Meaningful feedback is an important component of true collaboration, the driving principle of the CANS-NY tool and the CANS-NY Institute. As such, the CANS-NY Institute has an Impact Board which consists of individuals with lived experience of care, leaders who support transformation across our State, and regulatory partners from the New York State Department of Health (DOH), New York State Office of Children & Family Services (OCFS), the New York State Office of Mental Health (OMH), the New York State Office of Alcoholism & Substance Abuse Services (OASAS), the New York State Office for People with Developmental Disabilities (OPWDD) and the AIDS Institute (AI).
Board members are expected to:
- Guide the activities of the Institute in support of comprehensive and integrated care for the youth and families of New York State
- Share knowledge about how youth and families experience of the CANS-NY
- Share knowledge about how the CANS-NY is being used to guide care
- Provide input on needs for training and coaching supports, to increase effective use of the CANS-NY as a collaborative assessment and care planning/monitoring tool
CANS-NY Institute leadership provides monthly email updates to the Impact Board about Institute progress and findings. In May 2018, the Impact Board of the CANS-NY Institute met for the first time to discuss emerging learning needs, Institute effectiveness and consumer perspective on the CANS-NY. This discussion provided key insights regarding the use and impact of the CANS-NY on youth/families and the child-serving system in New York State:
- The CANS-NY has a long history in New York State, where it has been used since 2000 to understand youth in a variety of care systems, to better triage youth for services and to meaningfully plan collaborative care with youth and families.
- CANS-NY assessments need to be done in collaboration with a family. This means different things for different families: some may want to go step by step through rating of items, while others may find that overwhelming and need to participate in a different way. Care managers and providers using the CANS-NY need the skills to effectively engage families and meet them where they are.
- Health Home care managers will use the CANS-NY as the starting point to develop a comprehensive plan of care that coordinates individual service provision plans.
- Acuity algorithms are designed to help providers make consistent decisions based on youth/family stories and address provider biases. They help communicate the complexity of actionable needs for a given youth/family. They are also dependent on accurate representation of a family’s story through the CANS-NY ratings.
The next Impact Board meeting will be held in October 2018. A listing of current Impact Board members can be found here.