Over 630 professionals, parents, siblings, and vendors flocked to the New York Academy of Medicine on Friday, May 3rd for ADAPT Community Network’s Family Connect Summit. The annual event featured workshops on a variety of topics that affect families of those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, as well as the professionals who work with them.
Workshop themes included parent advocacy, eligibility for OPWDD services, managed care, the needs of those on the autism spectrum, the skills needed to live independently, and Supported Decision-Making (SDM). A workshop entitled “Family Support Services: What Are They and How Do You Get Them?” was among the most popular.
A session that also packed the venue’s auditorium was the Plenary Session, “New York State and the Transition to Managed Care,” at which Edward R. Matthews, CEO of ADAPT Community Network, and Kerry Delaney, CEO of Partners Health Plan, explained the Care Coordination Organizations (CC0s) move to mandatory Managed Care, and the key role that ADAPT and others have assumed with this transition. “There were lots of questions from the audience and a strong request to continue to offer more sessions in this important next step with service delivery,” says Amy Bittinger, Vice President of Family Support Services. She said that those in attendance received a “promise to keep these dialogues held in the days ahead.”
Event goers got to exchange information on supports and services with each other, and, at the Summit’s two vendor fairs, more than 80 vendors distributed to them information relevant to their lives, on things like ADAPT services, as well as other community-based supports, durable medical services/assistive technology, and government-supported organizations. Ms. Bittinger says the event did not disappoint: “Over 90 percent of the survey results indicated a high ranking in satisfaction for the event.” The lead sponsor of the Summit was TD Bank.
