What's New on the NIATx Web site? The Provider Toolkit.

The new NIATx Provider Toolkit is an online resource designed to help both beginning and experienced users launch and lead successful change projects. Among its many new features is The NIATx Way diagram.

The NIATx Way provides a structure for the whole toolkit and guides users through the NIATx process from start to finish. Executive Sponsors and Change Leaders can use to teach the process to their team members.

Another break-through feature of the Provider Toolkit is theNIATx Aims and the Treatment Continuum. This diagram shows how the NIATx aims fit into to the treatment continuum.

The toolkit also offers an expanded list of promising practices in the toolkit-more than 60 in all. Users can look at a promising practice for each aim and also find supporting documentation that will help them use or customize the change idea and test it in their own agencies.

For example, the promising practice titled Use the Spirit of Motivational Interviewing during the First Contact includes the script that Sinnissippi Centers in Dixon, Illinois, uses to engage clients during the first client contact.

The promising practices emerged from a variety of sources: success stories swapped at conferences and learning sessions, stories shared on NIATx Interest Circle Calls, and provider change project profiles from NIATx initiatives such as Advancing Recovery, Strengthening Treatment Access and Retention-State Implementation (STAR-SI), and NIATx 200.

For the most part, practices selected for inclusion in the toolkit were tested by at least two agencies that had supporting data to show that they resulted in improvement.

The toolkit offers tracking and measuring tools that will help a Change Team know whether a change was an improvement quickly. Two revised NIATx spreadsheets will help users tracking NIATx aims data for outpatient and residential levels of care, respectively. The Change Project form has also been refined and streamlined so it's easier to use.

The end product is the result of a team effort that incorporated feedback from providers and pilot testing to identify the best way to present the material. We hope users will let us know what they like and what they don't like. We invite users to send us promising practices that we may not have included in this version.

Contribute your story! Download theNIATx Success Story template, write up your story, and send it enews@niatx.net.