Program Evaluation
Many organizations want to be able to evaluate programs,
but there are often some questions about the best way to accomplish this.
It's important to remember that the focus of the FAS Outcomes application
is to track each youth's progress. When a youth has received more than
one assessment, the application always compares the most recent assessment
to the Initial Assessment. Now that you're an expert on the available
features of the application, conducting program evaluation will be easy.
The first step is to set clear guidelines about how often assessments
are routinely done. Many organizations follow a model of doing an intake,
followed by quarterly assessments, and an Exit CAFAS
Depending on your organization's needs, the Supervisor Dashboard and Aggregate Report may be more than sufficient for your reporting needs. They allow you to specify which programs you want to report on and get results quickly.
However other organizations may want to do a more in-depth
or specific examination of the data and they can easily use the Data Export
function to accomplish this. Because of the breadth of information available
from the Data Export function, you can conduct very sophisticated program
evaluation quite simply. For example, for each client you'll not only
get demographics but also information on Evidence Based Treatments and
Client Labels. For each assessment, you not only get all of the CAFAS
To give you a sense of the types of questions users typically want to answer, we'll go through a few quick scenarios.
You could look at the effectiveness of specific Service Areas or Programs--this could include a program evaluation for an innovative treatment that your organization may have developed. This type of analysis would allow you to provide support for highly effective programs that are working well in your community.
You could also use the Data Export to examine the rate of improvement for your clients. Instead of looking at a treatment you're looking at the rate of improvement across the course of time the youth was in services--when do youths make the greatest gains? And, more importantly, at what point are there diminished returns--where additional services results in far less gains? Does continuing services lead to improvement in the youth's functioning? A recent study done in one state found that highly impaired youths continued to make significant improvement up to a year, but then found severely diminishing returns after that. These were interesting results, because it was studied in the context of a program that automatically allowed services to continue services for two years which, judging from the data, may not be the best decision.
You could also combine the outcome information from the application with your billing data to look at outcomes in terms of costs and length of treatment. An example in one state found that four months of family-based parent management training produced far better outcomes than eleven months of treatment as usual.
Knowing this kind of information can be extraordinarily helpful to your organization, making it more adaptive and competitive in the market while ensuring the delivery of high-quality, consumer-valued services.
If you're an organization that uses the transfer function, you can also easily utilize the Data Export to evaluate the specific programs a youth belonged to during the course of his or her treatment. We have some additional tips that you would probably find useful, please contact us if you would like more information.