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Hello, all and welcome to the webinar an introduction to the Children's Benefits
Access Guide.
My name is Audrey Kraus and I am the Director of the Children's Benefits Access
Project at the Disability Rights Legal Center.
The goal of this webinar is to provide you with a brief training that will introduce
you to this project and will help you effectively use the comprehensive online
resource, the Children's Benefits Access Guide to access information about health
care and related benefits for children with disabilities.
First I would like to introduce you to the Disability Rights Legal Center.
The DRLC's mission is to champion the rights of people with disabilities through
education, advocacy and litigation. We carry out our mission through multiple programs.
I hope you will visit our website at www.disabilityrightslegalcenter.org to
find out more about our programs and how the DRLC may be able to serve as
a resource or provide services to you or to people with disabilities with whom you
work or have contact.
L.A. Care Health Plan funded the publication of the Children's Benefits
Access Guide to benefit residents of L.A. County.
The guide is a comprehensive resource and contains information about health care
related benefits and services for children with disabilities.
In order to assist parents and professionals as they navigate accessing
these benefits the guide focuses on listing and explaining benefits as well as
analyzing agency responsibility to provide them. The guide does not constitute legal advice.
To help you use the guide I will take you through two sample searches that will
illustrate some of the key features of the guide and show you how you can look up
information that you are seeking in this resource.
Starting with sample search number one, we are looking for information about
transition services for a child eligible for early start who will be turning three in
a few months. This refers to a child who is approaching
her third birthday and will require transition planning because when she turns
three she will no longer be eligible for early intervention services.
The table of contents on page two of the guide is an effective way that you can
start looking for many of the topics contained in the guide.
After you find the topic you were looking for you click on its heading and it will
take you to it. If you click on a link to a chapter that
describes a program, such as introduction to medical or early start, you click on the
chapter heading which will link you to that chapter's table of contents.
In this example, if you click on to California's Early Start Program it will
take you to the table of contents for Early Start Chapter.
Here you will find the Table of Contents for the Early Start Chapter which is made
up of several different topics and questions that a user of the guide might
have about it. In this case we are looking for
information about transition services and the arrow directs you to the question,
"What Transition Planning is Available to a Child Who is Turning Three Years Old?"
Clicking on that question takes us to the text related to the question that we have chosen.
This chapter is in a question and answer format allowing you to select information
responsive to your questions within the text there are links to other chapters
and resources so you can continue to build on the information that you are finding.
On this page you see a link to Appendix C which we will look at in a moment
and there is a link to further information on transition services through online resources.
This is Appendix C which lays out the steps in the transition process in chart
form helping us to multiply different ways that users can access the information in
the guide.
To continue navigating the guide we look at a second sample search.
This time for OT or PT for a student with disabilities.
To start we return to the guide's table of contents where we find
Therapeutic Services as a great place to embark on our search.
Clicking on Therapeutic Services there is a new feature of the guide that shows up
called the Benefits Matrix, unlike the California Early Start Chapter, the
Therapeutic Services Matrix does not describe a full program in narrative form,
rather the chart collects information about different programs that may be
responsible to provide therapies to eligible children.
Looking at the columns in the matrix, the matrix provides information about
therapeutic benefits with the focus on how coverage works if multiple entities are
involved in the coverage requirements section. The authority column provides legal
references that support the information listed. On page seven of the guide titled "How to Use
the Guide?" the reader is directed to a website through which you can access legal
authorities directly and helps to explain the kinds of references that the guide
sites to.
Looking further down this benefits matrix for therapies we find in the highlighted
area information responsive to our search for OT and PT for students with disabilities.
If you are searching for information in the guide and you don't know what chapter to
start with or what you are looking for you can search the PDF.
This assumes that you have downloaded the document on your computer by inputing the
term that you are interested in the window that says, “find,” located above your document
on the right hand side, this will prompt a search of the document for your desired
term in this case occupational therapy.
And if you hit "find next," the guide will take you to the next
reference to occupational therapy, and the next one.
By creating this comprehensive guide and providing it to the community and training
providers and consumers in its use, the DRLC has aimed to provide families of
children with disabilities and the professionals that work with them with
comprehensive information about available benefits and agency responsibility, to
improve services for children with disabilities who are Medi-Cal eligible,
and to help children with disabilities to access a broader range of health care services.
The DRLC is continuing to evaluate the effective of the Children's Benefits
Access Guide, and its usefulness to professionals and parents as they assist
children with disabilities to access benefits and navigate complex systems.
Please help us with this evaluation process by participating in our post
implementation survey available on the Disability Rights Legal Center Children's
Benefits Access Project page.
If you would like more information about this project please visit our website or
contact Anabel Prudencio directly (213) 736-8195, we welcome your feedback and participation.
Please look out for an addendum to the guide which will be posted on the project
page shortly, which will update select portions of the guide which was current as
of February 2011.
Thank you so much for your participation in today's webinar.