Original Posting 15.03.18

We thought it might help to provide an overview on data available in COMET because who doesn't love to talk about data?! [wink, wink] But seriously, COMET is fundamentally "child centric", meaning that the system is designed to record data that serve or relate to the child. (e.g.: Mother of Birth, Father of Birth, Household Environment, Primary Care Provider). However, the breadth of data we can store related to a child is wide and comes in many forms.

"Operational" Data Elements: These elements support the overall operation of an organization or program. Examples of these elements include when an email was sent to a parent, the date of the next visit, membership or service dues collected. They are often relevant for only a short time and of value primarily for operational purposes.

Only One Value per Child; No Change Tracking: These are data elements - such as Last Name, First Name or Date of Birth - that are unique for the child and for which change-tracking is not required. For example, First Name may have been entered with a spelling mistake an then fixed. We do not track the change nor store the incorrect prior entry. COMET has about a dozen of these fields.

Only One Value per Child; Track Changes: These are data elements - such as Address or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) eligibility - that have a static value for a given child at a given date but may change often. We want to be able to view the history of changes for that field, but primarily access the current value. COMET has over 150 of these fields

Multiple Values per Child: These are data elements that may have multiple entries for a child - such as Family Relationships, Contacts, Consents, Vaccination Records. Depending upon each client configuration, COMET manages multiple active/inactive and current/history records associated with each. 

Multiple Values per Child with History of Changes / Instruments: These represent entities that have multiple occurrences for a given child for which we are interested in viewing the change over a period of time (pre/post analysis, longitudinal, etc.). In addition to the data elements collected when completing a response, these instruments are often associated with an assessment. Some assessments are "normalized" (they follow a norm, often authoritative) or "standardized" (statistically position the child against their peers). Assessments are key for monitoring individual progress, informing the practice and measuring individual impact in a continuous improvement model. They are also the base for program evaluations for example, assessing a group of children that has received a service in comparison to a group that has not.

Let us know if this was helpful or contact us if you have more questions.

Looking for more tips on data management? Check out this blog post about Chronic Spreadsheet Fatigue.

Original Posting 10.05.18

From healthy birth weight to school readiness, Chemung County is on the path to tracking the developmental progress of all children from birth to age 5. The project started years ago with school districts wanting to look at school readiness. They worked with Children's Institute to bring RECAP to Chemung County. With RECAP they looked at assessing social-emotional health and other domains for Pre-K students with a focus on getting kids ready for kindergarden.

Jump forward a few years, enter CIDS and their infant registration program. Because of the smaller size of their county and having only one hospital, CIDS was able to interact with the families each time a baby was born in their county. At the hospital, a nurse would ask the family a few simple questions and record data about the mother and the child's health. The County had a goal of wanting to connect all this information together - from birth to school age.

The group decided to use COMET because of our connection with the Chemung RECAP team, who were already using the system. Two years later we've rolled out a case management system that records when a child is born and tracks referrals that may be made to programs like Nurse-Family Partnership or Healthy Families. As the kids grow and enter Pre-K, the system will have all their data going back to that initial infant registration on the day they were born. That's pretty cool!

Click the links below to learn more about this project!

Case Study

Project Overview

Original Posting 13.08.19

COMET is now implementing The Protective Factors Survey (PFS). This is a 20-item measure in the public domain designed for use with caregivers receiving services such as home visiting, parent education, and family support. It is a pre-post survey completed by the program participants, usually parents or caregivers.

The PFS measures protective factors in five areas:

1. Family functioning/resiliency
2. Social support
3. Concrete support
4. Nurturing and attachment
5. Knowledge of parenting/child development

The survey results are designed to provide agencies with the following information:

• A snapshot of the families they serve
• Changes in protective factors
• Areas where workers can focus on increasing individual family protective factors

Contact us for more details and/or to get access to this instrument.

Original Posting 11.10.19

October is Emotional Wellness & Emotional Intelligence Awareness Month. We at COMET have noticed, and are celebrating, the increased awareness of the importance of social emotional learning (SEL) and the whole health of a child.

In support of these advancements we work with subject matter experts to maintain a library of instruments and assessments like the TCRS, DESSA, and SWYC, as well as, various answer sheets that assess social-emotional, social determinants, child development, and academic domains.

The COMET assessment library and our child-centric data system supplies organizations with the tools to assist them in their missions to improve the lives of children. Most recently COMET has started seeing successes in the Community Collaborative cross-domain initiatives with our partners that are including a SEL component to create healthier communities for future generations. 

Our non-profit partner, Children’s Institute is using play to asses SEL via their Primary Project program. Primary Project is a national evidence-based program that helps children in Pre-K through third grade adjust to school, gain confidence, social skills, and focus on learning. Through play, Primary Project addresses children’s school adjustment difficulties and increases their chances for success.

 “Having all the data, results from all the various screenings, in one place makes a tremendous difference” Kim Avery, Early Care and Education Specialist at Children’s Institute. After the initial SEL play assessment, results are recorded in the COMET system where each outcome has a defined action plan.

The GROW-Rochester Collaborative has included SEL assessments into their work prescreening three-year-olds. This initiative integrates comprehensive screenings to identify if there are any needs in hearing, vision, dental health, language and speech, cognitive and social emotional development with case/service management and referrals.

Emotional Wellness and Intelligence are essential to the success of a whole child health mission and we at COMET are looking forward to the amazing work that our partners are doing to ensure that children have the necessary knowledge and life-skills to be successful.

Original Posting 15.10.19

COMET is excited to partner with Aperture Education (Aperture) to support both the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment (DESSA), and the Devereux Student Strengths Assessment-Mini (DESSA-Mini) as an integrated option in the COMET System.

The DESSA is used to screen, assess, monitor progress, measure outcomes, and strengthen the social-emotional competence of all students, K-12. The DESSA measures are one of the few supported by rigorous research that meets or exceeds strict industry standards. This data indicates that the DESSA is a reliable and valid tool for measuring social and emotional skills. Specifically, the COMET/Aperture partnership allows for the DESSA and the DESSA-Mini to be available in the COMET System for child-centric organizations all over the U.S.

Currently, the COMET System is being used in four different but overlapping ways: COMET Outcomes, Operations, Services and Backbone. A subset of existing COMET Outcomes users are already able to advantage of the DESSA (in addition to other assessment and measurement instruments) to assess and understand the progress of children to identify gaps, report gains and understand needs. Now, with this partnership, DESSA assessments will be available to Operations users (attendance tracking, membership, programs, classes and activities), Services users (service, case management and referral tracking), and Backbone users (collaborative community and funding organization outcomes tracking).

COMET and Aperture have entered into this partnership to work with all members of school and out-of-school-time (OST) communities (both children and adults) to support informed decision-making, raising organizational quality and improving outcomes for kids. COMET has been working on this mission for years by providing accurate and actionable data about a student’s social and emotional needs so that our end-users can pair that data with research-informed strategies, resources, and reporting. These efforts help ensure that students have the social and emotional skills needed to be successful, productive, and happy.