year, we grabbed the microphone to amplify those stories with the broader human services sector. We shared snippets on our blog, like these stories about the innovative ways Foothold customers in Pennsylvania and Illinois prepared for AWARDS implementation, how agencies like Center for Humanistic Change of New Jersey are providing creative supported employment opportunities, and shared examples of how many of you are leveraging data to mitigate homelessness in your communities. We can't forget to mention our Impact Prize winners, announced at our annual Users Conference. We also partnered with customers supporting individuals experiencing homelessness to help raise awareness through our ongoing Voices of Supportive Housing campaign (#VoicesofSH), and we joined many of you to celebrate Direct Support Professionals (DSPs) during DSP Appreciation Week.

Also in 2018, our Senior Adviser - David Bucciferro - was busy representing all of you in national conversations around EHR usability, security, interoperability, and more, as a newly elected member of the Executive Committee of the Electronic Health Record Association (EHRA), and as a member of the National Opioid Task Force. You can read more about EHRA efforts and The Opioid Task Force congressional briefing in this blog. We know the work you are doing is vital, we know the challenges you face are real and we appreciate your partnership and the confidence you have in our team.

2019

Priority projects for AWARDS in 2019 will focus on integration with a comprehensive eMAR tool, Electronic Visit Verification, two-factor authentication, enhanced e-signatures functionality in additional locations, and more look and feel transitions in critical modules and features like Medications, Entitlements, and Face Sheet. ReportBuilders will be enhanced to allow for including all clients on the roster, thereby offering true reporting on absence of data. And attendance and services data will become jointly reportable. Also, in response to the increasing need for deeper reporting - a result of the growth of Value Based Payments and Care Coordination - we are thrilled to announce our upcoming integration with Sisense, an industry leader in Business Intelligence reporting. 

We can't wait to share all of these new and exciting features with you in the coming year! And as we begin 2019, our team is grateful for the impact you are creating in your communities and poised to share more of your stories in the coming year. As always, I welcome feedback from all of you as we move through this new and exciting year together. Hope to see you at our annual User's Conference this year - hold the date of July 11th and stay tuned for more details!

Sincerely,

Marlowe Greenberg, CEO

Highlights from the Project Pipeline

Progress Notes - New Workflow Enhancement

To bring the Progress Notes feature in line with the rest of AWARDS, we will be making a modification in February to the saving feature. Currently in AWARDS, when a user saves a progress note, they are taken back to the Progress Notes Index page. With the February enhancement, the action of saving a progress note will bring the user to a confirmation page of the actual note. If electronic signatures are enabled for progress notes, the users will then be able to immediately sign notes from that screen. There will be a new Note Index button at the bottom of the page, which will allow the user to easily navigate back to the client's Progress Notes Index. The Note Index button will not display on printed notes.

New Incidents Permission

We are excited to announce that with the February enhancements, there will be a new Incidents Module related permission. This permission will be called Restrict Incident View and will prevent the assigned user from seeing any detail in the incident record aside from the Incident # and the comments written by that particular user. The Incidents Index will be similarly redacted, and users with this permission will not be able to access the Incidents ReportBuilder. 

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Important Training Update

In an effort to help you stay up to date with the latest in AWARDS, for any additional training your agency purchases going forward, your agency will no longer need to pay for your Foothold trainer's travel and lodging expenses. We want your agency to make full use of our training team, and don't want these expenses to get in the way. Please email your SPM or the training team at [email protected] to learn more.

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What's New in AWARDS

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 reach out to the Help Desk. We hope these enhancements improve the way you use AWARDS and provide services!

BillingBuilder - Unpost Worksheet Button Available for All Users

Within posted remittance worksheets, users will now see an UNPOST WORKSHEET button at the bottom of the page, so a request no longer needs to be sent to the Help Desk for this action to happen.

When the new unpost button is clicked, the following will happen:

  All Payments and Adjustments posted within this worksheet will be removed/deleted from AWARDS.

  Invoices included in this remittance worksheet will have their balance restored to their previous balance prior to the worksheet being posted.

  All future records (Re-bill and Remainders Assigned) will be removed/deleted from the Future Billings report, ONLY if they are present in the Future Billings report when the remittance worksheet is unposted. If future records (Re-bill and Remainders Assigned) from the original worksheet posting have already been used to generate re-bill invoices or COB invoices, then you must delete the duplicate future records that will be created when this worksheet is re-posted to prevent the creation of duplicate invoices.

The information above will also be shown within a warning/confirmation pop-up when unposting a remittance worksheet, so the user can confirm the unposting.

FormBuilder - Charting Event Schedule - New Option

When scheduling a FormBuilder form as a charting event, a new Schedule Based On option has been added to the Ongoing Schedule category that allows users to schedule the next charting event based on the client's admission date to the program.

Permissions - New Charting Timetable Permissions

Two new optional data entry/access permissions have been created to provide more granularity around who can enter done for and delete charting events:

  Restrict Charting Event Deletion - Users with this permission will not be able to delete existing charting timetable events; the Delete? checkbox will not display. Users with this permission will still be able to add new charting events.

  Restrict Charting Event Due Date Data Entry - Users with this permission will not be able to edit existing charting timetable event due dates. Users with this permission will still be able to add new charting events.  (Users with this permission can also still enter/edit due due dates for service plans (under Services - Individual > Service Plans).

These are optional permissions that are turned on by request, and are not automatically available in all databases. Contact the Help Desk if you are interested in having them made available in your AWARDS database.

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Tip of the Month - Closing AWARDS Accounts for Former Employees

When an employee leaves an agency, it can be a difficult process. Regardless of the circumstances, it's important to protect your agency from potential vulnerability and risk. Even if the employee has no malicious intentions, leaving old accounts open can lead to significant gaps in security. Closing former employee AWARDS accounts is one sure-fire way to avoid that.

When an employee leaves, close that person's AWARDS account immediately by entering a Payroll Group End Date on his or her Staff Information record, located in the Human Resources module. If that's not possible (for instance, if the person responsible for terminating AWARDS accounts is out of the office), there are a few other methods to ensure former employees cannot access AWARDS with their credentials:

  Reset their password - This can be done by the employee’s supervisor or someone at your agency who has access to the Password Reset feature, located under System Setup > Login Maintenance. We recommend using a random password generator to create a strong password they can't guess.

  Block their access - The Block Login Access feature is used to immediately prevent a user with an existing AWARDS login from accessing the system, by removing his or her password. Once blocked, a user can only access the system again if another user with the proper authority, such as a supervisor or system administrator resets the blocked individual's password.

  Post-date their Payroll Group End Date - If you know ahead of time that an employee will be leaving the agency on a certain date, you can enter a future group end date on their Staff Information record. Once that date arrives, their login will automatically be de-activated and they won't be able to access AWARDS.

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