Certified Trainers Blog

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Whew, what a busy and exciting couple of months!! Rainbow of Challenges has been growing and expanding a little more everyday. We have opened two new office buildings and have been in the process of renovating several of our other sites. It has also been announced that ROC will be opening a new children’s residential facility in Arkadelphia, AR. We will soon be able to serve even more people who have developmental disabilities.

All of these changes means ALOT more Therap. We are now adding two more of our day programs to Therap, which has kept me and those who assist me with Therap (Amber, Chika, Shelby, Farrah, Cathy, and Dot, amazing group) extremely busy. The new roll-out along with new programs we are implementing on Therap has been a huge undertaking, but we know how much better and easier it will be once we are finished with the initial phase. I am not sure one ever thinks about the time they spend tracking down information until they don’t have to do it anymore.

The changes that we are going through may seem to overwhelm us at times, but it seems a small thing compared to the world that this organization opens up to staff and clients alike. The difference that this organizatin has made in my, just one staff’s, life is amazing and humbling. It was never that I didn’t care, it was that I didn’t know. The people that I am fortunate enough to serve have taught me lessons about selflessness, unconditional love, perserverance, and enjoying life that I could not even have comprehended until I met them. They teach me lessons in all of these things daily by role modeling them. Sometimes we get so caught up in thinking about the things that we need to teach the people we serve in order for them to be independent, we forget to learn. It is my honest hope that I never lose that focus. When I came to work at ROC, my life, along with my family’s, was changed from that day forward. So I thank the individuals that I work for, from the bottom of my heart, for opening up this whole new world to me.

If you live in the Mid-West, be sure to check out the Regional Conference coming May 22-23 to Kansas City. Or if you just need to ‘get away’, come to Kansas City and enjoy some great BBQ at one of our famous joints, then head to the Plaza for some shopping fun. While in town, be sure to hit a few of the sessions at the conference. A co-worker and I will be presenting a session on tracking individual’s time in the Attendance Module, and then how we turn that into a billable document with Missouri’s CIMOR billing system. We have used this system of time tracking for almost two years now and it has been beneficial to maintain attendance information in Therap’s HIPAA compliant system.

Happy Monday to all and hope to see you in Kansas City next month!

My big news of the month includes a major job change.  I moved from being the statewide training coordinator at our state DDSD and am now the Director of a Family Living Agency called At Home Advocacy.  The best part of this change is that I now get daily interaction with the individuals we support.  Working at the state level, I didn’t get to see or work with individuals very often.

My new agency uses Therap for a number of things at the administrative level: e-CHAT, some custom forms, medication history, GER, etc…  I am excited about the possibility of getting our family living providers using the system directly.  Many of them have internet in the home but not all so there are some barriers.  We are everywhere with how people handle their daily progress notes – some handwrite them, some type them, some use our electronic form – some hand deliver them to the office, some fax them, some scan them and email them.

I’m hoping we can start using T-logs for the daily progress note.  How wonderful will that be when our family providers no longer have to deliver paper to the office (via car, fax or other)!  Now the road ahead of me includes convincing them why this is a benefit to them and teaching everyone how to use the system.  Exciting days ahead…

I sat in on Kim (Champney’s) monthly Therap Brown Bag lunch today. The subject was GER’s. Talk about confusion. Let’s take a situation where a client falls down but is not injured. Keeping track of  falls is important in our agency. To record this event, you have to select one of 6 choices in the GER screen:

OK:  the client wasn’t injured, so it wasn’t an Injury.  It wasn’t a Medication Error. It wasn’t a Restraint Related to Behavior, or Restraint Other  (why do we need to distinguish these?), it wasn’t Death (why does that warrant it’s own button?), so it must be Other.  So we pick Other  and in the required description box we type “fall”, or “Fall” or “client fell down”, or something to that effect.  Oh, dear that won’t work for tracking falls – due to inconsistent labeling  we won’t be able to pull out all the falls from the GER report.  Back to the drawing board.

This time select the Injury button (even though there was no injury), and again we have to select “Other” as the Event Type – so what do we put in the required description box?  Oh I see, I have to type in “No injury.”

I feel like I’m in the twilight zone.

Therap – you can do better than this…..

Hello everyone! Hope your Monday has started off good.

At the National Conference last month I was in a session where a developer mentioned that if a user hits the Approve button without submitting, the submit date is entered as the approval date. This made perfect sense to me.

So, when I got a call saying that users did not receive an email notification about an important GER, I wondered what happened. At first I thought that the email may have had a problem, but that was not the case. What I discovered was the following:

• Most Notifications in our system have been setup to notify upon Submit
• If Submit is bypassed, and the user Approves directly, notification is not sent

Has anyone had this happen? I would rather not send notifications on both Submit and Approve unless it is absolutely necessary. I guess I foolishly assumed that if the Submit date is entered, that a Submit Notification would be generated as well. Just one of those things that make you go hmmmm…

The Spring fever has hit (at least Nebraska, anyway)!

We had a wonderful weekend with temps in the 70′s to low 80′s and lots of sunshine.  This has meant a lot of work for me at home, since we have had remodeling going on since Christmas. The kitchen is now almost done, the new carpet is in the rest of the house, and I am ready to start building my garden boxes next weekend (after getting some free wood yesterday). Already found a couple volunteer lettuce plants that are about ready to start cutting.

The Therap work at Mosaic is now getting into full swing as well with the lovely weather. We have our Phase 1 early roll outs beginning, along with remainder of Nebraska Phase 1 modules. By the middle of June, we will have about 22 agencies live on Therap, using T-Logs, GERs, IDFs and SComms.

 In the last month alone, our 1200+ users logged into Therap almost 25,000 times! We are growing our Therap use by leaps and bounds.

Spring has definitely sprung!

Call them what you will; group home managers, direct support  supervisors, middle management, site supervisors or team leaders.  The list goes on. You know who you are. You  spend hours tweaking, mulling and updating employee schedules.

All supervisors must schedule their employees to maintain  coverage, but I would challenge anyone OUTSIDE the field to master a typical  group home schedule!

As I sit each month proofing, creating or mulling over a schedule,  Carl gently shakes his head and says “there must be an easier way.”  After what seems like a bazillion software  products previewed, I still can’t find a better way.

It has been about a year since I gave the Therap Module a whirl  and I will try again.  Just in case, in
the spirit of networking, I wonder what you are all doing out there?   I would love to see some templates of what
others are doing, as well as some of your standard operating procedures.  So send me your thoughts!

http://www.therapservices.net/trainers/contact/

Back to schedules

Cheryl

Every year I put together a team for the Polar Plunge in Green Bay.  The jump takes place next weekend (hopefully the weather stays warm but the forecast is not looking good) and we usually have one of the larger teams and raise over $5,000 for a great cause.  This one event raises over $100,000 every year for Special Olympics in Wisconsin.  This year the theme is Be a Below Zero Hero.  Even though the theme states that we are the hero I don’t think that jumping into ice cold water for a few seconds makes us the hero.  I think the true hero’s are those Special Olympics athletes doing things that so many people have told them they cannot do their whole life.  It is a privilege and an honor to raise money for this great event that brings happiness to those we serve.  If you would like more information about the event or to donate follow the link below.  You can also view the video from last year below (I am the one doing a belly flop!)
Click Here if you would like to donate.

It has started out as a crazy week with being gone all last week to the National Conference in New Jersey. It was a great week, I learned a lot and met a lot of great people. I always enjoy it when I meet another dog enthusiast (especially someone with a Bernese Mountain Dog!) I only wish I had enough fore thought to have stayed longer and gone to the Westminster Dog show. I knew people that were there and it would have been a great experience. Maybe next year!.
I not only learned a lot at the Conference but now have someone else in the agency that realizes the benefits of Therap and the things that we are not utilizing to their fullest, this of course means a lot of work ahead for me because now our implementation is going to move forward at a very rapid pace. I may be looking to some of you for information as we do this as to what works and what doesn’t.

The evening in New York city was great, it was a first for me. I discovered there is a lot to see and do and not enough time to do it all. Next trip i want to go to Ground Zero, take in a show and many other things, guess I will have to plan leave in conjunction with the conference.

Today we had a Risk Management Committee meeting and we are looking for some input from other agencies. What do you do as far as procedure/protocol for allowing someone who has a documented seizure disorder to go swimming with staff supports? Do you allow them to swim, do they have to wear a flotation device, does the guardian and/or parent sign off on it, just what parameters are in place if any?. Do you have a written protocol or procedure that you would be willing to share? If you do you can e-mail it directly to me at kristined@fra-alaska.net. Thank you for any input you can share on this topic. I am finding that this is something that a lot of agencies have not really looked at and have just allowed clients to swim. We are looking at the Risk of all our operations very closely and how it can impact our services.

There is so much to talk about regarding last weeks conference! First of all…another blogger wrote about all the eating! Totally true! Breakfast was just about over and voila! Delicious snacks graced the coffee table!! I, too, probably gained 10 pounds!!!

Two other things worth mentioning…I have two small kids (3 yrs and 10 months) and it was wonderful to be able to sleep in the hotel and get uninterrupted sleep!! That was fabulous and I most certainly did not tell my husband! Kind of felt a bit guilty!!

The other thing was being able to leisurely stroll through Target! I have not been able to do that without kids in 3 years!!! So much fun….I know….It’s the little things!!! Haha!!!

Anyway…I also learned a lot during those three days! Event summaries was very interesting to me. It is a simple little thing but something in which I forgot about. These summaries will surely help gather behavior info.

I also avoided the pivot table session! I start to glaze over when I hear the words, “pivot tables”!!! However, Brent told us that he also had difficultly with those until he was taught by Allison. Maybe I gather up courage and take another go at it!!

We also spent a lot of time going over the training component. This will be our agencies next thing to do. Looking forward to getting that set up and will keep everyone posted as to our progress!

Anyway…it was a great conference and am already looking forward to next year!
Deanna