Therap's Development of Data Driven Outcomes (DDO) E-solution for Evaluating Personal Outcomes

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Jan 04, 2021, 13:00 ET

WATERBURY, Conn., Jan. 4, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- The 1983 Section 1915(c) of the Social Security Act established Home and Community Based Services (HCBS) Waivers as a platform for person-centered planning and supports that requires an annual service plan for HCBS services, verifiable use of the previous years' service plan for each new annual service plan, and most importantly the requirement that habilitation services are required to assist in acquiring, retaining, and improving the skills to reside in home and community-based settings.

Processing eligibility and service plans for each individual is a daunting task. However, the requirement for measuring if services assist in acquiring and / or retaining the skills to reside in home and community-based settings, generally referred to as personal outcomes, provides the greatest challenge. Part of the challenge is that personal outcomes are a moving target. In the 1980's outcomes generally referred to improvements in congregate settings. As time has gone on personal outcomes have been increasingly focused on evaluating individuals in community settings.

The federal government and state governments have established criteria to measure personal outcomes and a number of organizations have established instruments to measure personal outcomes. All of the criteria share basic components such as increased self-sufficiency, community integration, safety, free from abuse and neglect, health, treated fairly, exercise rights, feel respected, etc.

Measuring personal outcomes was a challenging task in the 1980's and as the supports for individuals have become increasingly diverse the challenge has increased. Person-centered service plans focus on the individual and Therap has developed a suite of tools to measure progress on person-centered goals. Personal outcomes are a broad topic that is more difficult to measure. After years of working with private clients and states that use different methodologies Therap has developed a Data Driven Outcomes (DDO) tool for measuring personal outcomes. Therap's DDO cross references annual person-centered goals to Personal Outcomes that are displayed in a number of standard (CQL Personal Outcomes, National Core Indicators, CARF Personal Outcomes) as well as custom personal outcomes structures. The personal outcomes data derived from Therap's DDO can be evaluated on dashboard driven reporting tools on a near real time basis. With Therap's DDO, personal outcomes evaluation is not a major annual task. It is an easy to use tool that provides timely data to support decision making. To learn more go to https://www.therapservices.net/products/comprehensive-esolution-for-person-centered-services/

SOURCE Therap Services