Calling all Jointly Accredited Providers! Profession Field for JAPARS in Profile

[JAM]

Greetings! As you may be aware, ethos passes on information to JAPARS about a person’s profession (on the import csv it is called participant_category).

When we first implemented, we used our credit eligibility field to inform this field and got into a bit of a snag because people can select more than one credit eligibility, but they can only have one profession/participant_category and the system was just pulling the first eligibility the person selected.

Fast forward to now… we are looking to add a Profession field to the profile (not sure what we’ll actually call it yet). We would like this field to do 2 things:

1. Pass participant_category to JAPARS more accurately
2. Give us important and more complete/accurate data for analysis

The Ethos folks are proposing that the Profession field in the profile would be auto-updated with new jointly accredited professions (e.g., athletic trainer is going to come under the umbrella soon, I believe), keeping us all square with JA (woo hoo!). However the list of JA professions/participant_category leaves a few key players out, which are needed to make the field more relevant for use by our programs:
Currently because pharmacists and pharm techs report to CPE monitor as well, they are considered “Other” for profession/participant_category in JAPARS so they are not "double counted"

To accommodate all needs, I would like to propose the following Profession field options for the profile.
ALL JA professions (currently this includes Allied Dental Staff, Dentists, Dietetic Technicians Registered, Nurses, Optometrists, Physicians, Physician Assistants, Psychologists, Registered Dieticians, Social Workers, and Other)
ANY future JA professions
Pharmacist (would map to other for JA purposes)
Pharmacy Tech (would map to other for JA purposes)
Student (would map to other for JA purposes)
This way, we’d get the best of both worlds - we can pass on the correct info to JAPARS, but also use this field for better data analysis of all JA professions - including pharm and pharm tech. Keeping this field to ONLY JA professions (and not extending out to other professions) is the intent. Adding student is the only non-JAPARS “profession” that I thought would be insightful.

The Ethos folks wanted me to start this discussion, as the field would be a global implementation. If they implement how they originally proposed (lumping pharm and pharm tech in with “other” even on the profile side) this would mean A LOT of extra analysis work, since we would not be able to use that field to include pharms and pharm techs in analysis and our own reports). If we implement with pharmacist and pharmacy technician as additional categories, we can accomplish both!

What do you think? Is this JA-focused field more helpful/relevant with the addition of pharmacist, pharmacy technician, and student? Is there anything else you’d like to see?

[Tato4526]

We have spent a lot of time working though the same concerns. We have been adding the different roles as our “enrollment type”, and making sure we are tracking that enrollment type A = PARS type Y in terms of what bucket they fall in for counting purposes. I am not sure what enrollment types (maybe what you call profession field above) are used in Ethos in the off the shelf product vs. if each provider selects their own options. But ye, we are adding each enrollment type to our list as soon as PARS requires another type. We didn’t end up using the PARS report feature in Ethos, although we luckily had a way to work with our IT folks to export all the data and then export it to excel to generate pivot tables it to count up enrollment numbers correctly for PARS. I think we left pharmacist and pharmacy tech mapped to their own category in case we needed seperately, but then add to “Other” as you describe above when we manipulated our pivot tables. Students we mapped as Others. Good luck all…this can get tricky and requires some thinking though. And yes, credit eligible would not work for this since enrollment type = credit eligible is not a 1-1 match with every enrollment type that is required for PARS reporting.