A Foothold Year in Review: Looking Back on 2014

Now that we’re well into 2015, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the past year, report on some of our ongoing initiatives, and share some of the work we have set for ourselves in 2015.

Foothold Technology continues to spread the word about the benefits of using our complete Electronic Health Record, AWARDS, and we’re thrilled to report that in 2014, our community of AWARDS users has grown to more than 900 organizations across 25 states. As part of our outreach we attended over 75 conferences across the nation, and presented at more than 20 of them. Highlights of our speaking engagements include our Director of Application Development, Shulamis Turin, representing Behavioral Healthcare agencies in “The Health Story Project” at the HIMSS Conference; Paul Rossi at the Housing First Partners Conference; and David Bucciferro sharing his expertise at ACLAIMH, PRA, and of course, the PROS Academy. I also had the honor of presenting on our Interoperability work at the National Council. Special thanks go out to the clients who presented with us this year: Debbie Pantin of VIP Services, John Kulesza of CSPNJ, Bob Davison of MHA Essex, Tracie Jones of Pathways to Housing, Michele Montroy of United Helpers Care, Ed Carpenter of Mended Reeds, Michael Blady of The Bridge, Ellen Healion of HALI, Darcy McCourt of Gateway Community Services, Jenna Tine of Goodwill, Christa DiLorenzo of Catholic Charities Pittsburgh, Robert Myers of A Safe Haven, and Christopher Burke of Unity House of Troy.

In the course of our work with providers of Supportive Housing we realized we were in a unique position to share information with agencies around the country, and we established the Supportive Housing Resource Center, a new online collection of material about Supportive Housing practices gathered from the leading pundits and professionals in the field. Resources found here consist of materials shared by Supportive Housing agencies and advocacy associations nationwide–research, press, case studies, etc.–organized under the top challenges faced by agencies.

2014 was also a busy development year for us. Most notably, we successfully completed our 2014 Meaningful Use Certification to ensure AWARDS remains compliant with the Federal standards for a certified EHR, and as a Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), we updated our HMIS functionality to ensure AWARDS was compliant with the new 2014 HMIS Data Standards. And it should be noted that moving forward in 2015, we will continue to develop new reporting and workflow enhancements for HMIS data in AWARDS. In addition to these two large projects, we continued to roll out new enhancements in AWARDS on a regular basis, including many updates to our BillingBuilder module, new ReportBuilders and enhancements to existing ReportBuilders, as well a great deal of work in the Health Home arena, allowing our customers to continue using AWARDS as their EHR and share data electronically with Health Homes and RHIOs.

Foothold has once again set for itself an ambitious development agenda for 2015. We have been working on a new look and feel for AWARDS, and we have already started to roll out some of these changes throughout the application. These changes will allow for an even more personal and efficiently user experience. We will also begin work on enhancements to the Medication Administration and MAR features, enhanced ReportBuilders, updated Calendar functionality, and more flexible and robust E-Signature integration.

Finally, our development work will continue to focus on Interoperability during 2015. One specific feature we will be working on is E-lab integration in AWARDS, thereby allowing our customers to import lab results data directly into AWARDS. And our on-going work with Health Homes and Care Coordination models across the country will continue – with a focus on true sharing of care plan data. On the topic of care plan data, we are continuing to lay the groundwork for a build-your-own-plan module, whether it’s a care plan, treatment plan or any other type of plan this will give customers the ability to build it to meet any regulatory requirements.