Inside AWARDS | Documenting Your Services With Flexibility

How AWARDS Electronic Health Records (EHR) Adapts to Your Workflow Needs

One aspect of Foothold Technology’s electronic health records (EHR) AWARDS that makes it perfect for so many customers is the fact that it is not a one-size-fits-all product. Rather, it is an extremely flexible series of EHR software modules that each customer, in discussion with staff members at Foothold Technology, adapts to best fit the workflow for each of its programs. For this blog post, I’ll focus on three core modules of AWARDS.

Let’s look first at the Intake/Admission module of AWARDS. In a general sense, this module supports an agency’s client intake, but is dynamic enough to support multiple types of intake across an agency’s programs. For some AWARDS customers, clients are immediately admitted to a program and intake is documented as a straightforward admission in AWARDS. For other customers, or for other programs within an agency, prospective clients might need to be evaluated further before they are fully admitted into a program. AWARDS supports this type of intake through a Process Intake feature. This process of intake allows an agency to denote a client in Pending status before he or she is admitted to a program. Once the appropriate next steps occur with the client, that Pending status can be recategorized as Accepted, Rejected, Withdrawn—or any customized category in the database. Alternatively, agencies can use AWARDS’ Central Intake feature, which allows client demographic information to be entered into a Central Intake program, and then assigned to a specific service provision program at an appropriate time.

Like Intake/Admission, our electronic health records can also be configured to support client or consumer discharge in multiple ways. For most programs, clients are denoted within AWARDS as discharged once they are no longer receiving services. However, flexibility around this process does exist. Some programs, particularly Clubhouse programs, choose to mark a client as Inactive within AWARDS so if the client receives services at a later date, he or she can be designated as Active once more and all historical info can be reviewed and updated as needed.

A third core module of AWARDS, the Service Plans module has some of the most customizable features. Not only can the plan name be adapted to suit the program needs—perhaps your agency calls them Treatment Plans or Independent Living Plans—but the various components within the plans can be relabeled to align with your agency’s common language. In addition, agencies can use this module to schedule automatic plan reviews, with alerts and notifications of upcoming due dates sent to appropriate staff. What could be more flexible? AWARDS gives you the power to customize your service plan labels, determine scheduling, and set reminders aligned with your individual programmatic workflows.

Finally, each of these modules—Intake/Admission, Discharge, Service Plans—along with many more areas of AWARDS—allow for the use of FormBuilder forms. FormBuilder is the most flexible feature of AWARDS, and our customers use the tool to create additional fields and forms that are unique to each customer’s provision of services. Some customers even share these forms with other AWARDS users through a shared library.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to AWARDS’ flexibility. Are you looking for some ideas on how to support your workflow? Ask us how we can help you adapt our electronic health records software to fit your agency’s needs!