Justin's Blog

 Archive for the ‘COIS’ Category

We will be holding a North Dakota User Group meeting at Enable in Bismark on Monday, May 24th at 10am.

This meeting will have a particular focus on cross-provider sharing (COIS) thanks to all the work the Bismark-Mandan providers did helping us set it up.

It's also a great opportunity to get all your questions answered by Sazzad, Shawon, and Tahseen

:: Justin ::

Do you support people who also receive services from other agencies?

If so, you could be communicating quickly, easily, and securely using Therap’s COIS (Cross Organizational Information Sharing) functionality.

It’s easy to set up (you can find full instructions here)

1. Your administrator (from their -adm) account should start an issue (using the “My Issues” or “Feedback” links) requesting to set up COIS and the agencies they would like to share with.
2. Identify the Individuals to be shared, request sharing (via the new links that will appear on the Admin tab following step 1)
3. Turn on Cross Provider SComm for those staff that you would like to be able to communicate with the other agencies

That’s it!

Any Questions?  Call us!

:: Justin ::

As I travel around the country (and for that matter, Canada) I am often asked what it is that makes Therap better than other systems that are out there or why an agency or state shouldn’t just build their own system.

The answer to the second question is easy.  Just talk to anyone who has done it.  It is very hard to keep a system up to date with current technology and regulations.  You also have to contend with meeting all the HIPAA/ARRA/HITECH security and disclosure regulations, not to mention electronic signatures.  Finally, what do you do when your programmer leaves?  On the other hand you could have access to Therap’s entire team of programmers, tester, designers, graphic artists, and support staff.  Not that hard a choice really, and we haven’t even talked about cost.

When it comes to comparing our system to other systems that are out there, the biggest difference is usually that our system actually addresses real word issues and functionality.  That is because we are based on collecting data at the point of service and data entry is done by the person collecting the data.  As I often say, everything that your agency does is based on the interaction between one of your staff and a person with disabilities.  If that staff member writes something on a piece of paper and gives the paper to someone else to enter data into a computer you are losing time, money, accuracy, and effectiveness.

There are of course many other reasons why we are the national leader in documentation and communication services for the Developmental Disability community.  These include:

• In 2003 we saw the future as being cloud based computing, and we continue to be at the forefront of technology – look out for location aware mobile applications in the not too distant future.
• We have the best support out there and it is available to your whole agency.
• We give you the ability to involve the person’s whole circle of support including families and self advocates by giving direct, secure access to data.
• Rapid iteration and development to meet an ever changing regulatory and business environment.
• Electronic MARs, live drug database, direct electronic Medicaid billing, Health Information Exchange integration, X12n and HL7 functionality and so much more.
• Being mandated for use in three states (with more to come) we have direct access to upcoming federal issues and facilitate communication between states and providers.
• With more than 40,000 users in over 40 states and provinces we have worked in almost every regulatory environment and support structure out there.
• With local staff, user groups, conference, and state specific forms and process we can assure local compliance.
• People actually like using Therap (Do you love your software?  If not, you should try us!) 

These and many more reasons have been bringing people to Therap in ever increasing numbers over the years, but this weekend will see the game change completely.

This weekend we are releasing Therap 8.10 which will include (along with a number of other updates) Phase One of what we are calling COIS: Cross Organizational Information Sharing.

This will give you the ability to safely, securely, and with complete control share Protected Health Information between multiple agencies supporting the same person.  You will have complete control over which staff at your agency are allowed to share information with other providers and they will be able to decide who can receive it.  Therap will ensure that only staff working with the same individual can communicate.

This is something that we have been working on since the dawn of Therap and have actually gone through a number of trial implementations before reaching this point.  There are a number of huge obstacles to overcome in terms of a design that will meet HIPAA, employment law, and privacy requirements and we believe that we have nailed it.

Imagine a world where you can communicate and share data across all the settings that support a person seamlessly.

That is why you should choose Therap.  If you already have, congratulations on backing the winner.

:: Justin ::

if you, like me are really excited about being able to communicate with other agencies that support the same people as you, here’s a quick look at how you’ll do it:

Setting Up COIS:

To share information regarding an individual, the
Provider Administrator of an agency will at first need to contact
Therap, requesting Cross Organization Information Sharing (COIS) to be
enabled for their agency. The Provider Administrator would also need to
send the names of the Providers/Agencies they would like to share
information with. Therap will then enable COIS for the agency
accordingly.  This should be done by a Provider Administrator (from their -adm) account sending in a request from “My Issues”

To share information regarding a particular individual, the Provider
Administrator will need to follow the steps below:

1) Click on the ‘Share Individual’ link available in the Cross
Provider Options area of your FirstPage/Dashboard.

2) On the ‘Request Individual Sharing’ page, type in the name of the
individual for whom you wish to share information and the name of the
Provider/Agency he/she is enrolled in. A dropdown menu will
automatically appear with Individual names and Provider/Agency names
that you had requested to share information with.

Note: You will only be able to select from the Provider names that you had requested Therap to add for Cross Organization Information Sharing.

3) Click on the ‘Send Request to Therap’ button, to send in your
request.

Note: The Provider Administrator from the particular agency you wish to share information with, is also required to go through these steps and send Therap a request to enable information sharing for the particular Individual.

Sharing Information:

Users who have the ‘Cross Provider SComm’ option enabled,
will be able to share information specific to an individual, with users
in another agency. Provider Administrators can enable this option for a
user from their ‘User Profile’.

Once this option is enabled, users with find a fourth SComm message
type, named ‘Cross Provider’ which will allow users to send SComm
messages with information regarding a particular individual.

Clicking on the ‘Cross Provider’ option, will take you to the Compose
page, from where you can select the desired recipient and send the
Individual specific information by clicking on the ‘Send Message’
button.

Note The Recipient List will display only the names of the users in the other agency, who have ‘Cross Provider SComm’ option enabled.

You will then receive a success message displaying the names of the
recipients.

Any questions, just let me know.

Look for more as the week goes by.

:: Justin ::

If everything goes according to plan (and that can be a fairly big “if”) we will see the latest in our series of iterative releases coming out this weekend (April 4th).

There are significantly exciting things in this release.  None more so than the introduction of phase 1 of COIS (Cross Organizational Information Sharing).  This means that in a week or so, your staff (those ones that you choose) will be able to Individual Care SComms to staff at other agencies (the staff that they choose who also support the same individual).

This is a huge step forward for Therap, the developmental disability community and electronic health information.  I’ll be talking much more about it in the days ahead.

You’ll see a bunch of attendance and billing enhancements as we move towards the complete billing solution that ensures nothing that you claim for can be rejected.

We have some cool enhancements to Custom Forms which make each one have the ability to appear like its own module.

More enhancements to ISP Plans (especially at the end of year stage).

and a few more bits and bobs that you will find on the Release Notes when they come out later this week.

:: Justin ::

Well, the conference is now over (and I hope to have a post reflecting on all the amazing things that went on, but I am still catching up!) and in fact we were back in Fishkill today debriefing.

One of the coolest things looking back is how right we were with our big ideas, as confirmed by the conference attendees.

COIS (Cross Provider Information Sharing) is a concept that we have been working with and thinking about since Therap started, and infact we have even implemented versions of it.  The problem up to now has been that although it worked technically, the solutions we had come up with did not work within the realities of employees from multiple agencies working on the same document and communicating directly with each other.

One example I often use is where an individual is hurt at day program and an incident report is generated.  Do they want to share that incident report with the residential agency?  (probably yes), as soon as it is written by a DSP (probably no), can both agencies comment directly on the same report (technically we could make it happen, but you don’t want it to).  I could go on for paragraphs with questions which either have an answer of “No Way!” or “It depends” and computers in general are not that good at “it depends”.

In this latest version of COIS we believe that we have most of the answers and we have an implementation path that will get us the rest of them safely as me move along.

Probably the biggest hurdle is actually identifying that the records of one individual in two providers are about the same person.  How do you do this when you can’t ask the other for a list of their individuals to pick from and you can’t give them a list of yours (both would be HIPAA violations and probably not good business practice).  We have a wonderful and elegant solution to this that we showed in Fishkill.

Once that link is there each agency can now choose which of their staff are allowed to send SComms over that link.  So if I have been given permission by my Provider Admin, I can send and receive care SComms about individuals in my caseload to users at the other agency who have access to the same individual and have been given permission to do so by their Provider Admin.

Phase one of the implementation will involve setting up the link and sending SComms.  After that we will start being able to attach Therap forms.

Having spoken to so many users about this and shown then a pre-alpha version, I am more excited than ever and think this will be a real game changer.

:: Justin ::