WEBINAR–February 21, 2014: Part 2 of “Understanding Care Days in a IV-E Waiver Context”

February 21, 2014
2 PM – 3:30 PM Central
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The federal title IV-E waiver program offers participating states an opportunity to convert federal board and care payments into interventions that improve the well-being of children. One key to success in the waiver context is managing the use of foster care by safely preventing placement, by safely reducing time in out of home care, or by safely increasing the use of family based care.  Although there are a number of ways to measure waiver impact, care days are a particularly useful construct.

In this the second installment of a multipart series on care days and state IV-E waivers, Fred Wulczyn will talk about the software engineering underway at Chapin Hall.  In the first installment, care days were introduced as a strategic quantity that can be used to solve a variety of problems when it comes to planning interventions, implementing interventions, and monitoring the outcomes tied to the interventions.  Care days are particularly useful because of how they connect to the cost of operating a foster care program throughout the levels of the system.

The presentation will be organized around 4 versions of a program called OSPEDALE.  OSPEDALE is a predictive analytics engine; the versions of the program all operate using the same basic structure; the differences are tied mainly to whether the version is still in an experimental phase of development.  Versions I is already widely available; Version I.a is ready for deployment; the other versions are at various points in the development cycle.

For the presentation, which will be a demo of the programs, we will cover this ground:

1. Show how to project outcomes for two populations – the population entering care and the so-called legacy population – and the associated savings
2. Show how to express changes in entries, length of stay, or level of care as changes in care days used and funds spent
3. Show how we use predictive analytics to provide real-time monitoring and other forms of feedback
4. Show how to use OSPEDALE to manage waiver calculations
5. Show how OSPEDALE is tied to CQI processes, logic models, and the deployment of interventions designed to improve the well-being of children

We will close with a discussion of likely future developments – looking at where the engineering technology will take the software; what other information is needed to use the tool effectively; and, what other software is available to help reinforce the use of research evidence in a CQI context.