Today over 50 customers attended our online demonstration of the 2011 OMH Patient Characteristics Survey in AWARDS! Those who attended learned how to easily complete all required survey forms, as well as how they can generate a PCS data file that can be submitted to OMH in lieu of manually entering each and every survey into the OMH PCS system.
The Patient Characteristics Survey (PCS) is a one week survey, conducted once every two years that takes a cross section of pertinent demographic, service, and clinical related data for every consumer that has received a public mental health service in New York State. For the 2011 survey, all New York State OMH (Office of Mental Health) programs are required to complete the survey for the week starting October 24th; which forms the basis for a descriptive state-wide dataset. Just as with the last PCS submission, AWARDS has the survey built-in, with data quality checks and reports to ensure that agencies are reporting clean and valid data from AWARDS to OMH. The PCS exemplifies how AWARDS can consolidate the reporting process to a government agency by leveraging the relational capabilities of the software.
The PCS in AWARDS uses existing program history and services data to determine who should be included in the survey submission. This removes the need for staff to sort through paper records to make the determination of whose data should be included. After the census is filtered, survey questions are mapped from existing data fields in AWARDS, significantly reducing PCS data entry efforts and cutting out any need for staff to sort through paper records to locate survey answers. Further, AWARDS has a built in report specific to the PCS that allows supervisors to view all survey responses on one screen, assisting with data quality review and correction. OMH’s validations rules are baked right into AWARDS so that users are alerted to invalid entries, ensuring that only valid records are included in the data file. Finally, generating a data file from AWARDS to upload to OMH cuts out the need to manually submit every individual survey record one at a time.
We look forward to the survey week so that our clients can see the AWARDS “data-in, data-out” mantra in action. As always, our Help Desk is going to be ready to help you get your PCS submission in accurately and on-time. To get in touch with us to talk about the PCS connect with us on Facebook, on Twitter or contact the Help Desk.
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