Case Study: Delaware DHHS Incident Management System 

The state of Delaware's innovative approach to incident management brings together four divisions of the Department of Health and Social Services under one database. The shared system from WellSky helps identify perpetrators faster and keeps beneficiaries safe.  

Download an Executive Overview of the WellSky Incident Management Solution
WellSky offers a proven incident management system in use today that already meets the requirements of the Access Rule.

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Katie Howe, Director of Program Integrity at the Delaware Division of Developmental Disability Services, explains how the state's incident management system protects people in Delaware.

Transcript

Hi, I'm Katie Howe. I am the Director of Program Integrity at the Division of Developmental Disability Services in the state of Delaware. The Delaware Division of Developmental Disability Services works to ensure people are living the good lives of their choosing.

As the Director of Program Integrity, it is my responsibility to ensure that quality service reviews and critical incident investigations are conducted in a fair and consistent manner across our state. Additionally, we provide oversight and monitoring to our Medicaid home and community based providers.

A critical incident could be physical, emotional, psychological or sexual abuse, neglect, financial exploitation, some sort of significant injury, and medication errors of certain types. Recently, the federal government issued a final rule called the Access Rule. One of the components of that rule is conducting critical incident investigations and reporting out on that data. And while these rules don't go in effect for several years, I'm proud to say that Delaware is ahead of the curve.

In 2017, DDDS partnered with another division within the Department of Health and Social Services, the Division of Aging, who was also using the WellSky system at that time for their Adult Protective Services unit. We went fully live with the system in July of 2018. Suddenly we had all of this data at our fingertips and we were trying to figure out how to help our providers, see their own trends in their critical incident data.

One of the ways that we use our data is to provide a report to each provider that shows them their critical incident data. It can be arranged by site, by type of incident, and whether it's substantiated or unsubstantiated. Additionally, those reports can show them how they compare with providers of like size. I've been asked about what I've learned, this is what I say:

1. Discuss your current workflows with your colleagues and make sure they're written down appropriately. This is also an opportunity to make your processes more efficient.
   
   
2. Spell out your definitions clearly. We need to ensure that allegations are consistently defined, investigated, and either substantiated or unsubstantiated.
   
   
3. You also need to identify gaps in your data and reporting. During our implementation, DDDS identified a gap of not having the perpetrator in a reportable field. Even though we had all of that information in the system, it wasn't able to be pulled out into a report to have a list of perpetrators. Now we have that data on our perpetrators, and it is easily available to us so that we can identify if a perpetrator is working at multiple agencies and affecting multiple individuals.

Now DDDS is collaborating with three different divisions within the Department of Health and Social Services. We will all be using the same WellSky system to manage our critical incident data. By working together with the three other divisions within the Department of Health and Social Services, we'll be able to identify providers that we share and be able to address critical incidents together.

Download this executive overview of the WellSky incident management solution
WellSky offers a proven incident management system in use today that already meets the requirements of the Access Rule.

Download the overview