Paperwork
Reduction Act Submission:
Supporting
Statement B for
the Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP)
Retaining Employment and Talent after Injury/Illness Network (RETAIN) Demonstration Projects and Evaluation, OMB No. 1230-0014
January 2022
OMB SUPPORTING STATEMENT PRA PART B
Retaining Employment and Talent after Injury/Illness Network (RETAIN) Demonstration Projects and Evaluation
The RETAIN Demonstration Projects are a collaborative effort led by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Disability Employment Policy (ODEP) in partnership with DOL’s Employment and Training Administration (ETA) and the Social Security Administration (SSA). RETAIN—Retaining Employment and Talent after Injury/Illness Network—projects are testing the impact of early intervention strategies that improve stay-at-work/return-to-work (SAW/RTW) outcomes of individuals who experience work disability while employed. “Work disability” is defined as an injury, illness, or medical condition that has the potential to inhibit or prevent continued employment or labor force participation.
SAW/RTW programs succeed by returning injured or ill workers to productive work as soon as medically possible during their recovery process and by providing interim part-time or light-duty work and accommodations, as necessary. The RETAIN Demonstration Projects are modeled after promising programs operating in Washington state, including the Centers of Occupational Health and Education (COHE), the Early Return to Work (ERTW), and the Stay at Work programs. While these programs operate within the state’s workers’ compensation system and are available only to people experiencing work-related injuries or illnesses, the RETAIN Demonstration Projects provide opportunities to improve SAW/RTW outcomes for both occupational and non-occupational injuries and illnesses of people who are employed, or at a minimum in the labor force, when their injury or illness occurs.
Central to these projects is the early coordination of health-care and employment-related supports and services to help injured or ill workers remain in the workforce. These supports and services include:
Training in occupational health best practices for participating health-care providers;
Active involvement of a Return-to-Work Coordinator throughout the medical recovery period to facilitate continued employment;
Enhanced communication among workers, employers, and health-care providers;
Accommodations and job modifications; and
Retraining and rehabilitation services.
To accomplish this, projects are providing services through an integrated network of partners that includes close collaboration between state/local workforce development entities, health-care provider systems/networks, and other partners as appropriate.
The primary goals of the RETAIN Demonstration Projects are:
To increase employment retention and labor force participation of individuals who acquire, and/or are at risk of developing, work disabilities; and
To reduce long-term work disability among project participants, including the need for Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income.
The ultimate purpose of the demonstration is to validate and expand implementation of evidence-based strategies to accomplish these goals.
DOL administers and manages the grants as well as manages a third-party provider of programmatic technical assistance. SSA manages a third-party independent evaluation of the grant program, covered by a separate PRA package submitted by SSA.
In order to assess whether the RETAIN projects are serving the target populations through coordinated care and achieving RETAIN’s primary goals, DOL and SSA need to collect information that will assist the project's performance management and continuous quality improvement efforts, as well as the third-party evaluation effort, by providing baseline information relating to worker participants.
Information collection instruments included in this package:
Baseline Participant Form Part 1
Baseline Participant Form Part 2
Other items included in this package:
60-Day FRN
The purpose of the RETAIN information collection is to understand and assess RETAIN program start-up, pilot projects, and full implementation. In addition, worker participant data will be used as baseline data in RETAIN program evaluation activities conducted by SSA’s third-party independent evaluator.
The Baseline Participant Forms will be provided to the grantees by ODEP and are included in this package. Part 1 will be completed by each worker participant seeking to enroll in RETAIN. Part 2 will be completed by the health-care provider and/or Return-to-Work Coordinator for each worker participant at the time of enrollment. No sampling or other method is used to select a subset of respondents. The respondent universe consists of everyone attempting to enroll in RETAIN, and all grantees are required to collect this data. There are 5 grantees in Phase 2 of RETAIN. As described in the burden table in Statement A, the number of enrollees is expected to be 5,313 per grantee on an annualized basis over the next three years.
Table B-1.1 Respondent Universe and Response Rates
Study Component/Form |
No. of Respondents in Universe |
No. of Responses in Sample |
Expected Response Rate |
Baseline Participant Form Part 1 |
15,940 |
15,940 |
100% |
Baseline Participant Form Part 2 |
15,940 |
15,940 |
100% |
State agencies and health-care partners will utilize existing IT systems to the extent possible for collecting data. An informed consent process is provided to worker participants by the grantees to meet the requirements of the grantees’ health-care partners and institutional review boards.
No statistical methodologies are used for stratification or sample selection, either for the enrollees or for the grantees. No estimation procedures are used. There are no unusual problems requiring specialized sampling procedures. These forms are completed for each enrollee during the enrollment process, so there is no periodicity for this data collection. Data received by DOL concerns the treatment group only and is intended to be used for grant/program management and descriptive statistics. Impact analysis using data concerning both the treatment group and control/comparison group will be conducted by the independent evaluator, which is covered by SSA’s separate PRA package.
Key variables used for analysis include sex (I 8), ethnicity (I 9), race (I 10), educational attainment (I 11), general health status (I 13), current employment status (I 15), time since participant last worked (I 17), job tenure (I 18), veteran status (I 20), primary diagnosis (II 2), industry of employment (II 9), and occupation (II 10).
Each enrollee must complete the Baseline Form Part 1 during enrollment, while the health-care provider and/or Return-to-Work Coordinator will complete for each enrollee the Baseline Form Part 2. Lack of completion of these forms will prevent enrollment, meaning that response rates for enrollees will be 100%. Any missing data for enrollees will be collected by the Return-to-Work Coordinator. No sampling is involved.
The Baseline Form Part 1, which will be completed by enrollees, was tested on five DOL employees to ensure clarity and ease of burden. The Baseline Form Part 2 will be completed by health-care providers and/or Return-to-Work Coordinators, largely using information, such as ICD-10 code diagnosis, that will already have been obtained by health-care providers.
Those consulted on the content of these instruments include the grantees (contact information below), SSA (contact information below), the independent evaluator (contact information below), and the following:
ETA (DOL): Kellen Grode, [email protected], (202) 693-3534
Steve Rietzke, [email protected], (202) 693-3912
OMB (EOP): Rebecca Spavins, [email protected], (202) 395-2139
Contact information for the grantees who will collect this information is as follows:
Kansas: Dale Tower, [email protected], (316) 771-6800
Nigel Soria, [email protected], (785) 296-1705
Kentucky: Cora McNabb, [email protected], (502) 564-4440
Becky Cabe, [email protected], (502) 782-3415
Chithra Adams, [email protected], (859) 218-0245
Minnesota: Nancy Omondi, [email protected], (651) 259-7525
Lensa Idossa, [email protected], (651)-259-7509
Amy Carlson, [email protected], (651) 259-7542
Ohio: Ronald Weber, [email protected], (614) 644-0821
Katherine Allen, [email protected], (614) 752-3351
Vermont: Chrissy Geiler, [email protected]. (802) 828-5985
Stephen Monahan, [email protected], (802) 828-2138
Christine McDonough, [email protected], (412) 383-4603
Contact information for DOL is as follows:
DOL: David Rosenblum, [email protected], (202) 693-7840
Jackson Costa, [email protected], (202) 693-4925
Contact information for SSA and the independent evaluator, who will obtain and use part of the data collected by the forms, is as follows:
SSA: Laura King, [email protected], (410) 965-6161
Brian Aiken, [email protected], (202) 358-6138
Evaluator: Dave Wittenburg, [email protected], (609) 945-3362
Laura Kosar, [email protected], (202) 484-5268
| File Type | application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document |
| File Title | 7420.01: OMB Package. Section A. Introduction |
| Author | MARKOVICH_L |
| File Modified | 0000-00-00 |
| File Created | 2022-04-11 |