Getting Ahead of DDS Referral Deadlines

The Problem

The organization manages residential services for individuals referred by the Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services (DDS). With more than 180 residential homes, matching a referral with the right opening already required quite a bit of coordination between the people managing referrals and the people managing vacancies.

The process worked, but it wasn’t especially easy to keep straight.

The referrals team had one Excel spreadsheet. The vacancies team had another. A lot of the information about an individual referral also lived in email, sometimes spread across different employees and different email conversations.

So, while the information was technically there, getting the whole story often meant piecing it together.

If a manager wanted to know where a referral stood, they might need to check the referral spreadsheet, compare it against the vacancy spreadsheet, figure out how long the referral had been open, search through email for the latest conversations, and potentially track down someone else who had information they hadn’t seen.

Then the DDS requirements changed.

The organization now needed to respond to a referral within 30 days and complete the move-in process within 90 days. If the 90-day deadline was missed, the funding associated with that placement could be at risk.

That made the old way of working a much bigger problem.

It was no longer enough to know which referrals were open. Managers needed to be able to quickly answer a more important question:

Which referrals need our attention right now?

Getting Everything in One Place

The organization came to ThreeWill while some of the new DDS requirements were still being worked out.

That could have been a reason to wait. Instead, we worked with their team to build an initial version of the process based on what they knew at the time, and then adjusted it as they learned more.

ThreeWill also reviewed the available DDS requirements alongside the client team so we could help turn their understanding of the rules into something that actually worked day-to-day.

The end result was an application, available through Microsoft Teams, that brought the referral and vacancy processes together.

Employees can now see things like:

• Current referrals and available vacancies
• The residential home associated with a referral
• Referral status
• Approaching 30-day and 90-day deadlines
• Notes and interactions related to the individual
• Previous referral history
• Transfers and alternate-home activity

The notes are especially useful because they stay with the referral record and show who entered them. Someone doesn’t need to have been copied on the original email thread to understand what has already happened.

There is also a dashboard that calls attention to referrals getting close to important deadlines, which means managers don’t have to go looking for the problem before they can do something about it.

What Changed

Moving the information out of separate spreadsheets certainly helped, but that wasn’t really the biggest change.

The bigger difference was that managers could finally see the information they needed together, while there was still time to act on it.

Before the application, figuring out which referrals needed attention could mean checking spreadsheets, digging through email, and reconciling information maintained by different people.

Now a manager can go to one place and answer questions like:

• Which referrals are getting close to the 30-day deadline?
• Which placements are getting close to 90 days?
• What vacancies are currently available?
• What has already happened with this referral?
• Has this person been referred before?
• Has a transfer or alternate home changed anything?
• Where does the team need to focus its attention today?

A referral review that could previously take about an hour of gathering and reconciling information can now be completed within minutes.

Across the referrals and vacancies teams, the new process saves approximately five staff hours each week that would otherwise be spent looking for information, comparing records, and confirming where things stand.

That’s time the team can spend working on the placement itself instead of figuring out what happened before they got there.

Staying Ahead of the Deadlines

The application is now live, and the organization has one shared place to manage a process that’s directly tied to both service delivery and funding.

The 30-day and 90-day deadlines are visible right alongside the referrals themselves. Managers can see which cases are getting close and direct attention there before the deadline becomes a problem.

Since the application went live:

Two separate spreadsheets have effectively become one shared process.
Referral and vacancy information can now be reviewed together instead of being reconciled manually.

Managers can identify priority referrals within minutes.
They no longer have to reconstruct the status of a referral by pulling information from multiple places.

The team saves approximately five staff hours each week.
Less time is spent searching for information and more time can be spent moving referrals forward.

No funding has been lost because a 90-day deadline was missed.
Managers now have visibility into approaching deadlines early enough to address them.

And there is more at stake here than making the administrative side of the process easier.

A referral represents an individual waiting to move into an appropriate residential setting. If that process gets stuck, there can be a funding consequence, but there can also be a person waiting longer than they need to.

Giving managers earlier visibility doesn’t guarantee that every placement will be easy, of course. It does give them more time to see where something is getting stuck and do something about it.

Still Able to Change

One of the things we knew going into the project was that the DDS process wasn’t necessarily done changing.

So we didn’t want to build something that only worked for one version of the rules.

Because the organization continues to work with ThreeWill through Managed Services, the application can change as their process changes. If DDS requirements are updated, the organization changes the way it handles referrals, or the people doing the work find a better way to manage something, we can adjust the application along with it.

That turned out to be important because the organization didn’t have to wait until every question was answered before getting started.

They could solve the problem they had in front of them and improve the process from there.

The Bottom Line

The organization didn’t really have a spreadsheet problem.

They had a visibility problem.

The information they needed existed, but it was spread across spreadsheets, emails, and different people. That made it difficult to tell which referrals needed attention, and the new DDS deadlines made that lack of visibility much more consequential.

Today, referrals, vacancies, communication history, and approaching deadlines all come together in one place.

For an organization managing more than 180 residential homes, that means less time figuring out where things stand and more time doing something about it before a deadline is missed.