DATI’s Website Serves as a Model for Other Programs

When Beth Mineo, DATI Director, provided a demonstration of DATI’s new website to representatives from AT Act Programs across the country in November 2004, she could not have predicted what happened next. “I mentioned that the site had been developed with funding from the Real Choice Systems Change Grant from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,” Mineo Mollica recounts. “I thought it only fair to offer the source code at no cost to other federally-funded programs that could benefit from it.” Since that time, more than a dozen states have begun the process of adopting one or more of the website’s modules for their own use.

The module garnering the most attention to date has been the AT Exchange, which enables constituents to interact via the Internet to buy, sell, or give away used AT using a “want ads” type of approach (www.dati.org/exchange/). This interest has been stoked, at least in part, by the terms of the new Assistive Technology Act, which require all State AT Programs to operate an equipment exchange or equipment recycling program. In the interest of efficiency and economy, a national meeting of all those interested in adopting the DATI’s AT Exchange model has been scheduled for February 27 and 28 in Philadelphia. DATI staff, and representatives of AgoraNet, the company contracted to construct the site, will showcase the system and its capabilities, and work with other interested states to identify additional features and data collection functions to be built into the next generation of the system.

This type of cooperation is very typical among the State AT Programs. “We have relatively little federal funding but a very large mandate,” says Mineo Mollica. “We have to maximize our resources, and sharing new materials and tools across programs has proven to be one very effective way for us to ‘do more with less.’”

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