Aging and Disability Resource Center

The Forsyth County North Carolina ADRC has shared their advisory council insite. This website is an on line resource for council members. The website was designed to keep the local advisory council updated on meetings and obtain copies of important documentation. The site offers the RFP, the grant application, acronyms, fact sheets, work plans, work group descriptions, meeting minutes and more.

For older adults and individuals with disabilities, some website designs can pose access problems. Users may be unable to use a website’s navigational menu, fill out online forms, or even access content. Addressing accessibility issues is important. This brief addresses the adaptation of standard website construction techniques to meet the needs of the target populations. It includes considerations & strategies for design that are informative, functional and useful for these populations.

This is the third in a series of newsletters produced at the Exchange to provide assistance to our CMS Real Systems Change grantees. This newsletter is produced biannually. Topics include: Physicians’ Role in Determining Level of Care, Nurse Practice Policies for Home and Community Living, ADRC Toolbox, Massachusetts Connecting the Dots, Making Medicaid Work in the 21st Century, Assessment Instruments, HCBS Quality Management Roles & Responsibilities, Family Caregiving, and Housing.

The ADRC Pilot Site in Broward County Flordia shared a plan used to measure the agency's goals, strategies, and progress towards provision of culturally competent services. The plan offers guiding principles: responsibilities, implementation period:and outcomes for each of the strategies.

The South Carolina ADRC also known as South Carolina Access Plus has developed a number of tools for assessment. The evaluation team uses this protocol to interview ADRC staff members and partners for the first time and then later after an initial baseline interview has been performed.

This new assessment tool is currently being piloted within the MA Real Choice Pilot Project & will undergo formal evaluation over the course of the next year. A full report will follow. The core of the instrument is 7 pages, with an estimated average completion time of 15-20 minutes. The tool is designed to be web-based with a variety of modules, the entire tool is much longer. Please note that this instrument is intended for REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY and is not to be implemented for actual use.

This document describes the releationship between WV Real Choice Grants and the Olmstead Plan. The document contains a table showing all grants awarded to the state. The table illustrates the activities of the Real Choice Systems Change for Community Living grants and shows how the programs are closely aligned with the West Virginia Olmstead Plan. This strong relationship is the result of collaboration between the Olmstead Coordinator and other state partners and stakeholders involved.

This brief focuses on one consumer-direction model within the Family Care program-the Agency with Choice model-in which a \"co-employment agency\" serves as the Employer of Records and the consumer acts as the Managing Employer. In the other consumer-directed model, the consumer takes on all employer responsibilities. Slightly more than one in five Family Care members choose the co employment option, demonstrating how a managed care program can incorporate consumer direction.

Ohio has been using its Real Choice Systems Change grant to bring people together to consider options to streamline access to information about long term services. A group of county, municipal and private organizations in Ohio are working with state agencies to develop a pilot project. On December 13-14, 2004, policy experts from Rutgers Center for State Health Policy and the National Academy for State Health Policy met with stakeholders to provide information and technical assistance.

North Carolina issued a Request for Proposal notice for an information and referral vendor to serve the ADRC program in February 2005. The purpose of this RFP is to solicit proposals for the implementation of an integrated cost-effective commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solution that will provide a scalable and flexible Information & Referral (I&R) data management system that incorporates both a central web-accessible I&R data repository and individual I&R services, with minimal customization.