The idea of moving from a paper based agency to a computer system seems overwhelming for most providers.  It is definitely an exercise in change management as we have recently written about.  One of the pluses to getting everything off of paper and into a system is the ability to track everything in one platform.  Before, with paper, you could track things on forms or in different binders but that information is basically trapped on the paper.  If you stop and think about everything that you track for a client, from service notes to emergency contacts to units authorized, if you were tracking that in a single system as opposed to pieces of paper you would have tremendous data on every client you served and be better able to serve that client.  So to answer the title of this blog post, you can track everything that you're tracking now on paper.  The only difference is you can do a lot more with the information once you've noted it.  Let's examine some areas of tracking.

In a follow up to last month's blog post regarding a recent study that was co-sponsored by the Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities and the University of Illinois at Chicago's Department of Disability and Human Development, this post is going to focus on the study as it relates to state trends.