Month: July 2014

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.

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.

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!

ViaQuest Day Services is very excited to launch a new program titled “Home Base”.  The pilot locations for the program are the Valley View and Twinsburg Day Services (in Summit county as well as Cuyahoga county).  Each location has a selected number of participants who have volunteered to be involved in this program.  The groups are selected by staffing ratios and a desire to be out in the community. Twice a week each group will be involved in the community for the entire 5 hours of the program day.  Some of the involvement will include fun activities, and continuing our program “giving back to our communities” through volunteering. Things being set up are pen pal programs with seniors in nursing and assisted living programs and visits to our veterans in hospitals and at their homes.  The program will also include volunteering in the community for:

• Habitat for Humanity

• Animal Protective League

• local food banks and more!

Another important piece of the program is community employment.   The groups will be touring a wide variety of different types of companies and possible employment opportunities.  We will be sharing this information with our ViaQuest Employment Service division weekly to discuss the interests shown individually in the quest for gained employment in our communities.