Centerstone Research Institute - Hillel Sapir

By way of introduction my name is Hillel Sapir.  I have been working at Centerstone Research Institute (CRI) since May 1, 2011, but I just registered for GS 490.  CRI is the research and evaluation branch of Centerstone; Centerstone is the only community based mental health center which includes its own research/evaluation branch in the nation (Centerstone also largest community based health center and contains the largest mental health data base in the country). 

Being part of CRI, my job includes research and evaluation, and in this instance I am working on the BE Well Program (Centerstone's Building Exceptional Wellness Program), a 2 million dollar federal grant project which targets patients, 18 years and older, who have serious mental illnesses and a co-occuring physical disease.  The grant is designed to improve the physical health status of 250 patients in hopes of lowering physical and mental health symptomatology, medical costs, hospital emergency department utilization, and other health disorders.  The specific execution of this grant is to be conducted by the BE Well Program under Centerstone, but the evaluation of the data is to be conducted by CRI.  The purpose of CRI is to make sure the implementation of the program fulfills all the federal government guidelines, that the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA, an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) receives the required data, and that the grant program evolves in a way that the patients continue to receive healthcare at an exceptional level. 

As stated earlier, I began working at CRI on May 1st, 2011.  Instead of stating what I have done over the past week, I will give a brief description of what I have completed over the past month and a half; my following posts will follow the course requirements more strictly and describe simply the past week.

The BE Well Program examines both the patients mental and physical health.  Due to this, there is an extraordinary plethora of information at our disposal.  This information needs to be first put into computer databases so that future evaluation and examination can be easily accessed.  For a majority of May I wrote SPSS databases and entered patient physical and mental information, interviews, and assessments.  Between entering the required information I would attend required training sessions, bi-weekly staff meetings and grant advisory boards.  Now that most of the baseline patient information has been correctly entered and cataloged, I have been gathering the information required by the federal government and SAMHSA.  The information requested by these government agencies is being logged seperately so that all the grant requirements are completed on a timely fashion.

That is a basic overview concerning CRI, my employer, my basic job requiremetns and what I have done at work over the past month and a half.  I do apologize for the lengthy post.