It was great to end our Expo by announcing this year's Impact Prize winners from Community Counseling Center of Southern Nevada, the NJDD Foothold Users Group and Goodwill Industries. A brief summary of each winner's nomination form can be found below. Looking forward to hearing about the great things you do with AWARDS in 2017!

Michelle Velardo (Community Counseling Center of Southern Nevada)

Michelle championed the use of AWARDS and has fully embraced it​​. She worked with Foothold to build the TEDS form for Nevada billing.

NJDD Foothold Users Group (Michele Meyer, Courtney Fichera, Allison Sanchez, Jessica Goldsmith-Barzilay)

The group brought together 18 New Jersey agencies to create a cross-agency implementation team. They partnered with Foothold to get the software to meet the demanding needs of the NJDD world​. As a result of their work together and with Foothold, they have been able to join early pilot groups, test service delivery and billing.

Renny Villani (Goodwill Industries)

​Renny championed the use of AWARDS for OPWDD functionality, using FormBuilder to create a SEMP plan that would be Medicaid compliant and auditable by the NYS OMIG​. He also built powerful queries that allow program managers to quickly run reports and obtain summaries and detailed information.

Service Referrals and Referral Sources

The Service Referrals feature is being revamped to make data entry easier and reporting more robust. A new Service Referrals ReportBuilder is being planned as well.

To make it easier to manage the agencies that users are being referred to or referred from, a new Referral Agency feature under System Setup will allow administrative users to add, edit, and remove referral sources and contacts at those referral agencies. This will make it easier to ensure you always have an accurate list of referral agencies without unnecessary duplication. Within this feature you will be able to specify which agencies can be used as referral sources under Intake/Admission and which agencies can be used as outgoing referrals in the Service Referrals feature. Agencies can be listed as Inactive to quickly remove them from the list, and notes can be added to provide details about particular agencies. A new Referral Agency ReportBuilder will accompany this feature to enable users to report out on the referral agencies and their contacts.

Finally, entering a Referral Source will become easier by simply presenting users with a drop-down of the agencies that have been designated in the Referral Agency feature. This should make data entry faster and prevent duplicate agencies from being added.  

Providers

We are happy to announce that we will be creating a brand new Providers feature to replace the existing functionality found in the Medical module. The current Support Services Contacts feature is not dynamic, resulting in users needing to enter the same provider multiple times across different client records. This new feature will work with a new agency-wide Providers list, which will then be available for selection when entering client-level providers data. This will not only ease data entry and result in cleaner data, but with the addition of new related ReportBuilders, will allow for agency-wide reporting on shared providers. We anticipate deploying this new feature sometime this Fall.

E-Signatures Configuration

After gathering helpful feedback from our users, we have begun building a new interface for configuring e-signature rules. This feature will be in the new design and will allow for more flexibility in determining which staff roles have the ability to sign documents. Additionally, administrators will have the option to determine an order for the signatures, and we intend to provide options for alerting staff when they are due to sign a document. New ReportBuilders - displaying who is due to sign and has already signed which documents - will be available as well. These features will first be available for Progress Notes e-signatures this Fall, and moving forward we will deploy them to other existing e-signatures locations, followed by expansion into new locations.   

New Design Transitions

We have been hard at work transitioning many areas of AWARDS to the new design seen on the Home Screen and Employers. So it is with great excitement that we announce that four features will be transitioned to the new design later this summer - Diet Information, Group Types, Lab Locations, and Medical Information. Keep your eyes open for more announcements about other features making the transition during the remainder of the year. 

Foothold is always looking for ways to make it easier for providers to focus on their mission to improve outcomes and quality of life for those they serve. We're excited to announce that E-Labs is now out of beta and available to any agency using AWARDS.  In case you're not familiar with E-Labs in AWARDS, here's some information to get you started...

Foothold Technology has partnered with Change Healthcare (formerly Emdeon) to bring electronic lab order functionality into AWARDS, which gives users a direct connection with Quest, LabCorp and hundreds of other labs. E-Labs in AWARDS is a bi-directional interoperability connection that syncs consumer data into the electronic ordering system and then syncs order and result information back into AWARDS including the labs' requisition form and final results. The ordering system allows for the printing of specimen labels with supported printers and triggers an alert when results are available. The functionality will enable users to do the following:

• Send orders electronically and print specimen labels in the Laboratory Orders feature
• Receive result alerts by email
• View detailed results in the AWARDS Messages module
• Work with results as structured data and view supporting result documentation in the Diagnostic Test Information feature
• Use the FormBuilder and ReportBuilders to work with lab order and diagnostic test data in a flexible and dynamic way

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:  July 6, 2016

BillingBuilder - Multiple Procedures for a Single Authorization

When adding insurance authorizations in the Entitlements module in AWARDS, users can now select multiple procedures to be associated with a single insurance authorization. All procedures selected for a single authorization will be used to count down the authorization as services are documented. Additionally, the ordering of fields in the insurance authorization section of the page in both data entry and report modes has been changed to streamline the data entry process.

Central Intake and FormBuilder

For multi-divisional agencies, FormBuilder forms which are completed in Central Intake projects will now be copied over to the destination project when using the "Make Placement" feature on the Face Sheet.  This feature works for forms located at Intake/Admission or the Face Sheet.  Keep in mind that a form must be turned on in both projects for it to be copied in this way.

Diagnoses - Addition of Program Specific Ordering in Place of the Use for Billing Check Box

A new option labeled {Program Name} Order Level has been added to DSM-5 and DSM-IV Axes I, II, III diagnoses in place of the Use for Billing check box. The new Order Level option will allow programs to assign Primary, Secondary and Tertiary status to each diagnosis on a program by program basis.  For a client who is in multiple programs, a different diagnosis can be selected as Primary for each program s/he is in. The Program Name in the field name will reflect the program selected before accessing Diagnosis data entry,

The diagnoses previously marked to be used for billing will now be identified as Primary Diagnoses.  AWARDS will continue to use the oldest of all Primary diagnoses entered across all of a client's programs to be consistent with the former Use for Billing functionality.  You can increase control over which diagnosis gets pulled into the invoices for a particular billing type by refining the options listed in the valid diagnosis field on the Edit Billing Types page.  The path to this page is: BillingBuilder > Configure Billing Types > select the Payer and click View Billing Types > select the Billing Type and click Edit Billing Type > enter the first two characters of the diagnosis category in the Valid Diagnoses DSM Heading field.

Did you know that you can work with information for clients who have been discharged?  In this tip we'll review some useful ways in which you can take advantage of the Roster Archives tool available on most module menu pages for just this purpose.  

We'll also provide some examples of where data entry for discharged clients can easily be done without using Roster Archives.

Keep in mind that these are just a few examples of how you can document/view information for clients after they have been discharged. Even if clients are gone, this does not mean their data is as well!

Progress Notes

Roster Archives can be useful for writing progress notes for discharged clients. For example, if client Matilda Wormwood was discharged before you had a chance to write a progress note for her, you could do so by checking the Roster Archives check box on the Services Module menu page:

You could then go into the Progress Notes feature, select Matilda from the list of Former Consumers, and click CONTINUE to access her progress note index.  From there you have two options for data entry:

1.  If you add a note and  select a date that is on or before the date of discharge, the note will reflect a service delivered while Matilda was in the program.

2.  If you add a note and  select a date that is after Matilda's discharge date, the note will automatically be categorized as a "Post-Discharge Follow-Up Note," as illustrated below:

BONUS TIP!  If you find that you are frequently writing Post Discharge Follow-Up Notes, there is a program-based preference called "Show Follow Up Notes Button." This allows selected programs to write Post Discharge Follow-Up Notes for former clients from within the Discharge module as shown here:

If you're interesting in having this option turned on, please contact your Foothold Client Services representative or the Help Desk.

Entitlements

Editing Entitlements records for discharged clients is done in a similar manner. In the Entitlements module, after selecting Roster Archives, click Certified Entitlements, choose the former client, and then click CONTINUE to access the client's entitlement records. You can then select the record to be edited and make any necessary changes. Please note, only users with the "Entitlements Deletion" permission will be able to delete entitlement records.

Group Notes

In AWARDS, you can also write Group Notes for discharged clients but for these, you will not need to use the Roster Archives check box.  Let's say client Vanilla Bean was discharged on 2/16/16 but you have yet to write a group note for last week's Anger Management group that Vanilla attended. In this case you would simply create a new note for the group and use the Note Date drop-down to backdate accordingly:

Compare that view to another view that has the date of 2/17/16, one day after Vanilla has been discharged:

AWARDS recognized that Vanilla has been discharged and therefore has taken her off the Group Attendance list for this group.

Calendar

In addition, the Calendar is an excellent place to view information of discharged clients, especially if you'd like to remove certain future appointments. If you discharge a client that has a future medical appointment or job interview scheduled on a date after their discharge date, these events will not automatically be removed from the Calendar; instead, to remove these events navigate to the Calendar, select "Consumer" View, a program for Consumer Scope, and "All Former Consumers" in Consumer Section, as shown here:

Once "Former Consumers" is selected, you can manipulate the date range for the Calendar to display future dates and it will show whether any discharged clients have upcoming events during that timeframe. If you want to view one particular discharged client's schedule, they will be listed once you've selected "Former Consumers" from the Consumer Selection list:

After you've made your selection, the future events that have been scheduled in the specified time frame will appear on the calendar.

Once you've located the appointments you want to remove, you can easily delete them by clicking the appointment on the Calendar.  For instance, if you're deleting a Job Interview, click on it on the Calendar, check the Remove? check box, and then hit CONTINUE.

And if you are deleting  a Medical Appointment, click on it within the Calendar and then click the red X icon: