CEO Letter

Performance

Over the past two years, we’ve made a series of significant investments into our technical infrastructure to improve system availability, performance, and security.  We contract with a third party company to monitor performance from access points all over the United States, and reviewing the reports is part of our weekly management process.  Encouragingly, since reporting began, in early 2008, performance and availability have improved and continue to improve, despite the system usage growing dramatically as we have added over 25 new agencies in that timeframe.  Most impressively, response times on producing our heaviest reports has improved by over 40%.

We are not resting on our laurels.  In addition to releasing Home Tracking Functionality and Report Enhancements over the past few weeks, this month we will put through a series of upgrades that will increase network bandwidth by a factor of 10.  The changes will further improve performance and increase our capacity for adding new customer agencies.  We are fielding calls and inquiries from all over the United States and United Kingdom, and are excited about adding many new agencies to our community of customers.  But most of all, we get excited about being able to deliver an increasingly high level of service to the customer agencies that have already committed to work with us and we appreciate your patience with the downtime windows that are necessary in order to make these improvements a possibility.

Thank you for letting us participate in the important work that you do to care for children and families,
  Alistair

Online User Group Continues to Grow in Attendance and Interest

The KaleidaCare Online User Group meets the second Tuesday of each month at 12 PM ET/11 AM CT/10 AM MT/9 AM PT.  With the recent escalation of enhancements the Online User Group has been a platform to inform System Administrators and other key users for upcoming enhancements and to demonstrate new functionality before it has been released to all users.  The Online User Group is also a platform for asking questions to the KaleidaCare Staff and the KaleidaCare Community.  If you are interested in participating in the Online User Group, but have not been receiving the email notices, please contact Chip Bolyard, Director of Account Management at cbolyard@kaleidacare.com.

New Agencies in Q3

Children’s Home of Cleveland County (Shelby, North Carolina)is a community based, non-profit agency serving children and families with an array of services.Children’s Home of Cleveland County is a COA accredited agency that provides residential treatment to youth as well as Parenting Classes.  With KaleidaCare, they will now be able to track all their services.

Connie Maxwell Children’s Home (Greenwood, South Carolina) will be able to use KaleidaCare to manage their sites all over the state.  Connie Maxwell provides Group Home, Residential and Shelter services.  Connie Maxwell is excited to be able to configure their drop downs and build their own agency documents within KaleidaCare.  After accepting their first child in 1892, Connie Maxwell has greatly expanded its service areas and is now an Eagle Accredited agency.

Recent Developments

KaleidaCare has released several major enhancements to Solutions in the past quarter.  These enhancements have added new functionality to our case management and financial tools and increased reporting capabilities.

Home Tracking Functionality

KaleidaCare’s New Home Tracking Functionality allows an agency to track a prospective Foster and Adoptive Home from the point of Inquiry through Approval and eventually Closure.  The tool also tracks when homes are placed on hold for corrective action or may elect to not accept new placements for a time period.  The In Process Stage tracks Application Dates, Pre-Service Training Start and Completion Dates, and Home Study Completion Dates.

Report Enhancements

Home Status Reports, which report on the Home Tracking Stages, have been added to the Data Warehouse report options.  Reports can be generated for each of the tracking stages and displays critical data points – Contact Information (Address, Phone, and Email), Placement Preferences (Gender, Age, and Level of Care), Tracking Date, and Reasons.   The reports also calculate the number of days between the various events to assist with data analysis.

The Clients Served Report is a new report that replaces the Active Client Status Report.  This report now offers the ability for the user to choose the data points to report over a specified time frame.  Additional data points have also been added – Address, Legal Status, ID Numbers.  Data points that could have multiple values, like the Level of Care and All ID Numbers, have two options – Data with Line Breaks (one value per row) and Comma Delimited (all values on one row) to allow for easier manipulation once downloaded to Excel.

The Clients Served Report also has a Foster Parent Payment Option that calculates the payment based on a rate and nights in care.  An Occupancy Rate Statistic has also been added to this report.  The Occupancy Rate is the number of available bed nights divided by the number of placed bed nights for a given time period.

The Agency Document Aggregate Report has new filtering options.  The report can be filtered by:

• Show All Records – Displays all records for a specific Agency Document and Time Frame
• Show Records Based on Client Status – Displays all records for a selected program and status
• Show Records for a Specific Client – Displays all records for a specific client.  The data is displayed in a side by side format.

The Incident Aggregate Report has new filtering options.  The report can now be filtered by Individual (Client or Staff/Professional).  An option for Restraint Details has also been added that displays the Start Date, Start Time, Day of Week, Location, Restraint Duration, and Type of Restraint.

The Facility Listings Report has been improved by adding 47 new foster/adoptive home data points.  The report filter has been enhanced to include filtering by Open Beds, Gender Accepted, and Age Accepted.  The filter will allow this report to be used as a matching tool when looking for a possible placement.

The Client Listings Report has also had 31 new individual and family client data points added.  The data points include Current Medications, Expected Discharge Date, Discharge Location, and Family Member with Active Programs, to name just a few.  The grouping options for County and Referral Source have been split out for both substitute care and community based service programs.

Service Billing Enhancements

Bypass Functionality

This functionality will allow users to more accurately track lost revenue for services they cannot bill for.  Services can now be moved from the Validator Error Report to Accounts Receivable without generating a Bill.  Then a Bad Debt Write Off transaction can be performed and the reason for this can be tracked.

General Ledger Numbers on Accounts Receivable Reports

General Ledger Numbers can be associated with the Payer Category, Payer, Service, and Procedure Code.  These numbers will now display on a Financial History Section of the AR Tool and the A/R reports.

Notes Section Added to Accounts Receivable Tool

A Notes Section has been added to the AR Tool to capture short descriptions of activities completed on the service.

New Financial Posting and Financial Posting Reports

A Post Financial Transactions Tool and Report have been added.  The Post Financial Transition will add a month/year stamp to the various transactions activities for the month.

The Financial Posting Report displays the Transactions, Debit and Credit General Ledger Account Numbers, and Close Month/Year. 

The Financial Postings Summary Report displays the Total Debit and Credit for each General Ledger Account.  A Net Balance and Totals complete this report.

Georgia User Group

The Georgia User Group was held on September 10th.  Twelve people from six agencies participated in this quarter’s meeting.  We’d like to thank Hillside for hosting.

The group discussed possible topics for upcoming meetings.  Attendees stated that even repeating previously covered topics can be helpful because the discussions vary.  Suggestions included using the system for Quality Improvement, Supervision, discussing Work Flow and how to go “paperless”.  CHRIS Kids described how they have dramatically reduced the paperwork they print and file in their Counseling Center.  They no longer print out their counseling notes and only keep a “skinny file” for items such as consents and other requirements.  They use the Document Storage and Retrieval module to cut down on their filing by scanning and uploading documents and saving them to the client’s file in KaleidaCare.  They analyzed the cost of paper, binders and storage and found that the module would actually save them money.  Other agencies were interested in hearing more about this so we plan to discuss it further another time.  Several agencies discussed how they address the common difficulty with ensuring that accurate information is entered in a timely manner.

Account Manager Trish Murphy had e-mailed a written guide to the members on how to create a Work Order like the one that Gwinnett Children’s Shelter had demonstrated at the last meeting.  If any other agency wants this information, please let Trish know so she can forward them to you as well.  Trish highlighted some of the system enhancements released during the past quarter, and then gave a sneak peek at the upcoming Home Tracking enhancements.

Mark your calendars now for the next meeting on Thursday, December 10th at 2:00 p.m.  Lutheran Services of Georgia has agreed to host at their office in Midtown Atlanta.  A reminder and directions will be sent out in advance.

Heather Rowles, the Executive Director of MAAC and Trish Murphy are the co-chairs of the Georgia User Group.  For more information about these meetings, please contact Heather at (404) 880-9323 or hrowles@maac4kids.org or Trish at (404) 580-1142 or tmurphy@kaleidacare.com.

Regional Trainings Planned for October

KaleidaCare is pleased to announce that we will be hosting two Regional Trainings in October:

• Fort Worth, Texas on Wednesday, October 21st
• Chattanooga, Tennessee on Friday, October 23rd

Regional Trainings are a hands-on training experience.  The training is available for all levels of KaleidaCare Solutions users.  The training agenda will be based on the attendees that register.  We are confident that everyone who attends will leave feeling that they have learned how to use KaleidaCare Solutions more effectively for their agency.

Seating is limited by the size of the facility so reservations will be accepted on a "first come, first served" basis.  Payment must be received to hold your space.  To register, go to www.kaleidacare.com and click on the green Event Registration box.  Once your registration has been received, an invoice will be sent to your organization for payment.  The charge is $95 per person.  Group rates are available upon request.

Toolkit 101

What is the Difference between a Face Sheet and an Information Report?

The Toolkit on KaleidaCare allows our customers to build custom Agency Documents, Face Sheets and Information Reports on Clients, Families, Staff, and Facilities.  While the Agency Document Toolkit gets used a lot, the Face Sheet and Information Report options sometimes get overlooked.  These two options in the Toolkit allow you to create custom reports that use “Information Sections” which are pre-defined categories of pertinent information that may be pulled in and ordered to meet specific reporting needs.  Information Sections have been developed over time to meet specific needs and include items such as Address & Phone Number, Current Medications, Summary of Case Notes, and more.  There are actually 54 unique client Information Sections, 16 for families, 7 for staff, and 15 for facilities.  Some of these Information Sections pull in current information and some pull in a summary of information based on logs or documents entered into KaleidaCare.

Sometimes it is difficult to determine whether a Face Sheet or Information Report should be built in KaleidaCare.  The following examples will help you identify which type of report will work best for the information that is needed.

The most important thing to remember is that a Face Sheet will always pull information based on the day you actually run the Face Sheet.  An Information Report will always allow the user to enter a date range to control what data pulls in.

With that in mind, a Face Sheet would typically only be used to pull information such as Current Diagnosis, Last Annual Physical, and Facility Information – which is all information that can be viewed in one place at any specific time.  An Information Report would make sense when you are trying to pull in information such as a Summary of Case Notes, a Summary of Health Care Logs, or Incident Aggregate information.  As you can see, the Information in this second example is date related and so is best pulled where you can enter a date range to control what information is reported.

Let’s look at a typical Client Face Sheet and the data points that it might include:

• Current Age (based on the client’s DOB and the current date)
• Allergies (pulled from the health care information entered for the client)
• Last Annual Physical (based on the most recent Health Care Log of this type)
• Last Psychiatric Visit (based on the most recent Health Care Log of this type
• Current Medications (all medications the client is taking as of the date the Face Sheet is run)
• Current Diagnosis (based on the most recent Diagnosis Log)
• Level of Care (based on the most recent Level of Care Log)
• Permanency Goal (based on the client’s current permanency goal)
• School Performance (based on the most recent School Performance Log)

A typical Client Information Report can of course include all the same types of information, but in addition may also contain the following:

• Case Notes (a summary of the notes entered for the date range provided by the user)
• Session Notes (a summary of session logs entered for the date range provided by the user)
• Health Care Summary (a summary of health care logs entered for the date range provided)
• Incident Aggregate (an aggregate of incidents that occurred during the date range provided)

It’s also helpful to remember that multiple Face Sheets can be run at one time on various clients (they would appear one after the other in the report).  However, an Information Report can only be pulled on one specific client at a time as a date range needs to be entered.

Finally, an unlimited number of custom Face Sheets and Information Reports can be created and made available to different users based on their program’s or department’s specific needs.  For more information on how to build custom Face Sheets and Information Reports, you may access the user manual on your KaleidaCare home page or contact your Account Manager.