For many providers, grant funding marks the beginning of large-scale enabling tech pilots. These pilots typically include reporting requirements that document the progress, successes and perhaps, setbacks in the onboarding, adoption and monitoring phases.
So, how providers ensure that they can provide positive results back to the grant providers?
Here are a few tips to follow as you receive your grant funding:
- Purchase enabling technology solutions that cover an array of intellectual disabilities.
If enabling and assistive technology providers are telling you that 100% of the people served will adopt the technology…use caution! (We find that a more realistic number of 82% as reflected in our MeMinder pilot study with NIDDELR.) - Purchase enabling technology solutions that are able to monitor the feedback and provide reporting capabilities. You will need this functionality to simplify the grant reporting process.
- Choose an enabling technology vendor that offers enabling technology solutions on a cafeteria style basis. This way you are not “stuck” with a huge (and expensive) technology platform that will overwhelm some of your staff members as well as the people you serve. In addition, cafeteria style technology enables you to remain true to an individual’s person-centered care plan.
- Choose a technology provider that can partner with you to provide “back up plans” for those who do not “take” to the technology. For example, when our clients purchase MeMinder task-prompting, we expect that there will be a few folks who may not take to it. CreateAbility then provides our simpler, QR-code-driven task-prompting technology for those individuals.
When all levels of intellectual disabilities and personalities are covered – the odds for positive outcomes in your reporting increase dramatically!
- Choose an enabling technology partner who provides evidence-based technology solutions. That’s important as it equates to third-party verification of outcomes. In most cases it also means that the development of the technology is partially covered by grants; decreasing some of the costs for providers.
CreateAbility has 20+ years of working with grant providers in the area of enabling and assistive technology. Should you have any questions on how to get the most out of your grant funding, don’t hesitate to reach out to us here!
