All,
As we enter the summer and prepare to complete our 25th year in business, I'd like to share some thoughts and ideas.
First of all, I'd like to recognize all that you contribute to the organization. The Service Coordination Team has done a great job in meeting the challenges of the 10% reduction in payment from Medicaid. The IT team is really making important progress, and our support staff are doing a nice job of filling in the gaps and making our work life a lot smoother!
Kudos to all!The Management Team has been going through a strategic planning exercise, lead by Shawna Link, that has great promise for our future. It is an opportunity to more clearly explain who we are and who we plan to become.
Let's start with who we were. We began as, essentially, a one-person operation, doing consulting and training across Kansas. We took on new projects, including staff training, publishing, software development and service coordination, because we believed that to do so was important for the lives of people with developmental disabilities-not just here in Kansas, but throughout the world.
Along the way, we went into a sort of
maintenance mode. We grew, but growth, alone, is not really satisfying to the intellect and does not make optimal use of our collective ability to learn, grow and contribute to the well-being of our world.
So, who do we strive to be? My vision is that we strive to be
the center of excellence in services for people with developmental disabilities. This means that we continue to provide products and services that help contribute to our worldwide community. We can do this by examining what we do and how we do it, making improvements in our process and products and then sharing this with other organizations.
Here are a couple of things that I believe we can get started on right away. First, I would like us to reaffirm our philosophy of
customer service: Even though we are paid by others (Medicaid, school districts, agencies), we are in business to help the user of our product or service, even though that user may have a cognitive disability. When conflicts arise, as they certainly will, we rely on one another to help problem solve. We do not
go it alone. When we interact with a user of our products or services, we let them know that we appreciate that they have chosen us.
Second, I would like to encourage novel thinking and experimentation with new approaches. For example, we recently piloted a method to evaluate person-centered outcomes for individuals we directly serve; James Johnson has developed a novel approach to document handling for
iEC that has eluded us until now; Jeanne Tomiser is experimenting with a new approach to assessing dementia in older individuals with profound intellectual disabilities. These new approaches hold the promise of contributing to our field as a whole.
Third, I would like you to be on the lookout for other approaches that we might borrow, adopt and use effectively. That is how we began publishing the
Motivation Assessment Scale-Jeanne Tomiser originally brought it to my attention and, now, we are about to publish a version in Spanish. Similarly, Eric McDaniel recently identified a researcher interested in publishing a set of positive behavior support tools that he has been working on over several years.
I invite you to comment on this vision by logging in and selecting the
Discuss tab at the top of this page, or by sending comments to Jared to post here or by sending me an email. I want this to be as easy and as comprehensive as possible.
I also invite you to make suggestions for improvement,
here.
Regards,
Greg