In fiscal year 2023, Shirley Ryan AbilityLab speech-language pathologists and occupational therapists assisted 589 inpatients and 841 outpatients with their technology needs. Edward Hitchcock, OT, and SLP Kathleen Ruppert discuss how they help connect people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to assistive tech at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab.

"Out of the roughly 900,000 people with IDD who were projected to receive HCBS in fiscal year 2021, only about 3% were projected to receive assistive technology," says Carli Friedman, Director of Research at the Council on Quality Leadership and author of two recent papers on assistive technology for people with IDD who receive HCBS.

IATP offers device lending and reuse programs, training for users and their care partners, a maker space where specialists custom-create assistive devices and tech and demonstration spaces where people can try out features of a smart home in a unique 50,000 square-foot space housed in an old hospital building in Springfield.

“I know what it feels like to struggle with being a caregiver and a full-time worker,” Jenkins says. “And that gives me a really unique perspective towards advancing Long Term Supports and Services in ways that will support our members and their families.”

CROR’s Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Home and Community Based-Services (HCBS) is funded by a 5-year, $4,375,000 grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research. The Center is now in its fourth year.

Several members of CROR’s RRTC on HCBS will be present at the National Association of Rehabilitation Research and Training Centers (NARRTC) annual conference this May 21-22 in Alexandria, Virginia.



Jacqueline Kish, PhD, a post-doctoral fellow with CROR, will lead a presentation titled, People want great lives, not just good services: Case studies on the implementation of person-centered practices in Home and Community-Based Services provider organizations. The presentation will provide preliminary results from interviews with leadership and staff of HCBS provider organizations nominated for doing an outstanding job of providing person-centered services, and from people who receive HCBS from those organizations.

Bridgette Schram, PhD, project manager of CROR’s RRTC on Home and Community-Based Services, will join research collaborators Sara Karon, PhD, from RTI International, and Brian Abery, PhD, and Renata Ticha, PhD, from the Institute on Community Integration at the University of Minnesota for a panel titled, Developing Person-Centered HCBS Outcome Measures. This panel presentation will provide updates on the status an HCBS measure development project and how the measures could help improve the delivery of person-centered HCBS.

Niveda Tennety, senior project coordinator in CROR’s RRTC on Home and Community-Based Services, will exhibit a poster titled, Organizational struggles and systems’ impact on Home and Community-Based Services: Perspectives of HCBS users and professionals on person-centered service delivery. Her poster will summarize the findings from interviews with people who provide and receive HCBS, highlighting system-level barriers to person-centered services.



Look for their presentation times, dates and locations on the NARRTC conference page.  

Have you listened to our podcast episodes on HCBS lately? Be sure to listen to episode 11 on Developing and Testing Person-Centered HCBS Outcome Measures. Want to learn more about accessible transportation in the Windy City of Chicago? Episode 14 has you covered.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube. 

We found some recently-published articles and reports related to our research and wanted to share them with you!

The HCBS RRTC staff monitor the literature for relevant articles and reports. We found some recently published articles and reports related to our research and wanted to share them with you!

Addressing the Shortage of Direct Care Workers: Insights from Seven States – Issue Brief. Lyons, B. & O’Malley Watts, M. Addressing the Shortage of Direct Care Workers: Insights from Seven States. The Commonwealth Fund. March 19, 2024.

Self-Directed Long-Term Services and Supports (LTSS): National Inventory

National Inventory of Self-Directed Long-Term Services and Supports Programs. Applied Self-Direction and AARP. February, 2024

State home and community-based services expenditures and unmet care needs in the United States: Has everyone benefitted equally?

Yang, Y., Lee, A., Rapp, T., Chen, R., Glymour, M. M., & Torres, J. M. Health Services Research. January, 2024. 

Efforts to Evaluate the Impact of ARPA HCBS Investments. Halperin, A. & Jacobs, A.ADvancing States. January 29, 2024

Measuring and monitoring the adequacy of the direct-care workforce and impacts on unmet need: Landscape scan of data sources and opportunities for future research. Wu, C., Hong, G., & Kasach, M. Research brief. Community Living Policy Center. Brandeis University.

The Center on Knowledge Translation for Disability and Rehabilitation Research is looking for people to provide feedback (via 20 - 30 minute compensated Zoom interview) on summaries related to research about HCBS. Whether you are a person with a disability, caregiver, or someone with a background in this area (e.g., vocational rehabilitation counselor, social worker, community support worker), your input will help KTDRR improve the design and usefulness of these research summaries. 

If interested, please reach out to Jeremy Rasmussen at jrasmussen@air.org. 

The contents of this newsletter were developed under a grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR grant 90RTGE0004). NIDILRR is a Center within the Administration for Community Living (ACL) in the Department of Health and Human Services (DHSS). The contents of this newsletter do not necessarily represent the policy of NIDILRR, ACL or DHSS.

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