I am attending a conference on the Robert Wood Johnson Advancing Recovery project as part of Missouri's grant team (www.MIMH.edu/AdvancingRecovery-MO). During that meeting Victor Capoccia of NIATx observed that
there are no consistent descriptions of treatment or providers for substance abuse services.
His observations were based on addiction treatment but really the problem is also true for mental health and medical related treatment.
Why is consistent important?
o To allow for consumer choice there must be a way to compare one set of treatments/services with another.
o To aggregate information across a community this information needs to be available and collectable.
We have done limited approaches to do this - basically a centralized repository of information about treatment programs for mental health, substance abuse, and MR/DD services across a circumscribed region (SAMHI.MIMH.edu). There are problems with this approach. Most importantly it requires a centralized system to collect, organize, and present this information on an ongoing basis. This is expensive and time consuming.
What about instead of a centralized group being responsible for this would be to push this out to the treatment providers themselves. What would this look like
o An XML standard program description format.
o A XSLT to allow this XML form to be presented in a consumer friendly format.
o A search engine could aggregate these descriptions that would automate the ability to compare and contrast services and to match consumer needs to treatment provider capabilities. This search engine could go to the web sites or could subscribe to this information via RSS feeds. This makes provider updated information automatically and continuously aggregatable.
o Case managers could subscribe as well so that they can automatically keep up with revised information from the providers in their area or that they commonly use. (For more on the underlying concepts of what is called syndication-oriented architecture see this post by Jon Udell.)
There are clear advantages to consumers for such a system. This as evidenced by the various popular comparison shopping sites for consumer goods. For the providers this would help them promote their services more broadly, and serve the dual purpose of providing information on their site AND in a common aggregation location.
What do you think? Where might this go?