Think Tank | Highlights from the Foothold Technology Project Pipeline

Updates from our CEO

I want to take this opportunity to bring our readers some highlights on our 2015 successes and goings on here at Foothold Technology, and share an overview of the scope of work we have set for ourselves in 2016.

Foothold Technology continues to spread the word about the benefits of using AWARDS. As part of our outreach we attended or presented at over 65 conferences across the nation in 2015. Special thanks go out to the clients and partners who presented with us this year: Jennifer Weeber of Hazard Perry County Community Ministries, Liz Smith of Unity House Cayuga County, Cindy Skinner of Focus on Youth, Patrick Germain of Project Renewal, John Kulesza of Collaborative Support Programs of NJ, Steve Duke of Baltic Street AEH, Jenna Tine of Goodwill Industries of Greater NY & Northern NJ, RaeAnn VanGundy of Kendall County Health Department, Debbie Pantin of VIP Community Services, Mary Woods of Woods SeniorCare Consultants, Erin McDonnell of COTS, Marge Vezer of SAIL, Hilary Melton of Pathways Vermont, and Pamela J Russo of Catholic Charities Diocese of Allentown. We also made a huge splash at the CSH Summit and launched our first “Voices of” campaign around supportive housing. “Voices of” is a collection of perspectives from the industry and their thoughts on why they do what they do, the struggles they’re seeing within the industry, the tools they use, and where they see things going. We have seen tremendous success from our client and prospect community and are looking to launch many more “Voices of” campaigns in 2016.

2015 was also a very busy development year at Foothold, with new features and enhancements on many fronts. Most notably, the new Home screen was deployed, introducing AWARDS users to the new look and feel that will be incorporated incrementally throughout the entire application over the months to come. Along with the Home screen, we converted the Employers module to the new look and added new features there such as the search feature and breadcrumbs. This project was the culmination of a tremendous amount of work on the part of many staff at Foothold, and we are extremely excited about the transition! Also in 2015, we added a new Security Details feature and put the ability to manage forgotten usernames and passwords into the hands of our end users. And based on valuable feedback from our customers, we worked hard to enhance our Medications module and develop the MAR in AWARDS. With these new enhancements, our users are able to bring their medications tracking to a new level in AWARDS.

2015 was also a year of great company growth at Foothold. On the training front, our Training Division broadened the types of webinars we present for FootholdConnect events and continued to build the library of recordings in AWARDS Online Help. Additionally, we completed our sixth round of AWARDS Certification courses and began our seventh!

Our Quality Assurance Division made large scale updates to our Online Help system to reflect great new changes to AWARDS, including the new Home screen, and began an improvement project to make finding information in Help even more user-friendly.

Our Client Services Division spent a good part of the year refining processes as they relate to new customer implementations of AWARDS. It’s been a very busy year guiding customers through the beginnings of the transition to managed care, exchanging data with Health Homes and Health Information Exchanges, transitioning to the second year in a row of HMIS Data Standards changes and the ongoing work of maintaining compliance across all regulatory bodies.

And at the crux of all the development work we do, our Application Development team had a very productive year, with lots of large-scale projects completed related to the redesign effort along with those focused on regulatory compliance. We have a tremendous development agenda for 2016, with our flagship project being the ongoing revamp of the entire application, allowing our customers’ work to flow even more intuitively and efficiently.

Alongside that, the majority of new feature development will be in the new framework, including the new PlanBuilder, which is well underway. The PlanBuilder is one of the more exciting pieces of functionality that we will be releasing. Service Plans are at the core of the work you do with your clients every day. Our current Service Plan module has been in need of a makeover to both evolve with the times as well as give you the flexibility to design your own plans. The new PlanBuilder module will do just that. PlanBuilder will allow you to add the fields you need, as well as create your own plan schedule, and all within a new interface that will greatly ease the process of interacting with Service Plans in AWARDS. The PlanBuilder will give you the ability to assign a goal to a specific program from a Care Plan, greater reporting with a ReportBuilder, integration with assessments and ease of use so you can continue to focus on the important work you do with your clients.

The landscape within which we all work is shifting rapidly and throwing new requirements and expectations at our customers at a faster rate than is comfortable to most. But rest assured that we at Foothold are tuned in to our customers’ changing needs and are working hard to make sure AWARDS can keep up with these rising demands!

That’s all for now, but watch this space for more updates over the course of the year.

Sincerely,
Marlowe Greenberg, CEO