ViaQuest, Inc. Recognized by Midwest Care Alliance

ViaQuest is being presented the Rose & Sam Stein and Professional of the Year Awards at 35th Annual Conference Luncheon

DUBLIN, Ohio (October 29th, 2014) –ViaQuest, Inc. is being presented with the Rose & Sam Stein and Professional of the Year Awards by Midwest Care Alliance at 35th annual conference luncheon.

Kathy Richard, ViaQuest’s chief clinical officer, is being honored with Midwest Care Alliance’s Professional of the Year award. She has more than 19 years of experience in the home health and hospice arena and is a nationally recognized leader for her work in pharmacogenetics.

The Professional of the Year award is bestowed upon those who demonstrate commitment to home health, hospice and palliative care and has impacted those they serve. This year, Richard assisted in expanding pharmacogenetics, a personalized medicine program, to all eligible home health and hospice patients in Ohio.

“Our mission is to continue to set the standard for home health and hospice through highly-personalized care,” said Rich Johnson, President and CEO, ViaQuest. “I’m proud that our programs and leaders are being recognized and exceeding goals through their extraordinary contributions to health care.”

The Rose & Sam Stein award recognizes programs that make significant contributions to the community, patients and families, as well as the corporation at large. The award honors programs that develop new ways to accomplish and improve teamwork and palliative care services.

This year ViaQuest launched the Hospice Developmental Disabilities Specialty Program, an innovative service to adults with disabilities and their families. The program is receiving the Rose & Sam Stein award. The program’s team, lead by Lisa Birklund, has extensive experience and expert knowledge around caring for adults with disabilities. The organization’s medical staff has training, insight and has earned certifications to be the primary resource during end of life stages for patients.

This award-winning specialty program focuses on providing comfort care, pain management and relief of distressing symptoms with skilled professionals who provide counsel and support while empowering individuals and their families to make informed decisions.

Midwest Care Alliance has been awarding individuals and programs for their outstanding work in the industry for 12 years. The non-profit organization was formed to support the growth and development of provider programs through education, advocacy and technical information. For more information about Midwest Care Alliance, visit www.midwestcarealliance.org.

About ViaQuest
ViaQuest, Inc. is a healthcare company that believes strongly in choice for its employees and the people it serves. Its areas of expertise include home health and hospice, mental and behavioral health, and developmental disabilities. ViaQuest offers quality, highly-personalized, specialized and cost-effective care, empowering individuals to function independently and live their best possible lives. Through a wide range of innovative services referred to as ViaQuest’s Circle of Care, a skilled, dedicated staff ensures that the people served are active participants in their own care. The company is based in Dublin, Ohio. For more information, call ViaQuest at 800-645-3267 or visit www.ViaQuestInc.com.

ViaQuest, Office Depot Celebrate Successful Job Training Program for Adults with Disabilities

DUBLIN, Ohio (Oct. 21, 2014) – ViaQuest Employment Services joined Office Depot, Inc., Kessler Foundation and Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities (OOD) today in celebrating the initial successes of its job training and employment program for adults with disabilities.

ViaQuest worked with Office Depot to implement a job training program for adults with disabilities at Office Depot’s distribution center in Southwest Columbus, Ohio. Office Depot has gone on to provide full- and part-time employment to many of the individuals with disabilities who have completed ViaQuest’s job training program.

“Our program is different than a typical job training program,” said Larry Worth, executive director, ViaQuest Employment Services. “Participants are brought directly into the facility for two days and are taught skills that can be used across the facility, rather than learning one specific repeated task. Many of those individuals are then offered full- or part-time employment.”

ViaQuest Employment Services provides pre-qualified, trained applicants on a full-time, part-time or seasonal basis for employment training, job placement, job coaching and follow-up support. The organization has developed strong partnerships with many companies that are also passionate about hiring people with disabilities.

“We’re [ViaQuest] in the business of enriching people’s lives,” said Rich Johnson, President and CEO, ViaQuest. “And this program is doing just that by assisting individuals who may otherwise experience significant barriers on the job or have difficulty gaining employment.”

OOD – the statewide agency for employment and rehabilitation services – identifies potential participants for the Office Depot training program. OOD provides services to nearly 4,000 Central Ohioans with disabilities in Franklin and contiguous counties and more than 27,000 throughout Ohio to assist them in realizing their employment goals.

Office Depot is a leading global provider of office products, services and solutions. The company’s disabilities hiring program is being facilitated through a two-year grant from Kessler Foundation to help expand employment for adults with disabilities. The resulting grant project was designed to assist Office Depot in developing local and national partnerships within the disability community to create career training programs aimed at increasing its hiring of people with disabilities. Ohio, along with three other states, is participating in this pilot program.

“Office Depot is proud to partner with the Kessler Foundation, Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities and ViaQuest on this worthwhile program,” said Ken Roman, General Manager for the Office Depot distribution center in Southwest Columbus. “We’re committed to helping improve the lives of people in the communities where we do business. By giving individuals with disabilities the skills and resources to become well-trained associates, we’re providing them with the best chance for sustaining meaningful, paying employment.”

Kessler Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to changing the lives of people with disabilities through rehabilitation research and funding disability employment initiatives. OOD is the state agency responsible for assisting individuals with disabilities to live independently, gain meaningful employment or receive disability benefits through the Social Security Administration.

For more information about the celebration or ViaQuest’s Employment Services division, please contact Larry Worth at 614.339.0852 or visit www.ViaQuestEmploymentServices.com.

About ViaQuest

ViaQuest, Inc. is a healthcare company that believes strongly in choice for its employees and the people it serves. Its areas of expertise include home health and hospice, mental and behavioral health, and developmental disabilities. ViaQuest offers quality, highly-personalized, specialized and cost-effective care, empowering individuals to function independently and live their best possible lives. Through a wide range of innovative services referred to as ViaQuest’s Circle of Care, a skilled, dedicated staff ensures that the people served are active participants in their own care. The company is based in Dublin, Ohio. For more information, call ViaQuest at 800-645-3267 or visit www.ViaQuestInc.com.

ViaQuest, Office Depot Celebrate Successful Job Training Program for Adults with Disabilities

DUBLIN, Ohio (Oct. 21, 2014) – ViaQuest Employment Services joined Office Depot, Inc., Kessler Foundation and Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities (OOD) today in celebrating the initial successes of its job training and employment program for adults with disabilities.

ViaQuest worked with Office Depot to implement a job training program for adults with disabilities at Office Depot’s distribution center in Southwest Columbus, Ohio. Office Depot has gone on to provide full- and part-time employment to many of the individuals with disabilities who have completed ViaQuest’s job training program.

“Our program is different than a typical job training program,” said Larry Worth, executive director, ViaQuest Employment Services. “Participants are brought directly into the facility for two days and are taught skills that can be used across the facility, rather than learning one specific repeated task. Many of those individuals are then offered full- or part-time employment.”

ViaQuest Employment Services provides pre-qualified, trained applicants on a full-time, part-time or seasonal basis for employment training, job placement, job coaching and follow-up support. The organization has developed strong partnerships with many companies that are also passionate about hiring people with disabilities.

“We’re [ViaQuest] in the business of enriching people’s lives,” said Rich Johnson, President and CEO, ViaQuest. “And this program is doing just that by assisting individuals who may otherwise experience significant barriers on the job or have difficulty gaining employment.”

OOD – the statewide agency for employment and rehabilitation services – identifies potential participants for the Office Depot training program. OOD provides services to nearly 4,000 Central Ohioans with disabilities in Franklin and contiguous counties and more than 27,000 throughout Ohio to assist them in realizing their employment goals.

Office Depot is a leading global provider of office products, services and solutions. The company’s disabilities hiring program is being facilitated through a two-year grant from Kessler Foundation to help expand employment for adults with disabilities. The resulting grant project was designed to assist Office Depot in developing local and national partnerships within the disability community to create career training programs aimed at increasing its hiring of people with disabilities. Ohio, along with three other states, is participating in this pilot program.

“Office Depot is proud to partner with the Kessler Foundation, Opportunities for Ohioans with Disabilities and ViaQuest on this worthwhile program,” said Ken Roman, General Manager for the Office Depot distribution center in Southwest Columbus. “We’re committed to helping improve the lives of people in the communities where we do business. By giving individuals with disabilities the skills and resources to become well-trained associates, we’re providing them with the best chance for sustaining meaningful, paying employment.”

Kessler Foundation is a nonprofit organization dedicated to changing the lives of people with disabilities through rehabilitation research and funding disability employment initiatives. OOD is the state agency responsible for assisting individuals with disabilities to live independently, gain meaningful employment or receive disability benefits through the Social Security Administration.

For more information about the celebration or ViaQuest’s Employment Services division, please contact Larry Worth at 614.339.0852 or visit www.ViaQuestEmploymentServices.com.

About ViaQuest

ViaQuest, Inc. is a healthcare company that believes strongly in choice for its employees and the people it serves. Its areas of expertise include home health and hospice, mental and behavioral health, and developmental disabilities. ViaQuest offers quality, highly-personalized, specialized and cost-effective care, empowering individuals to function independently and live their best possible lives. Through a wide range of innovative services referred to as ViaQuest’s Circle of Care, a skilled, dedicated staff ensures that the people served are active participants in their own care. The company is based in Dublin, Ohio. For more information, call ViaQuest at 800-645-3267 or visit www.ViaQuestInc.com.

ViaQuest, EnterpriseWorks Merge

Expands Employment Services Division

DUBLIN, OHIO (July 24, 2014) – As of July 1, ViaQuest, Inc., a leading regional health services provider, is expanding its Employment Services division with an acquisition of EnterpriseWorks, a Columbus, Ohio nonprofit that provided education, training and mentoring to adults with disabilities to achieve self-employment and exercise social responsibility for 25 years.

ViaQuest will operate the self-employment division with five highly-trained self-employment consultants in Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo, Dayton and Cincinnati. The company’s business experts help determine if adults with disabilities are able to successfully run a business.

“Our Employment Services division is able to provide pre-qualified, trained applicants on a fulltime, part-time or seasonal basis for employment training, job placement, job coaching and follow-up support. Companies use our labor pool to meet their hiring needs,” said Larry Worth, executive director, ViaQuest Employment Services. “By expanding our offerings and acquiring EnterpriseWorks, we are now able to consult those who wish to be self-employed. This aligns with our corporate goals to serve our clients and continues to support our affiliation with Employment First in Ohio, a policy to ensure every individual of working age has an opportunity to seek employment.”

As of Sept. 30, 2013, the EnterpriseWorks team assisted 6,500 individuals across Ohio successfully start businesses. ViaQuest Employment Services will now be able to support a broader range of individuals and engage clients in traditional business roles.

“With a combined 58 years of expertise assisting people with disabilities, we have the business acumen to assess viable self-employment opportunities and assist individuals to become self-sufficient through microenterprise initiatives,” said Marcia Duffy, former executive director, EnterpriseWorks.

Adults with disabilities that are interested in starting a business should contact ViaQuest and a self-employment consultant will discuss the options available for those seeking to be a future business owner. Once approved, the consultants assist the individual to write a business plan and provide technical assistance during business development and start-up. ViaQuest consultants are involved in the process until the business is open and have demonstrated that the benchmark earning share has been met for a 90 day period.

For more information, please contact Larry Worth at 614.339.0852 or visit www.ViaQuestEmploymentServices.com.

Mental Health Providers Plead for Meaningful Use Payments

By Arthur Allen
7/22/14 6:31 PM EDT

Mental health care providers pleaded Tuesday for Congress to pass a law that extends meaningful use incentive payments to their work, which they said was underfunded and suffering from faulty connections to other health care providers. Five bills, two in the Senate and three in the House, were introduced in 2013 to extend the meaningful use program to behavioral health providers, who held a briefing on the Hill to gin up support for passage.

“It was a mistake to leave us out of meaningful use,” said Alfonso Guida of the Behavioral Health IT Coalition. “Now we’re trying to correct that.”

About 70 percent of patients with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have other chronic conditions such as diabetes, asthma, high blood pressure or cancer. The cost of treating these diseases among the mentally ill is two to four times higher than in other populations, frequently because the mentally ill fail to adhere to drug prescriptions.

Coordination of their care is vital, providers at the event said, and it can’t be done without health IT. “If you aren’t caring for the whole person, you get tremendous expenses and bad outcomes,” said Chris Wolf of ViaQuest, a private community health provider in Dublin, Ohio.

Historically, mental health services have been underfunded. According to the National Council for Behavioral Health, they typically recover only 70 percent of their costs from Medicaid, for example. And they were left out of meaningful use when it launched in 2011.

“We need to get that dime,” said Joseph Cvitkovic, director of behavioral health care at Jefferson Hospital in Pittsburgh. His hospital is part of the Allegheny Health Network, which is building “health malls” where specialty services are linked to primary care.

Allegheny is switching to an Epic Systems EHR, but Epic’s behavioral health software is in an elementary stage, Cvitkovic said. “How can I have psychiatric care in that primary care complex if I don’t have health IT?” he asked. The problems of working with a mostly paper system are enormous, he said. It is time consuming, he loses insurance and Medicare payments because of illegible physician handwriting, and when his patients are in emergency care the doctors have trouble finding out about their behavioral medications.

Closure of some state hospital systems in Pennsylvania has placed strains on inpatient acute care clinics, Cvitkovic said, and “we care for some of the most violent, acting-out people. Units like ours are going to close if we’re kept out of the modern era, which we are.”

Health IT requirements are complex for mental health because information about substance abuse must be sequestered from other health information in a patient’s record under federal law. That requires special EHR modules. Since behavioral health is low on cash and left out of meaningful use, there’s been no incentive to EHR vendors to develop that software, said Ginger Bandeen of the Columbia Community Mental Health Center in St. Helen, Ore.

“You need health IT that can lock things down — and break the glass,” she said. For example, systems such as Kaiser-Permanente have systems that keep the information separate but allow physicians in an emergency room, for example, to get the relevant information on a patient who has substance-abuse issues.

The technology includes sophisticated audit tracking capacity that makes sure the wrong people aren’t looking at sensitive information, Bandeen said. “The good stuff is in our records,” said Badeen. “We want to be able to share it because it will create better outcomes for our patients.”

Changes in regulations that loosen privacy restrictions might be required to make strides forward in health IT, said Cvitkovic. “While we keep some privacy, the issue is to find out what’s in the interest of the patient, the family and, in the case of violent individuals, the community,” he said.

The providers urged senators to support bills that would enable meaningful use for behavioral health providers. “We need co-sponsors,” said Guida. “If we can get them, we can show that to [Finance Committee leaders Ron] Wyden and [Orrin] Hatch and make progress in the next Congress.”

To view original article online, click here.

ViaQuest/Olentangy Employment Initiative: Success Stories

The ViaQuest/Olentangy Employment Initiative ended for the school year at the end of May.  As a point of reference, this is the program ViaQuest developed with Olentangy Local Schools & TRECA to provide community based work internships in the Village of Powell for current Olentangy Local School students with disabilities.  This year was the first year of the program.

While developing the Olentangy Employment Initiative, the partners determined that the goals will be that students going through this program will have the opportunity to gain on-the-job experience through internships that would then lead to the opportunity for employment &/or more appropriate graduation (graduating prior to 22 years of age).

Our pilot program consisted of three female students.  Nanette, Alexis & Kelly.  All are 19 years  of age.  At the start of this program, all students and their families had the expectation that they would continue to enroll in Olentangy Local Schools through age 22.  The families did not expect for their child to meet the expected outcome goal (early graduation or job).

However… Nanette & Kelly are graduating this year and Alexis was offered a job at her internship site! That would be a  100% success rate of the program!

Olentangy Local Schools is overjoyed with the final outcomes of the program, as are the students, their families & the internship sites.  All of them directly contribute the participation in the Olentangy Employment Initiative as the reason for the students’ success!

More details

Nanette will be attending cosmetology school after graduation, and will continue to be supported by ViaQuest through OOD funding.

Alexis has been offered a job at Local Roots, and will continue to be supported by ViaQuest through OOD funding.  Due to this job, Alexis is considering ½ day academics next year instead of attending school full time.

Kelly will be attending OSU’s TOPs program for further education after graduation.  A requirement of this program is that all participants must be able to safely navigate crosswalks and understand pedestrian rules. Kelly did not have these skills prior to this year.  She learned and mastered them as part of her individual program in the Olentangy Employment Initiative.  Due to her mastery of these skills, she became eligible to enroll and was accepted in the TOPs program.

This is a tremendous success for ViaQuest, the VES team and specifically Wes Almond & Ashley Radca who worked day-to-day on the Olentangy Employment Initiative!

This program has been such a success that there are already another three students enrolled for next school year and ALL of the current internship sites have agreed to continue to be part of the program.  Additionally, Olentangy Local Schools highlighted the program this month in their newsletter.  Here is a link to that article:  http://issuu.com/olsd/docs/spring_2014_olsd_community_newslett

ViaQuest continues to provide incredible services and outcomes for people of all ages!

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