CoARC

Committee on Accreditation for Respiratory Care

Revised:  04/25/2006

CoARC Electronic Communication Policy

As will hopefully not be news to any of you, the "electronic age" is upon us! CoARC, in order to provide efficient and cost-effective services has been increasingly utilizing electronic means of communication both internally and externally. At our just completed March Committee meeting it was established that the "official and preferred" method of providing written communication to and from our programs would be through electronic transmission, i.e. via email.

CoARC has all but a very small number of Program's (i.e., Program Director) email addresses, and will from this date forward be utilizing this as a means of transferring our routine, official communication with Programs. Please ensure that you keep our Executive Office updated on any changes in email address for any of the following; Program Director, Director of Clinical Education, Medical Director, and Administrative Officer to whom the program reports.

Updates to CoARC Annual Reporting Tools Program

IMPORTANT: This memo contains critical information for ALL Programs. You should read and understand the ENTIRE memo BEFORE you attempt to download and install the programming update file.

Important update to Annual Reporting Software:

Due to input from Committee members and respiratory therapist educational programs, we have revised the software. We hope that everyone will be able to install the patch and input data for the 12/31/2000 year by the April 15th deadline date. However, if it is impossible for you to accomplish this, you may submit the annual report on or before May 15, 2001 and it will not be counted as a late submission.

Significant upgrades are included in version 2.0 of the AC/TRAC© Accreditation Annual Report Tools (ART). All known programming errors in the prior edition have been corrected and, to the extent possible, valuable suggestions from users have been incorporated. Many of the changes and improvements are discussed in this article.

Note: This new software does create a mechanism for separately reporting "first-time" pass rates as well as cumulative pass rates. The "Thresholds" that CoARC has developed are compared to your program's cumulative pass rates and the Committee has again reaffirmed that this is their intention at their just completed meeting. The "first-time" rates are still (mistakenly) being utilized by some Programs and being reported to CoARC as their cumulative rates. This is making these programs appear to have deviations from the thresholds that they often do not have when the data is reported correctly! We have inserted this column to make clear the distinction between the two. At this time the "first-time" data is not necessary to report. Please just leave this column with the "zero" that is already there, and do not attempt to input data in the "first-time" column's at this time. We are aware that the NBRC is continuing to develop the data that is reported to you, and once this "first-time" data becomes more readily obtainable, we will ask that you begin to report it.

In order to obtain the Annual Report Software Update, please do either of the following:

1. Go to our Web site at www.coarc.com and download the update again from this location, or;

2. Call the CoARC office and request that we mail a "disk copy" of the new Annual Report update.

Additional information on how to download and install the update is in the information provided below.

Important revisions to the functioning of the software are as follows:

ERROR CHECKING: The error checking features of ART have been expanded so that significantly less is left to user discretion. This means that fewer data errors are permitted by the system as data errors are trapped both at the time of data entry and at the time of printing reports. As a result, the data ultimately submitted to CoARC will be more consistently accurate and useful to educators as they continue to improve programmatic outcomes.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES and EVALUATION SYSTEMS: As CoARC has worked to refine the definition of successful, accredited educational programs, ART was necessarily re-designed to reflect these changes. Most significantly, the software now requires that a minimum of three (3) learning "Objectives" be established for the basic competency "Goal."

CONTINUING USERS: While most users of version 1.0 did establish a minimum of three objectives, not all users did so. Users will now find that, in the "Objectives" window, the user must declare whether the immediate objective itself is related to the "Cognitive," "Psychomotor," or "Affective" domain of learning. Once this declaration is made for any given Objective, then and only then can the user progress to the next window, where all appropriate Evaluation Systems are "applied" to any given Objective. A minimum of three (3) objectives are required for each goal.

In the "Apply Evaluation Systems" window, a "Hint" button is available to suggest which evaluation systems should be applied to the given learning objective. The displayed hint is specific to the level of educational program (entry- or advanced-level) and the particular learning domain (cognitive, psychomotor, or affective). If you have entered an evaluation system which does not match the declared learning domain, you will receive an error message when you attempt to print.
PRINT PREVIEWS: From the "print menu", there are now alternatives for previewing all portions of the Annual Report prior to printing. (Note: If no print icon appears on your computer while a report is in the "preview" mode, you may invoke your system's printer by using the key combination <Ctrl>+<P> while in desired report is on screen.)

RECORDING "PASSING" on FIRST and SECOND-and-SUBSEQUENT ATTEMPTS: The student performance screen now requires that the user input numbers of students who pass evaluations on either their first or second-and-subsequent attempts. The "number passing" field is auto-calculated after entry of numbers of graduates who achieved success in either or both of these categories. Note that for continuing users of ART, the previously-entered numbers of "passing" students is retained, but may ONLY be updated by entering numbers of students who pass on the either, or both, the first or second-and-subsequent attempts.

The "GLOBAL PROGRAM DELETIONS" option of the Main Menu: This option is used to globally delete an educational program (and all it's related data) from the database (as when the program ceases to exist, or when erroneous program data have been entered on a large scale). This window is provided to accomplish the global deletion of all data related to any selected educational program. After you select an educational program for deletion from the database, and confirm your election to delete the data, the data cannot be recovered.

UPDATE and DOWNLOAD OPTIONS:

Continuing users of the system will be able to receive the update by downloading the file from the Internet, or they will have the file mailed to them on diskette. If you are downloading the file from the Internet, you should make a copy of the update file to a clean diskette, and follow the instructions, below: see, "INSTALLATION OF THE UPDATE FILE FROM DISKETTE."

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are downloading the update from the Internet, two update files are available. One is named "ART_2d.exe," and the other is named "ART_2d.dat" - without the ".exe" extension. Normally you should opt to download the "ART_2d.exe" file, but some users (based on their internet connection settings) are unable to download files with the ".exe" extension. If you cannot download such files, you should download the "ART_2d.dat" file (without the ".exe" extension), and then re-name the file to "ART_2d.exe" before you attempt to run the update installation.

INSTALLATION OF THE UPDATE FILE FROM DISKETTE:

Place the diskette with the update file into your floppy disk drive and double click the "ART_2d.exe" file.

A self-extracting zip utility will open, and will suggest the path to your existing program file as "C:\acrth." If this not where you have installed the ART system, then type the correct path to your existing "arpt.mdb" file before you run the "unzip" utility. (For most users, the default path is correct.) After the correct path is entered, click the "Unzip" option.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The utility will attempt to "write" the update file to the path you enter (or the default path, if you do not change the path). In either case, the utility is designed to suggest to you that it is about to "overwrite" an existing file by the same name (i.e. arpt.mdb). You should select the "Yes" option, indicating that you DO wish to overwrite the existing file. If for some reason you do NOT receive the advisory about overwriting the file, this means that you have "written" the update to the path WITHOUT having overwritten an existing file. If this is the case, you should contact the developers of the system (NDT Consulting) immediately, toll-free at 1-877-422-8722 for advice.

When the message appears, "1 file unzipped successfully," click OK.

Close out all windows.

Go to the "Start" menu on the bottom left of your desktop.

Go to "Programs" line.

Go to "Annual Reporting Tools" line

Click "RT Annual Report Tools."

IMPORTANT NOTE: For continuing users, the program will tell you that it cannot find the "artdata.mdb" file, and will inquire as to whether you wish to locate the file. Click the "Yes" option, browse to the c:\*.* drive, then to the c:\acrth folder, and double-click on the "artdata.mdb" file. This action will automatically re-link and update the data tables, and will create new data fields in your database. Note: If you have installed your data table in a different directory (as on your server in a network environment in a path other than c:\acrth), or, if you have named your data table something other than the default name of "artdata.mdb," you will need to locate the data file in the path, and double-click it.

If you should have any questions regarding how to input data into the software, please contact Jana at the Executive Office or e-mail her at janaanderson@coarc.com. If you are having a problem installing the patch or run into a software programming problem, please contact Dave Klundt, toll-free, at 1-877-422-8722 or e-mail him at ndtconsulting@home.com.