The Alaska Department of Health announced last week its intent to give nearly $75,000 to a Ketchikan nonprofit. The money will be awarded to social services organization Community Connections to help streamline workflow and scheduling in Ketchikan and on Prince of Wales Island.
The project is twofold. One portion of the money will go to improving scheduling and communication for wraparound children’s mental health services.
Max Mercer is the grants director at Community Connections. He says because their children’s mental health programming has so many moving parts, communication can get confusing.
“When the schedule changes because the kid is sick or the kid needs more help or the parents are late or the staff is late, or whatever, we’ve really struggled with communicating to all of those people who are this circle of wraparound supports around the kid,” Mercer said.
The plan is to hire a consultant to help coordinate scheduling and, hopefully, reduce the burden on administrative staff to allow for more reliable and consistent care.
The other piece of the grant will be used to hire a separate consultant to work on the nonprofit’s electronic health records system. Community Connections implemented the system in 2024. Operations Director Milbia Fuller says the system works, but they want it to be more useful. The goal is for it to aid in important decision making by communicating things like how much service each client gets or how much progress they’re making toward their goals.
“It’s always about how we can continue to provide quality services to people who need who need them, and also increase our caseload when we can,” Fuller said. “So getting this grant is going to help us optimize some of our systems and reduce that administrative burden on our teams so we can really focus on client care.”
This award is part of the first round of a series of funding announcements from the state’s Rural Health Transformation Program. Community Connections was just one of 19 projects across the state that will be awarded for improved healthcare access. More funding for projects will be announced every Friday, according to the Department of Health.
