Is Your EHR Vendor Ready for Person Centered Planning?

Person-Centered Planning (PCP) as a modality for organizing I/DD agencies has been gaining traction among both facilitators and executives. As the name suggests, it’s a process controlled and directed by the person who is receiving the support.

It involves a meeting focused on and attended by the person receiving support. Attendees may include family members, guardians, facilitators, or others.

What comes out of this meeting, or meetings, is an effective plan for helping the individual to choose their life as they want it right now. It takes into account strengths, interests, needs, goals, and dreams. 

PCP Plans Have Limited Effectiveness without Timely and Accurate Tracking

PCP plans represent a vision shared in common among a team, for a specific individual. 

But what happens when a PCP is ready to be acted on? When it comes out of the meeting and enters the real world? 

Sometimes the best PCP plans can run into difficulties if relevant information is not available on a timely basis. One of the most relevant pieces of information is the PCP plan itself. 

Is your EHR vendor ready for person-centered planning?

iCM enables PCP through a variety of modules including CareTracker and another module created specifically for PCP. 

Can your EHR vendor allow each involved agency the ability to set up a workflow designating the person responsible for each PCP task? iCM can. Even better, a system of alerts can be created for the lead-up to the annual PCP meeting date. These reminders keep everyone involved on track. When you plan accountability the results of the plan improve. 

Using such a workflow, an agency can create settings that make certain tasks in the PCP dependent on others being completed first, encouraging a logical or necessary progression. Critical tasks are prioritized. 

This logical progression and timing of tasks help the individual and facilitators create the best plans possible since the software reminds everyone of pre-planning activities in time enough to complete them. 

For example,  a due date for completing the pre-planning activities might be set 90 days prior to the PCP meeting. Or a deadline of uploading the PCP to the relevant network or database might be set for 10 days before implementation is scheduled to begin. 

Facilitators need to be able to see quickly whether a PCP process is on track, off track, or out of compliance. iCM can automatically track each PCP in a population and keep facilitators well informed. 

Can your EHR make sure that every staff member is trained on all the PCPs relevant to them? Can it remediate staff training on specific PCPs when a change of schedule or assignment occurs? 

iCM allows agencies the option to block any individual staff member’s access to a certain person until they’ve been trained on that person’s current PCP. This assists staff in staying on the same individual plans across multiple individuals, even with staff changes, transfers, and shift covers.

Software Should Assist in Creating a Plan and then in Implementing it

All plans, including PCPs, are only as good as their pre-planning processes allow them to be, and only as good as their implementation. Preplanning as well as implementation depend on timely information. 

Is your EHR ready for person-centered planning?