Justin's Blog

 Archive for the ‘Oregon’ Category

It’s an age since I last blogged.  I hope you all had a tremendous thanksgiving, I know I did!  Lots of family and lots of good food, doesn’t get much better than that.

This is the start of a two week odysee for me as I visit with folks around the country seeing some of the amazing things that folks are doing with Therap and building tools that will truely change the world for people with developmental disabilities and the folks who support them.

Today I am in Portland, Oregon with Anna for a meeting to discuss bringing the Oregon ISP into Therap.  It’s going to be a great project that I think will benefit Therap users everywhere.

Lots more on this in the coming months.

:: Justin ::

I have been slacking a but recently on the blogging front.  One reason is a bit of a crazy travel schedule!

I spent Monday in Easter talking to the folks ag Linn County in Oregon as well as the State of Oregon Licensing Department, both of whom are doing some very cool things harnessing the power of Therap.

Then it was off up to Seattle (I finally got to drive the highway to Olympia, WA)

Tuesday I was meeting with another great group of people, this time in Bremerton, WA which meant I got to take the ferry to work.  Does it get any better than that?

I really liked Seattle, looking forward to an excuse to come back.

Enjoy the photos:

:: Justin ::

We are very excited about the number of Oregon agencies that we have using Therap.  Over the past few years, Anna and Allison have been up and down the highways or Oregon setting up and training folks.  

One of the significant impacts of this is that now, when surveyors from The DD Licensing Unit of the Office of Licensing and Quality of Care come out to do their surveys, more and more of the data and records that they need to look at are on Therap.  This means that surveyors need a log in into each provider making for lots of extra work for provider administrators and many, many accounts for the surveyors to remember.

Over the past few months, we’d been working on setting up an opt-in system so that the surveyors can log into one central “parent” account and from there will be able to access the data that they need to in order to prepare for and complete their surveys.

While change like this is always a little disconcerting (I still love the looks I get from potential customers when I suggest that they should be giving parents and guardians direct access to data) I think it is really part of the overall progression towards and accountable, transparent, and cost effective system that makes life better for everyone.

I can still remember that the part of instpections I liked least as a provider was sitting watching the surveyor read books.  How much less stressful would it be if they could do all that reading first and then when they were on site spend the time talking to staff and people receiving supports.  Well maybe Oregon is leading the way in that direction.

For more information on how this is all working, check out the links on our Oregon page.

This will also show how Providers using this method are complying with HIPAA by making sure that all access to their electronic Protected Health Information is tracked.

:: Justin ::

Our friends at Partnerships in Community Living in Salem, Oregon sent this over.

Take a look and as they say, vote early and vote often!

Hello everyone,

Many of you already know that we recently submitted a video to the Dell Mobility Challenge.  The idea of this challenge was to highlight the ways in which companies could use mobile technology to increase productivity.

We have now entered the “Public Voting” phase of the Dell Mobility Challenge.  This is our opportunity to win $50,000 worth of Dell products.  We need as many people as possible to vote for our video.  In return for voting you get entered into weekly drawings to win a dell laptop. (From Dell)

To vote go to the following link:

http://dell.promo.eprize.com/mobilitycontest/gallery?id=642

Click on “Get Started”, then “Register Now” if you have not yet registered.

Then you will need to navigate back to our video, it is in the “Large Enterprise” section and is the only Video.

Now you can rate the video in 5 different categories and also click on “Vote for this Entry”

You get one vote per day, so please use it wisely (aka vote for us everyday)

We need as many votes as we can get, so feel free to log in and vote for our video everyday between now and March 28th.
– 

Andrew Mason 

IT Manager
Partnerships In Community Living

Of course, if you have anything similarly innovative, we’d love to know.

:: Justin ::

On Friday I paid a flying visit to Oregon and along with Anna attended a meeting with a bunch of folks from  The State of Oregon and OTAC.

There were a number of things on the agenda, but primarily we talked about three things:

1. Developing the OTAC ISP forms within Therap – We will be working on this over the coming months
2. Helping agencies who use Therap (and those who don’t) collaborate in the ISP process
3. Working with Therap customers and State of Oregon licensing surveyors work together and share information.

All of these are very exciting for the whole developmental disability community in Oregon and we’re looking forward to many more discussions and moving things forward.

Look out for much more on all of these.

:: Justin ::

For photos out a plane window taken with a phone, I thought these were pretty good!

I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days with Anna in gorgeous Oregon this week.  The only downside was that we were so busy meeting people that I didn’t get to do much, if any, sightseeing.

I did though do a training for a group of state surveyors who are coming across Therap in more and more places.  they were very receptive to learning more about how Therap works and how they can better do their job working with our customers.  Remember, if you would ever like us to come out and do a training for your surveyors, just let me know.

A bunch of other meetings and it looks like things are going really well on the left coast.  Anna and Allison have done a tremendous job with a great group of providers.

Don’t forget the Oregon Conference is coming up soon. We should have the schedule ready next week.

:: Justin ::