Recovery Care Coordinators who guide wounded, ill or injured service members and their families to the next phase of their lives are learning a new software application this week that greatly improves their ability to create care plans for wounded warriors’ transitioning into their new lives.
The Recovery Coordination Program Support Solution (RCP-SS) provides secure, web-based access to tools needed to successfully manage a service member’s non-medical care, and is available for use by care coordinators in all military branches.
There are currently 130 such care coordinators serving wounded warriors and their families in 65 locations. These care coordinators receive standardized training through the Recovery Coordination Program (RCP), a program of the Office of Wounded Warrior Care and Transition Policy. This training includes hands-on, practical training on the RCP-SS.
Before the RCP-SS, care coordinators spent hours each day hand-writing paper forms, taking away from the time they could spend face-to-face with wounded warriors and family members. Now, the RCP-SS automates many of the paper forms and administrative tasks that used to burden care coordinators, allowing them to focus instead on the most important part of their job—talking to the people they work to help every day.
“WWCTP is happy to offer this software application to non-medical care managers in all branches of Service to streamline the work flow and support consistent care for all of our wounded, ill and injured service members,” said John R. Campbell, Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Wounded Warrior Care and Transition Policy.
The RCP-SS is an intuitive tool developed in just 12 months with input from care coordinators who are currently supporting wounded warriors and their families. The tool automatically populates recovery plan forms with information stored in authoritative databases. The system also pre-populates new forms with information entered previously by the care coordinator.
“The RCP-SS gave us all a sigh of relief,” said Bernie Fiero, who coordinates care for wounded, ill and injured airmen at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. “The amount of time spent gathering information, documenting and goal planning was cut in half. That means I can focus more time on my service members and their families, and that is the key to the success of this program. Time, a valuable commodity, is placed where it should be, not locked into hours of documentation.”
Now scheduled to be updated on a quarterly released cycle, the RCP-SS will continue to be developed, and adapted to further integrate with existing platforms, allowing for increased data sharing and collaboration between the Services.
“The RCP-SS is the system we have been waiting for,” said John Wood, a care coordinator working with recovering service members at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. “It will allow us to track the status of action items, ensuring that we don’t overlook critical items. The RCP-SS will also allow care coordinators will spend more time helping service members achieve their goals, and less time accomplishing paperwork.”
To lean more about the RCP-SS System, please contact Ismael Cardenas at
Ismael.Cardenas@osd.mil.