JIFF® Advanced Features for Supervisors in FAS Outcomes
Supervisor Tools

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Supervisor Dashboard

The Supervisor Dashboard is a reporting feature offered by FAS Outcomes to supervisors (users with the role of Business Administrator).The Supervisor Dashboard is always easy to access from the left navigation menu. It gives you an overview of all of your clients, records compliance, and the status of each case's Service Plan. The purpose of the Supervisor Dashboard is to give supervisors a quick and easy way to view what is happening right now so that you can easily provide targeted supervision.  You will have:


Using the Supervisor Dashboard

This document will go over several useful features to enhance your understanding and experience of the Supervisor Dashboard, including, how to choose which clients to display on the Supervisor Dashboard, easy ways to "drill down" and access more specific pieces of information, and how to save copies of the dashboard results so that you can make the most of the data that is being displayed.


Criteria Selection

You decide which clients to include on the Supervisor Dashboard. You make several selections that will define the clients to include on the dashboard. Simply click on the down arrow by "Criteria for sample selection" to display this screen:

This is a collapsible feature that guides you through selecting the clients you will see results for. It will minimize itself when not in use. Let's go through each of the criteria in detail:

1. Date Range - Select the date range of clients you would like to view. You can easily decide to view just the clients who were assessed within the last day, last week, or last month. For example, you could use the Supervisor Dashboard to check every morning to see if any clients who were suicidal or an aggressive threat came in the day before. If you would prefer to review a specific time period, select "Other" and enter the start and end dates. Keep in mind that the Supervisor Dashboard has a maximum date range of a 90-days. You can, however, choose any 90-day time period, it doesn't have to be the last 90-days. You can use the calendar icons for easier selection.

2. Service Area(s) / Program(s) - Select which clients to include by choosing a Program or an entire Service Area. You have the option to include as many or as few of your Service Areas and Programs as you like. The Service Areas and Programs are organized in a hierarchy, with the higher (parent) items appearing with the lower (child) items nested within them. For an explanation of how parent items relate to child items in the list, click here.

3. Show - You can decide to show only active clients, inactive clients, or both. Later we discuss inactivating clients here, but essentially you can think of them as clients who are not currently receiving services. This can be an extremely useful feature if you wish to review clients who have exited services, or only clients who are actively receiving services.

4. Assessments - You can also specify what type of assessments to include. There are three options to choose from. The first option, Initial Assessments in time period, will summarize the problems presented by clients who had an initial assessment in your given time period. This is helpful for seeing what problems clients have when entering treatment. If you choose All Assessments in time period, you'll see information on the current status of all of the youth being served (i.e. you will see the most recent assessment for every client regardless of whether it is an initial assessment or a re-assessment). If you choose Re-assessments in time period, you'll see the outcomes to date for all cases that have had more than one assessment.

Once you've made your selections, simply hit the search button. The page will refresh to display your results.

The next few sections highlight several helpful features of the Supervisor Dashboard as well as reviewing the content that is displayed on the Dashboard.


Drill Down

We use the term "drill down" to refer to the ability of clicking on piece of information to see a greater level of detail.  On the Supervisor Dashboard, whenever you see a number, percent, or client's name underlined, that indicates that you can "drill down" into that information to learn something more detailed.

The example provided below is from the Supervisor Dashboard:

We're looking at the goals that were endorsed for each of the subscales.

  1. Clicking on the icon will show the listing of goals that are a part of that subscale and the number and percent of plans that endorsed those goals.

  2. You can drill down further by clicking one of the listed goals to view which cases endorsed the specific goal.

  3. You can then click on any of the client's names to be taken to their profile page.

In the example above, we have chosen to drill down on the Feelings subscale, in which 33% of the clients in the sample select at least one goal. We then see each of the goals in the Feelings subscale that had been selected, in addition to how many plans it was selected on and the percent of the total sample. Drilling down on a goal then lists the cases in which the goal was selected. In our example, Ingrid Internalizing and Tommy Truant both were endorsed for "Evaluation to assess depression (CAFAS)", which is recommending they get evaluated by the CAFAS®. Clicking on either name will take you to their Client Dashboard to review case details.

Note: Because the JIFF® has both youth and caregiver versions of the interview, it is possible that one youth's name could appear on a drill down list more than once. The column "Source" lets you know whether the JIFF® interview was completed by the youth or caregiver.


Table Features

Let's show you a few handy table features that we can see in the example below.

1. Sort - In the table above with Sorry Larry, you'll notice that the column headings are underlined (e.g. Name, Source, etc.). If you were to click on one of the column headings, that would sort the table by that category.

2. Export - The second feature that you definitely want to know about is the ability to get a copy of the table. This is very helpful if you want to take the list to a team or supervisory meeting. You get this listing by clicking "Export" next to the Excel® icon above the table. The table will be exported in the Excel® format, so you'll be able to print it out or save it to your computer if you so desire.

3. What's this? - Additionally, throughout the program there are "What's this?" links, which will give you an explanation of the item you're viewing if you hover the mouse over it

4. Go Back to Dashboard - Notice at the bottom of the screen there's a link that will return you to the Supervisor Dashboard.


Dashboard Results

Now that we've seen how the Drill Down feature works, let's review the Dashboard Results. There are five sections of results - the Activity Report, Assessments and Service Plan Status, and three indicators flagging cases with goals selected that reflect high risk behaviors or mental health or substance use issues, goals selected, and cases where caregivers have indicated a high level of help is needed.


Activity Report

The first item displayed on the Supervisor Dashboard is the Activity Report, which summarizes information about assessments based on the "Next Assessment Due Date" that is specified when a JIFF® is being setup.

The Activity Report makes it easy for you to see the number of Overdue Assessments and Upcoming Assessments in addition to alerting you to the number of Active Cases with no new assessments in the last five months. We also put these indicators on each of your staffs' "My Dashboard" to help them stay in compliance and on task with what they are supposed to be doing.

Note: The Activity Report is based on the end date specified under search criteria, so, for example, any assessments that were due by the specified end date that have not yet been done will be counted towards Overdue Assessments. Note that this shows assessments as of the end date specified that are currently still overdue, it does not show you what assessments were overdue as of the specified date. The Activity Report is for knowing the current status of assessments up to the specified date and does not provide a historical record of assessments that were at one time overdue.


Assessments and Service Plan Status

Beneath the Activity Report are two orange boxes: Assessments, and Service Plan Status.

Assessments - The Assessments box displays the number of cases included in the dashboard showing you how many of the assessments were completed by the youth and how many were completed by the caregiver. You also see the number of cases that were interrupted and are restartable. The JIFF® interview can be interrupted if, for instance, you lose the internet connection, or the power goes out in the middle of the interview. You have 24-hours to log back in to complete the interview. When you restart the interview it will pick up where you left off beginning with the section that the respondent was in at the time of the interruption. If you take longer than 24 hours, the youth or caregiver will have to start the interview over from the beginning.

Service Plan Status - This box tells us the number and percent of assessments that were marked "completed," those left "unfinished", and the number that have "not been started". Service Plans labeled as "not started" are typically seen when the youth completes the interview but the staff person has not had a chance to review the results. When an assessor marks a JIFF® Service Plan as Completed, they are acknowledging that they have completed the selection of goals and services to be addressed by the Service Plan. We will discuss marking assessments complete in greater detail here later on.


Indicators

There are indicators on the Supervisor Dashboard that summarize how the youths in your selection are doing. The indicators focus on the goals that were selected on client Service Plans. Before going into the specific indicators, we need to go over a few things about the goal selection process.

The JIFF® application interprets the youth and/or caregiver's answers to the JIFF® interview questions and nominates goals to address the problems or issues that were found, erring on the side of being inclusive (including a goal if any concern is expressed). The system automatically selects the goals it nominates after an interview, so if your organization does not use the Service Plan and is not de-selecting goals then the number of youths associated with each goal could be inflated. Since the indicators rely on the goals selected, they also will be inflated. Your staff will want to review the goals that were nominated and de-select any goals that they feel should not be addressed now. Typically we recommend you choose between three and seven goals to work on at any given time.

It should be noted that most of the indicators that appear on the Supervisor Dashboard are also available to the JIFF® assessors, but are targeted towards the specific client they are viewing and not a range of clients, so rather than showing the percent of youth that have High Risk Behaviors it would simply indicate if that specific youth has any High Risk Behaviors and what they are. Assessors can view these indicators by accessing the Client Dashboard. You too can access a client's dashboard any time you see a youth's name underlined by clicking the name. At your agency, you may have service protocols or decision guidelines in place for your staff for youth who are flagged by the indicators, such as if a youth has High Risk Behaviors like suicidality. Your agency would likely improve individual case decision-making by linking these indicators to guidelines provided to the staff.

Note: The Client Dashboard is a very useful tool for your staff because it summarizes the youths needs using charts and helpful indicators. If your organization administers the JIFF® more than once for each youth, such as at intake and then again upon exiting services, the Client Dashboard and the subsequent JIFF® Service Plans will include a chart that compares the youth's percent endorsement of subscales over time so you can easily see if the youth is improving.


High Risk Behaviors

The first indicator on the Supervisor Dashboard flags cases with High Risk Behaviors. It reports on the number of Service Plans that currently have goals selected that are indicative of High Risk Behaviors. If your organization does not have any youths with High Risk Behavior goals selected, the space under the headings of this indicator will be blank.

The high risk behavior goals address aggressive behaviors in three life domains: at school, in the home, and in the community. It also includes those with fire-setting tendencies and youth who reported inappropriate sexual behavior. These particular goals have been flagged as high risk to alert you to youth who may need specialized intervention.


Mental Health and Substance Use

The next indicator quickly identifies those youth for whom goals related to mental health needs and substance use needs were selected.

The goals state that these youth should have a more in-depth evaluation to assess whether anxiety or depression is present, if there are problems related to a traumatic experience, and if the youth is a suicide risk. We recommend that the CAFAS® (Child and Adolescent Functional Assessment Scale®) be used for further assessment. It is a more in-depth assessment that is often used when mental heath concerns are identified. You may want to develop guidelines for your staff to ensure that youths who appear in these indicators receive any needed specialized mental health services or co-occurring treatment for substance use.


Goals Selected

The next set of indicators reports the percent of Service Plans that have at least one goal selected for each of the JIFF® Subscales. Clicking on the picture will drill down to a list showing you each of the goals associated with that subscale and the number and percent of Service Plans that include that goal. If you then click on the underlined goal, you will be taken to the list of clients, as mentioned when we talked about drilling down. Again, you can easily save this table as an Excel® file to take to a supervisory meeting, for example. These lists can be handy for proactive supervision. If you have established specific programs or services that address the JIFF® goals you can easily check this list to make sure that all of the youth who should be receiving that service are enrolled.

This allows you to easily at-a-glance see which goals are the most prevalent among your cases. In this example, we can see that goals within the "School" and "Noncompliance in Home" subscales are selected most often.


Caregiver's Rating of Need

The final indicator on the JIFF® Supervisor Dashboard report's findings from Caregiver JIFF® interviews. If your agency does not use the Caregiver JIFF® interview, this indicator will not contain any information, which is why it appears as a collapsible table. For organizations who do use the caregiver version of the JIFF®, this table is a way of collecting some of the additional information the interview asks of caregivers. For each of the subscales shown, the caregiver is asked to rate their child's level of need for help during the interview at the end of the appropriate subscale. The caregiver must choose on a scale of 0 to 5, where 0 indicates no help needed and 5 indicates help needed very much. The indicator included on the Supervisor Dashboard gives the number and percent of caregivers who reported that their child has a strong need for help in each of these JIFF® subscales (ratings of 4 and 5).

As before, clicking on the numbers next to the subscales will give you the list of youths. In the example above, there is one caregiver who expressed a great need for help on the "Noncompliance in Home" scale, which could indicate that the youth is at greater risk for out-of-home placement.

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Aggregate Reports

There are two aggregate reports built into the program. You can easily access these reports from the left-navigation menu. The program generates these reports instantaneously, based on the criteria you specify. The program includes two versions, the Youth JIFF® Intake Report and the Caregiver JIFF® Intake Report. Similar to the Supervisor Dashboard, you can filter the results by Service Area and Program, and decide whether you want to include active clients, inactive clients, or both. When choosing the date range to include, there is a maximum range of 365 days. Note, this is any 365 day period, not just the last year.


Youth Intake Report

First we'll look at the Youth JIFF® Intake Report which allows you to understand the presenting needs of your youths so you can easily identify what types of problems youth are having when they first walk in the door. Below is a three-page sample Intake Report that gives you an overview of what the report is like. The report consists of a number of informative boxes, charts, and graphs, and we will go over each part in more detail. In general, the information presented on the Aggregate Reports is similar to what we just saw on the Supervisor Dashboard, however it is put in a different format and comes as a convenient PDF which you can save or print.


Youth Intake Report Header Information

As you can see below, at the top of the report is a summary of your selection criteria.

The next box shows how many youth were included in this report--the sample size. For this example, we have a sample size of thirty-one youth.

In the last box we see a summary of the demographic characteristics of the sample, including the mean (or average), age of the youth, the age range, the percent of youth who are preadolescent (twelve and younger) and adolescent (thirteen and older), and the percent male and female.


Youth JIFF®: Average Percent Endorsed

In general, the information presented on the aggregate reports is very similar to what we just saw on the Supervisor Dashboard. The first chart shows us the average percent endorsement for each of the ten Youth JIFF® Subscales, informing us about the needs of the youth. As you can see in this example, services that help address school problems and non-compliance in the home would be particularly important.


Number of Youth not asked School Questions

Below the chart the report tells you the number of youth who were not asked the school questions because they either graduated from high school, obtained a GED, or because they dropped out of school.

The paragraph below gives information about the next section of the report, which you can read if you so desire.


Service Plan Status

The next box, Service Plan Status, reports the number of plans that are complete and unfinished. If there were any plans that weren't started, they would appear here as well.


Percent of Youth for whom Each Goal Appear on the Youth JIFF® Service Plan

The final section of the report is a table showing the number and percent of youth for whom each of the JIFF® Goals appears on the youth's Service Plan. Goals that represent High Risk Behaviors are highlighted in red and include a warning symbol next to them. To avoid bad outcomes, you might develop protocols for staff to follow for some of the high risk behaviors. In this example there are eight youth who have a goal to address aggressive behavior at school. You'd want to have a plan that addresses the potential repeated aggressive behavior.


Caregiver Intake Report

Now let's take a look at the Caregiver Intake Report. As you can see glancing at the sample report below, the layout of the Caregiver Report is very similar to the Youth Report. While the information is based on the caregivers instead of the youth, the only addition to the report is the presence of an additional chart.


Percent of Caregivers Reporting 'Need for help' at Critical Levels

The Caregiver Report includes one additional chart compared to the Youth Report, which shows the percent of caregivers who report a critical need for help. This chart is divided into the JIFF® Subscales so you can see what areas parents are saying they need the most help in. In this example, school is by far the area that parents most often report needing help for.

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Data Export

The third tool available to supervisors that we'll be talking about here is the Data Export, which is easily accessible from the left navigation menu just like the Supervisor Dashboard and Aggregate Reports. An export means you get a copy of your organization's data and can access it outside of FAS Outcomes. You have a few choices for what form the data comes in. You can put the data in Excel® or you can use SPSS for more advanced data analysis. The Data Export gives you data at the client level, and includes many of the indicators you've seen on the Supervisor Dashboard and on the Aggregate Reports. Typically, the export function can serve a few purposes:

  1. You can easily use the export to generate the full list of youth who have been assessed for a given time period,

  2. You can answer more specific program or research questions, such as comparing youth in different programs.

  3. You can use the Data Export to examine change over time if your organization conducts repeated administrations of the JIFF®. The export generates a total score and scores for the two most common problem areas, "School" and "Noncompliance in Home" and you can look at change in these scores over time.

Note: The export gives you two types of scores, one that calculates a score based on the "Yes" responses, and one that generates scores based on the "Yes" and "Maybe" answers. The justification for generating the "Yes and Maybe" score is that it is possible that youth and caregivers might worry that answering "Yes" to certain questions would incriminate the youth in some way, so they choose "Maybe" instead. Therefore, depending on the type of program you are looking at, we find that it can sometimes be helpful to have the "Yes and Maybe" score.

  1. You can combine the exported data with other data so that you can examine the relationship between outcomes and other information, such as cost.

The Data Export screen is shown in full below:

As you can see, the Data Export is highly customizable, putting the control of choosing which variables to export in your hands. It also allows you to specify the clients and the types of information you want. Staff who have been assigned the role of "IT Administrator" for a specific Service Area can also do exports.

Typically, staff that have skills in working with data sets use this function, such as your IT, Quality Assurance, or evaluation staff. Going to "Help" on the export screen will provide these users with all of the detailed information they need to fully utilize the Data Export.

We have now looked at the three built-in tools for supervisors.

We started off with the Supervisor Dashboard, which provides real-time, up-to-the minute aggregate reporting that can be especially useful for daily or weekly monitoring of cases.

Next we looked at the two Aggregate Reports, which provide a summary of clients' needs at intake and change over time. You might want to do these monthly, quarterly and/or annually.

Finally, we explored the Data Export, which can be used to conduct program evaluation to answer specific questions.

We hope that you have learned how you can start using these powerful tools to help your organization run more efficiently and productively. Next we want to move on to more helpful information that you will definitely want to know as a supervisor, going next to the special privileges that users have who are assigned to the Business Administrator role.

Move on to Special Privileges for the Business Administrator Role

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