Supervisor Tools
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:
Real-time, "rolled up" (aggregate) information about clients exhibiting specific types of behaviors (for example, fire setting).
The ability to "drill down" to individual clients of interest.
An Excel
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.
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 came in yesterday, 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 show you the problems clients present with at intake. 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.
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 clinical marker of Youth High-Risk Behaviors Present.
Clicking anywhere in this box will show the listing of risk behaviors and the number of youths with those behaviors.
If you want to know the clients who are possibly suicidal, click on the underlined number to see all of those youth.
If you wanted to review the case details of Mixedup Matt, for example, you could click on his name and you would be taken to his Client Dashboard.
Let's show you a few handy table features that we can see in the example below.
1. Sort - In the table above with MixedUp Matt, you'll notice that the column headings are underlined (e.g. Name, Total Score, 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
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.
The Supervisor Dashboard has a number of helpful indicators to keep your organization running smoothly. There are four sections of results: the Activity Report, Cases and Assessments, Clinical Markers, and Outcome Indicators (if you've chosen re-assessments).
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 CAFAS
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 any assessments, for example, 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.
Beneath the Activity Report are three orange boxes: Cases, Assessment, and Assessment Status Marked.
Cases - "Total" indicates the number of cases assessed between the start and end dates provided, and "New Cases" indicates the number of cases that were both created and assessed within the specified dates.
Assessment - The Assessment box displays the number of Initial and/or Re-Assessments done within the date range depending on the type of assessments you chose to show. When selecting your criteria for the sample selection, if you chose "Initial Assessments" then you will only see the number of initial assessments done in time period. Similarly, if you chose "Re-Assessments" you will see the number of re-assessments done in the time period. If, however, you choose "All Assessments", then the total number of initial and re-assessments will be shown.
You will also see "Assessments with Missing scores".
This tells you how many assessments had no CAFAS
Assessment Status Marked
- This box tells us the number and percent of assessments that were marked
"Signed" or "Unsigned". When an assessor marks a CAFAS
Clinical Markers are based on the CAFAS
Most of the clinical indicators that appear on the Supervisor
Dashboard are also available to the CAFAS
You can click anywhere on any of these boxes to drill down and view more detailed information.
CAFAS
When you click on this box you will see the total number
and percent of youth scoring at each of the CAFAS
Note that the number in the box shows the number of cases with a total score of one hundred or more, which is a very high score, so think of it is a quick way to see the more extreme cases. Even if the indicator is at zero you can still click the box to see the details for cases below one hundred.
Youth High Risk Behaviors Present - This shows the number of cases that present with high risk behaviors, which are based on specific items endorsed for the youth. Drilling down will show you the list of risk behaviors and how many youth were endorsed for each risk behavior. You can easily know which youths have each of the risk behaviors.
Pervasive Behavioral Impairment - This is an important Clinical Marker because published research has shown that the youth with this marker are less likely to get better with treatment-as-usual. Youths are considered pervasively behaviorally impaired if they are moderately or severely impaired (scores of 20 or 30) on all three of the following subscales: School, Home and Behavior Toward Others. If this indicator is present, consider it a flag that the youth may need a stronger intervention.
Severe Impairments - Clicking on this box will show your clients in tiers based on the number of Severe Impairments they have, whether it is zero, one, two, and three or more. The clients with more severe impairments would likely need a higher intensity of treatment to ensure treatment progress and to lessen the risk of frequent crises and/or placement.
The number in the box reports on clients who have three or more severe impairments. A client is marked as severely impaired on a subscale if they are given a score of thirty, so these are the clients that scored thirty on three or more subscales.
Severe Impairment by Subscale - Clicking this box allows you to see the total number of youth and percent of youth who are severely impaired in each of the eight subscales, such as at school or at home. This may help you generate ideas about types of specific services that are most needed. The number in the box shows the number of youth who have a Severe Impairment on one or more subscales.
CAFAS Tiers
There are nine CAFAS Tiers
Improving Child Management Skills - The number in the box indicates the number of cases in which the caregivers could benefit from receiving a parent management training intervention at the start of treatment. There are two criteria for this indicator. The youth must be rated as moderately or severely impaired on the home subscale and not have major comorbidity (i.e. the youth is not severely impaired on the Thinking, Substance Use, Self-Harm, Mood, or Community subscales). Program evaluation on an evidence-based parent management training program showed that these criteria were excellent for selecting youth who could benefit from parent management training at the start of their treatment.
The final section of the Supervisor Dashboard, Outcome Indicators, only appears if you chose "Re-Assessments in time period (Includes Outcomes)" as the assessment type in your sample selection criteria. To generate outcomes, the youth's most recent assessment is compared to his or her initial assessment for that episode. In the example below, we can see that there are twelve youth who have had a re-assessment in the time period specified. Note that the initial assessment does not need to have been done within the time period specified for outcomes to be generated--regardless of when the assessment was done (or even if it was done in a different Service Area or Program), the program will always go all the way back to the initial assessment for that episode to generate outcomes.
Additionally, we want to note that these indicators vary in degree of ambitiousness. Not all youth would be expected to achieve success on all of them.
As you can see, there are four indicator boxes, each showing the total youth and percentage of youth who improved, did not improve, or were excluded from that indicator.
Improvement on One or More Outcome Indicators - This first indicator is presented as an overview of the other three. It lets you know how many youth improved or did not improve on any of the other three indicators. Youth are marked improved if they improved on any of the other three indicators, and are marked not improved if they did not improve in any of the other three indicators. Note that if a youth was excluded from all of the other three indicators that youth will also be excluded from this indicator.
Meaningful and Reliable
Change Indicator - Improvement for this indicator is defined
by at least a 20-point reduction on the CAFAS
Severe Impairments
Change Indicator - Here improvement means that youth who had
at least one severe impairment on their intake CAFAS
Pervasive Behavioral Impairment Change Indicator - Our final outcomes indicator captures improvement on the Pervasive Behavioral Impairment indicator. Those in the improved category no longer meet the criteria for pervasive behavioral impairment while those who are not improved still do meet the criteria. The excluded youth are those who did not meet the criteria at the time of their initial assessment.
Note that these boxes allow for drilling down. You can drill down by clicking on any of the underlined numbers in the box to display the youth who in that category. The example below shows data for those youth who did not see Meaningful and Reliable Change, but you can do the same drill downs for all four of the indicators.
Above, we have drilled down so you can see the seven youth who are no longer pervasively behaviorally impaired. Drilling down gives you some demographic information and summary outcome information on each youth. Additionally, you can view any client's dashboard by clicking his or her name.
You should note that just because a youth is in the "Excluded"
category of an indicator does not mean that you can assume they are improving.
It only means that they did not meet the indicator's criteria at the time
of their Initial CAFAS
As you've just seen, looking at these four Outcome Indicators gives you an easy way to monitor progress while the youth is still in treatment. It quickly identifies youth who may need an adjustment in services. You can improve agency outcomes by using these tools to aid treatment decisions.
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 Intake Report that just includes initial assessments and an Outcomes Report that compares the initial and most recent assessments. 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.
First we'll look at the Intake Report, which allows you to understand the presenting needs of your clients 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.
As you can see below, at the top of the report is a summary of your selection criteria.
In the next 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.
The third box shows how many youth were included in this report--the sample size. For this example, we have a sample size of eighteen youth.
The next box contains a chart that presents information
on the CAFAS
The next chart shows the breakdown of youth in each of
the eight CAFAS
Note: The columns will often not total to 100% because youth with no impairment are not shown.
The next sections shows the number and percent of youth
in each of the CAFAS
The next chart shows the percent of youth in each of
the CAFAS Tiers
Following the CAFAS Tiers
The final section shows the number of clients that could
not be included in this report because a CAFAS
Now let's take a look at the Outcomes Report. Below is a three-page sample report. As you can see, this report has some of the same types of information as the initial report. However, this report is oriented towards outcome data.
As you can see below, at the top of the report is a summary of your selection criteria. This section has much of the same information as the header on the initial assessment report.
The next box shows how many youth were included in this report - the sample size. For this example we have a sample size of thirteen youth.
In the third 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.
The first section reports the average change in CAFAS
The next chart shows change for each subscale. The average
Initial Subscale Score on the left (shown in blue) is compared to the
Most Recent CAFAS
Next we see the same Outcome Indicators that are found on the Supervisor Dashboard. Again, this reports the number and percent of youth who were either improved, not improved, or excluded on each indicator.
The last chart illustrates progress made for each of
the CAFAS Tiers.
Finally, similar to the Intake Report we are given the number of clients who were excluded from this report because of unreported data.
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
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.