By Olivia Minnier

Inside a blue-painted office, a woman is in meeting after meeting helping a seemingly endless line of providers in Delaware County through the paperwork, certifications, and training they need to serve individuals in the county. She asks them if they want coffee and swivels a computer monitor to help them with technical questions.

Cheryl Copley has been DCBDD’s Provider Coordinator for 18 years. Cheryl first got her start at DCBDD as a DSP working in the sheltered workshop.

A Provider Coordinator works with providers to help them best do their job by providing technical assistance, assisting new agency and independent providers get into the state developmental disabilities system, billing, ongoing training requirements, and re-certification, making sure the website is up to date, and creating guides and resources for providers.

“There’s been a lot of things that have changed just as far as duties go just because the role has grown so much,” she said.

As part of the Provider Coordinator role, Cheryl says her job involves many moving parts.

One of those has been creating the Request for Provider or RFP system, which stemmed from a request for a provider to serve an individual with very complex needs on a tight deadline.

“A young man coming out of high school had some complex behavioral needs, so we were looking for a very specific type of provider to work with him, and time was limited because it was an emergency. So, we pulled emails out of, probably a contract database back then, and sent an email out and that was the birth of the RFP. That was the first RFP,” she said.

Since then, the system has evolved from online website postings and an email request list to the Free Choice of Provider Portal that launched in May. The Free Choice of Provider portal allows the previous process to be even easier, data to be gleaned, and everything to work in an overall more efficient manner.

“It’s one place where the Service and Support Administrator logs in, the provider logs in, they can look at the available cases according to their certifications and they can respond. The Service and Support Administrators do not have to assemble or look up provider certification because they know providers are only getting access to it if they are certified. They don’t have to put together a report at the end of the posting to send to the family, this system does it for them. The system will give notifications to the providers. It will send notifications to the support administrators. It also gives us better documentation and easier documentation of free choice of provider. It’s just a more efficient tool,” she said.

“When we started collecting the data, we were doing it by hand in the beginning of 2023, and we were able to see that we had about a 50 percent fill rate if I recall and it was 1-9 hours that was the hardest to fill in the outlying areas of Delaware,” she said.

Cheryl said the portal also allows her to use that data to talk to agencies and providers who are new to Delaware.

“Hopefully they will be building their staff around those areas and know what to expect when they come into the county,” she said.

Cheryl says that is ultimately the main goal of her position: to simplify the paperwork and data.

“I think in everything that I do, my first goal is to make the technical stuff easy because the service delivery should be the hard part, not the technical stuff. The technical side needs to be easy to follow and easy to manage so they can do what they do best which is work with people. No one gets into this business because they love paperwork,” she said.