Technology Tools
HAP is committed to understanding and identifying the potential for technology to assist SHIPs in serving their Medicare beneficiaries. HAP’s provision of technology assistance centers around the development of web-based tools that support SHIPs in the areas of program administration, volunteer development and management, outreach, education, counseling and training. Supported by a grant from The Atlantic Philanthropies to study capacity building within the SHIP Network, HAP’s goals in providing technology assistance are two-fold: promoting ‘innovation from within’ and making these innovations available to all interested SHIPs.
To promote innovation from within, HAP listens to what SHIPs themselves have identified as their needs and then works with them to make their ideas a reality. In doing this, special attention is paid to how these technology innovations could benefit other interested SHIPs and be made more widely available. Through all technology development, HAP’s intent is to act as a vehicle for its widespread adoption throughout the Network.
To this end, HAP has worked on a series of web-based tools with two different SHIP Directors over the last year that also address needs identified by a technology survey of SHIP programs throughout the network that HAP conducted in the fall of 2004. HAP’s eNPR Service, electronic National Performance Reporting, is a web-based tool that captures the data required to satisfy national performance reporting elements as defined by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. It came out of a finding from HAP’s technology survey that approximately 57% of survey respondents report client contact forms via a paper-based process.
In addition, under Competitive Leadership Grants awarded to Iowa and Ohio SHIP programs in 2005, HAP collaborated with these states to address needs in the areas of volunteer development and management with a series of Web-Based Collaborative Tools and volunteer training with an Online Recertification System (O.R.S.). While first and foremost HAP’s goal in assisting these SHIP programs was to promote innovation from within, HAP was able to use data collected in the technology assessment to inform how these projects could also fulfill needs across a larger SHIP audience.
