Improving the Intake Experience for Parents

with Montgomery County Infants and Toddlers Program

PARTNER
Montgomery County Infants and Toddlers Program

SECTOR
Health and Human Services

SKILLS UTILIZED
Facilitation
User research
Project management

THE CHALLENGE

The Montgomery County Infants and Toddlers Program (MCITP) provides early intervention services to assist families with their efforts to address their children’s developmental and special needs. Entering the program is challenging for many families, due to a clunky application system and a tricky handoff between multiple internal teams that have minimal transparency on what each other does. Each team had a different process and duplication of work was rampant for both staff and parents.

MCITP leadership wanted to streamline the intake process and improve the experience forth parents.

PROCESS

Engaged Leadership and Staff to Partner

MCITP consists of a central office that handles the first part of the intake process and 5 regional teams, each responsible for a geographic region of the County. While this project had the support of central leadership, my teammate Kate and I needed to partner with the 5 regional teams for this project to be successful. We met with leaders from each regional team to establish a point of contact (POC) for each team, determine the most appropriate parent research approach for each team, and identify who to invite to the regional team-specific workshops we would host.

My values in action: Build ownership in others.

Heard Directly from Parents

To understand where improvement was needed, we needed to hear directly from parents. Some regional teams wanted us to conduct interviews and they requested parents for interviews on our behalf. Other regional teams rolled the interview questions into their regular check-ins with parents and shared the responses with us. To broaden our scope, we also collaborated with leadership and each site’s POC to craft a survey that we would send to all parents that recently entered the program. We worked with the County’s translation team to translate the survey and email blast into Spanish and Amharic, the two main non-English languages that parents in the program spoke. Interviewees received a gift card and survey respondents entered to win one of 5 gift cards.

My values in action: Lived experience is expertise.

  • Survey

    • Offered $40 gift cards for one-hour conversations

    • Created an online survey and emailed it to over 300 parents who had entered the program within 6 months

    • Translated survey into Spanish and Amharic (covering primary language of >80% of enrolled parents)

    Referrals

    • Asked frontline staff to recommend parents for us to contact

    Rolling questions into existing check-ins

    • Added 4 intake-related questions to staff’s 6 month check-in with parents

Heard from and Collaborated with Frontline Staff

Not only did parents have critical, first-hand experience, but so did frontline staff. We would capitalize on this through 6 workshops, one for the central office and one for each of the 5 regional teams. Before each workshop, we shared a Googledoc for team members to list out the steps of their intake process and the things that were and weren’t working about each step. The content of each document was moved to a large piece of butcher paper to be used in a workshop.

In each workshop, a wide range of staff (e.g. speech therapists, nurses, administrators) did the following:

  • Reviewed findings from our parent research

  • Verified the steps of their process

  • Shared what was and wasn’t working about each step

  • Prioritized the issues to address

  • Brainstormed ideas for how to address the most pressing issues

My values in action: Build ownership in others, Lived experience is expertise, Be a shepherd.

  • Each workshop was attended by 8-18 people, ranging from occupational/physical therapists who worked directly with parents and children to administrative staff to team leaders.

    1. Introductions activity, Norms setting, Objectives, Agenda
      Each person introduced themselves and shared with the group why they found their work meaningful. We reviewed a set of norms I presented and added to it. We aligned on objectives for the workshop and reviewed an agenda for our 2 hours together.

    2. Review and update intake process map
      This ensured that we had a record of each team’s intake process, complete with key details.

    3. Review parent feedback
      Staff had an opportunity to review quotes from parents and place them on the process map with a green dot for positive sentiment and red dot for negative sentiment. They also marked quotes they felt were particularly insightful or important. This was a way for them to synthesize (make sense of) the parent feedback. At the end, we could visually see where in the process the parent experience was predominantly positive and where it was predominantly negative.

    4. Synthesize and Prioritize parent feedback
      Staff worked in pairs to summarize parent feedback into themes. Each staff member received a number of dot stickers to vote on themes to ideate (generate solutions) on. Through voting, we aligned on 3-4 themes to take forward.

    5. Brainstorm/Ideate solutions
      For each theme to ideate around, we put up butcher paper that had three prompts:

      • Ideas that might work if there were no requirements of constraints

      • Ideas you could implement as early as next week

      • Ideas that use new or existing technology in new or different ways

    6. Prioritize ideas
      Each staff member received a number of dot stickers to vote on which ideas to implement first.

    7. Next steps and close

OUTCOME

More Transparency + Improvement Ideas

The work from each workshop was digitized and shared with central leadership and all regional teams. They now have everything they need to see and learn from one another’s processes, strengths, and pain points. The prioritized issues and ideas were aggregated across teams in a summary document to show which issues were experienced by multiple teams and which ideas had support from multiple teams. MCITP leadership will be hiring two additional full-time intake staff to help implement many of the ideas that came out of this project.

See the digitized artifacts below:

Process and Parent Research

Ideas

FEEDBACK

“We did a year-long leadership training, meeting weekly, and it didn't go anywhere. Working with you has been thought- provoking and we generated doable ideas! ”

— S.W.

“This [workshop] was so encouraging! This is the first time I feel like we might actually implement some changes!”

— H.S