Atlas Research welcomed the National Science Foundation (NSF) to its client community in 2017, winning a multi-year contract that supports oversight of NSF’s $28 billion research award portfolio. Atlas’ efficient, risk-based approach to monitoring award recipients also helps at-risk recipients recognize and address operational issues that could affect their performance. So everyone wins: NSF, researchers, and the nation that counts on them to drive scientific discovery and engineering education.

NSF provides more than 11,000 new research awards each year to 1800 academic and private research organizations of all sizes, working across the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Each organization must meet federal requirements for operational performance. Atlas conducts an annual award portfolio risk assessment to identify organizations that need additional business assistance.

Atlas experts then conduct reviews of awardee practices in areas such as general management, operational controls, and regulatory compliance to guide award recipients toward best practices. This strategic, structural approach helps recipients well beyond the term of their current NSF awards – it ensures that the recipients will better administer all federal research funding well into the future.

In 2017, Atlas Research entered dynamic new territory with a contract to support the Department of Defense (DoD) Center for Development of Security Excellence (CDSE). In an ever-changing security landscape, CDSE provides security education, training, certification, and professional development for DoD and other U.S. government personnel, contractor employees, and representatives of foreign governments.

Atlas is helping CDSE achieve its mission by collaboratively developing performance-based learning solutions in the core security disciplines. Atlas teamed with C2 Technologies to win this five-year engagement under the Human Capital and Training Solutions (HCaTS) contract vehicle, which federal agencies use to order complex human capital and training services.

The Atlas team was selected for its security-related subject matter experts, who bring 25 years of combined experience in supporting CDSE before joining Atlas. This expertise allowed Atlas to hit the ground running with broad knowledge of CDSE’s extensive portfolio of offerings and the large, diverse security community it serves, spanning 31 federal agencies and more than 13,000 cleared contractor facilities. CDSE provides security education, training, certification and professional development for DoD and other U.S. government personnel at all levels of authority; for contract employees; and for representatives of foreign governments.

The engagement’s first year includes the following high-profile projects:

• Aligning the vast CDSE training portfolio to current security policy and making recommendations to address any identified gaps.
• Recommending training on workplace violence prevention, assistance, and response capabilities.
• Designing a five-day instructor-led course to teach physical security professionals to think critically and manage risks associated with protecting DoD assets.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Partnership for Patients aims to make hospital care more cost-effective in two ways: by preventing patients from acquiring health conditions in the hospital and by improving the care of patients during transitions between health care settings. Health care organizations contract with CMS to form Hospital Improvement Innovation Network (HIINs) that share best practices among their hospitals.

Skilled communication is essential to the success of the HIIN strategy. Atlas is providing it for the largest HIIN, including more than 450 hospitals associated with Premier Inc., a nationwide health care improvement company. Hospital staffs are already inundated with information – about patients, disease conditions, medications, diagnostics, and care protocols – so it is essential that HIIN communication is carefully crafted and delivered in convenient formats. Timely topics include the sepsis epidemic and opioid addiction crisis.

Atlas won this work with its broad range of sophisticated communication skills combined with deep knowledge of health care delivery. The Atlas team is working across a range of media and making content flexible and adaptable for individual hospitals. HIIN organizations are tasked with reaching ambitious quantitative goals for improving the safety of patient care, and Atlas is helping to achieve them in hundreds of hospitals across the country.

Imagine if you decided to visit a new doctor, insurer, lender, or financial advisor, and they could instantly call up an accurate, approved, up-to-date digital profile for you. Imagine if you changed your address or took a spouse’s name, and all your service providers instantly had the new information.

That’s what’s coming for the 9 million U.S. Veterans who use services offered by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) – and the 375,000 VA employees who serve them. A sophisticated data architecture developed by Atlas Research for the Veterans Experience Office (VEO) gives every Veteran a master customer record across all lines of business, including health care, education and training, insurance, lending, disability compensation, and more.

As VA developed these services, it also amassed more than 200 contact centers and more than 1700 sites of care, many with their own databases. The new data architecture syncs them all, so that contact and military service data for Veterans will be correct wherever they go within VA. When this data is updated anywhere, it will be automatically updated everywhere. In addition to improving customer service for Veterans, the new master customer record is also eliminating costly operating problems of the past, such as postage wasted on misaddressed mail.

One of the most popular and successful laws ever enacted in the U.S. got a huge update in 2017, and Atlas is helping turn the legislation into regulations, operational programs, and successful utilization by Veterans. The Harry W. Colmery Veterans Education Assistance Act of 2017 updates the so-called GI Bill, enacted during World War II, which offered tuition assistance to Veterans.

The updated law is known as the “Forever GI Bill” for one of its key benefits: removing the time limit for Veterans to use tuition assistance. But there’s much more. Among its eleven major provisions, the bill extends some benefits to Veteran family members, provides extra funding for students enrolling in science and technical fields, and includes a pilot program to guide Veterans toward high-tech jobs in understaffed industries.

Atlas Research (with partners Sprezzatura Management Consulting and Prometheus Federal Services) is helping the Veterans Benefit Administration in three fundamental, interconnected areas: drafting regulations that will accomplish the bill’s intentions; providing operations expertise and training for implementing the bill; and communicating to Veterans about how to take advantage of it.

Congress wants most benefits in the Forever GI Bill to be operational in the summer of 2018, just a year after it became law. This high-profile, high-impact work perfectly fits Atlas’ mission to help clients succeed with their most pressing challenges.

In 2017 Atlas Research helped the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) rapidly scale up one of its biggest recent successes: allowing Veterans to schedule appointments for medical specialties without first seeing a primary care physician. It’s an outstanding example of how Atlas is helping the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) succeed with top priorities, including giving Veterans greater choice and enhancing services at the core of VA’s mission.

Atlas originally helped VHA launch “patient self- referral direct scheduling” (PSDS) in 2016 for audiology and optometry care – two of the specialty offerings available in 143 participating VHA facilities. The results were dramatic: wait times for appointments fell by two to three weeks, and primary care physicians were freed from 16,000 “pass- through” patient visits a month.

By the end of 2017, VHA was able to offer PSDS for specialty clinics including podiatry, nutrition and food services, and amputees and wheelchair- bound patients. In 2018, the option will extend to oncology services, mammography screenings, weight management, smoking cessation, PACT clinical pharmacy specialist services, orthotics and prosthetics, and social work. As Veterans get better service and gain greater control over their health care, VHA becomes more efficient and its primary care physicians become more productive.

When it comes to sexual health and reproduction, sexual minorities not only need good advice and clinical care but may have unique health care needs that need to be addressed. Unfortunately, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex and asexual (LGBTQIA) people often face cultural perceptions leaving them feeling anxious, unwelcome, or distrustful in clinical encounters. While this can result in negative interactions with the health care system and disparities in health outcomes, there has been little research that could improve the situation.

To gain more insight, the Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health’s Office of Population Affairs tasked Atlas Research Source: National Transgender Discrimination Survey with conducting a systematic review of relevant peer-reviewed literature as well as published clinical guidelines regarding the provision of family planning services to sexual minorities.

Clear themes emerged, particularly regarding emphasis on culturally competent care, medical confidentiality, and positive attitudes towards LGBTQIA clients on the part of providers. Atlas published the findings from both reviews in Contraception and LGBT Health, and aims to continue advancing society’s understanding of how to improve reproductive health and family planning for the many women and men who identify as sexual minorities.

Topflight organizations don’t wait for potential risks to become damaging reality – they proactively turn them into opportunities for quality improvement. As part of its ongoing organizational transformation, the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) formed the Office of Internal Audit and Risk Assessment (OIARA) in 2016 to provide oversight of VHA’s most pressing clinical and operational issues. One of IARA’s first major decisions was turning to Atlas Research to ensure a fast ramp-up and obtain risk assessment and internal audit expertise.

With its extensive experience and capabilities in program management and risk assessment, Atlas ensured that IARA would achieve the two major goals for its twelve months: setting up a program management office and conducting an inaugural audit of risks related to VHA’s ability to provide excellent care to Veterans.

To determine the focus of the inaugural audit, the team developed a VHA-wide risk assessment by sifting through more than 700 VHA audit reports containing 4,000 findings, compiling and grouping related findings to develop risk statements, and scoring them to identify the most significant risks to VHA performance. At the same time, the team monitored its own work for cost-effectiveness, process quality, and client satisfaction. In 2018, the team will refine its data collection processes to ensure that the risk assessment is comprehensive, deliberative, and forward-looking to help VHA focus on the risks that matter most.

One of the most ambitious projects ever, for one of the largest health care centers of the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), is now approaching completion. Atlas Research is in the thick of it. The VHA’s new Rocky Mountain VA Medical Center near Denver, Colorado is a brand new replacement medical facility. It includes 1.2 million ft2 in nine buildings plus parking and site infrastructure. Soon it will serve nearly 400,000 Veterans in Colorado and adjacent states.

In 2017 Atlas Research continued to provide quality assurance and quality control management of the process of transforming the project’s bare-walled buildings into working, state-of-the-art medical and research facilities. Known as “activation,” this process ranges from procurement, delivery, and installation of furnishings and equipment to hiring and training employees to establishing a complete set of policies and procedures for operations, maintenance, and safety. The final phase is staff moving into and opening the new medical center to serve Veterans.

The Atlas team has abundant expertise to manage this massive logistics challenge: more than 100 years of combined experience, 30 previous activations, and custom-built IT tools for data management, quality control, and progress reporting.

In 2017 the energy plant and research center opened, and staff moved in. Diagnostics and testing, clinic, and inpatient facilities will follow in early 2018. The entire campus is on track for full activation in the summer of 2018. The Atlas activation team will then turn to its next big project: a new VA Medical Center in Omaha, Nebraska.

The transformation of customer service at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) took another leap forward in 2017 with the launch of VA’s “Choose VA” campaign, and Atlas Research played a key role.

Previous initiatives had focused on changing VA processes and attitudes internally, to make customer service more Veteran-centric and employee-driven. “Choose VA” turns the focus outward with a communications campaign aimed at convincing Veterans – particularly including Millennials – to make VA a first choice for health care, financial services, employment, and more.

To succeed with this new strategy, VA turned to Atlas Research for its communications expertise matched with deep experience of Veterans and VA communications channels. Atlas had already demonstrated its ability to work fast at transforming VA-Veteran communications, such as in guiding the Department to a successful overhaul of its nationwide call center operations.

Atlas (with subcontractor Burson-Marsteller) responded just as fast for Choose VA, with a national marketing communications campaign. The team created a logo and initial set of videos within weeks of winning the contract, then kept up the pace with more videos, advertising, and printed materials for VA locations. In 2018, the team is producing online webinars aligned with VA’s top priorities and aimed at VA managers, so that they train their workers to further reinforce VA’s new focus on communications.

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) needs just two words to state its first priority for improving Veterans’ health care experience: “greater choice.” Atlas Research is helping deliver on one of the biggest promises of that priority: enabling Veterans to receive care at home, from providers inside and outside the VA itself.

Atlas began tackling this challenge in 2011, with the advent of VA’s National Veteran Caregiver Training Program (NVCTP). Under NVCTP, Atlas and its partner organizations have trained and certified more than 40,000 unpaid family caregivers who look after post-9/11 Veterans. Atlas further engaged with Veterans and their caregivers through projects with, and support of, the Easter Seals organization and the Elizabeth Dole Foundation.

Atlas also supports a contract to help VA accelerate and expand its Veteran-Directed Home and Community-Based Care program, which enables family- or community-based caregivers to receive compensation from VA. Atlas is providing financial analysis, policy analysis, technical assistance, and training, and also providing internal controls to make sure that both Veterans and VA are benefiting from the program as planned.

The continuing, shared success of both of these contracts paved the way for an exciting new contract awarded to Atlas in 2017. Choose Home is an ambitious initiative to give Veterans, caregivers, and families a unified plan for keeping an aging or severely injured Veteran in their own home if they don’t want to move into an institution. The Atlas team is supporting Choose Home through three work streams: matching homecare needs to VA resources; facilitating plan development with organizations inside and outside VA; and establishing a VA Center of Excellence for Veteran homecare.

In 2017, Atlas completed year four of a five-year project to increase the success of hundreds of community-based organizations that help Veterans and their families avoid or escape homelessness.

These non-profits receive grants from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) National Center on Homelessness Among Veterans, through a program known as Supportive Services for Veteran Families (SSVF). The grantees help homeless and at-risk Veterans and their families address a broad range of risk factors for homelessness.

Atlas (with partners Technical Assistance Collaborative and Abt Associates) designed and executed a rigorous process for monitoring how effectively grantees comply with SSVF requirements and regulations. Individual grantees receive customized feedback on how to improve, while the Atlas team continually analyzes the monitoring data for trends and best practices that could benefit grantees across the country.

One of the clearest trends to emerge from the data is the success of the mission that drove Atlas from the beginning: grantees are now much better able to meet SSVF requirements, deliver services, and help end homelessness for Veterans and their families.

Atlas is taking its proven expertise in policy, research, and health care into new arenas. In 2017 the Department of Defense (DoD) Psychological Health Center of Excellence (PHCoE) contracted with Atlas (in partnership with ICF) for multi-year support in addressing a critical challenge: nearly 15% of active duty Service Members receive diagnoses for behavioral health conditions. These conditions, typically associated with high stress, range from alcohol-related disorders to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

While DoD has mandated that the four military services must follow policies for combat and operational stress control (COSC), the services execute the policies and gather associated data in different ways. Atlas experts are reviewing and analyzing compliance activities across the services to identify effective COSC programs and metrics that all the services could standardize on. This will make DoD more efficient and the care for individual service members more effective.

Atlas is also supporting PHCoE in eliminating attitudinal barriers that Service Members experience when seeking help for behavioral health issues. For example, some DoD policies still use outdated, derogatory language about people with mental health conditions. So Atlas public health experts developed a methodology for DoD to help identify and update policies that contain mental health stigma language.

Atlas continues to add to its unparalleled expertise and experience in public health and health care research and evaluation across multiple federal agencies. Atlas experts match the right research and evaluation methods — including quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-method approaches — to client objectives and can apply both time-tested and innovative methodologies based on the questions to be answered. Most importantly, Atlas translates research and evaluation findings into clear and actionable strategies.

Atlas is also a trusted advisor, known for nuanced handling of sensitive topics and engaging research into the concerns and conditions of underserved populations. Atlas combines this sophistication with deep understanding of its clients’ goals and strategies. The result is high-value information that clients can rely on to inform and improve policy development, implementation strategies, and execution.

In 2017, Atlas completed or continued work on the representative projects highlighted on the next page.

Focus: Transgender women at risk for HIV

Client: Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Atlas completed data collection on a qualitative research study to better understand the barriers and facilitators to HIV prevention, care, and treatment among transgender women, a population severely affected by the disease. Study findings and associated publications will provide crucial information to ensure that future HIV prevention, care, and treatment efforts are culturally competent and successful in reaching and engaging transgender women.

Focus: CREATE Program

Client: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Health Services Research & Development Service (HSR&D)

Atlas completed a multi-year qualitative process and outcome evaluation of HSR&D’s CREATE program (Collaborative Research to Enhance and Advance Transformation and Excellence), which funds partnered research projects in high-priority areas such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), women’s health, and long-term care. The client will use the findings to inform decisions about CREATE’s program structure, operations, and future funding.

Focus: Evaluating Training for Research Nurses in Post-Acute Care Settings

Client: Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)

Atlas evaluated staged trainings delivered to research nurses and field staff in support of a CMS initiative to improve standardization in post-acute care settings. Atlas utilized a mixed- methods approach to evaluate data elements as well as the training approaches used; analyzed data on their effectiveness; and provided recommendations for developing training content and delivering it for the initiative’s national rollout.

Focus: Military Sexual Trauma among Racial and Ethnic Minorities

Client: Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) National Center for PTSD

Atlas helped develop protocols and supported recruitment for an examination of health care and other experiences of racial and ethnic minority Veterans who had unwanted sexual experiences during their military service. Atlas conducted over 35 interviews with these Veterans to gather qualitative data to inform and enhance educational and outreach efforts to ensure all Veterans who have experienced military sexual trauma feel supported and welcomed at VA.