Articles from prior issues of The Advocate

September/October, 1997

NADE Correspondence

Susan R. LaMorte
President
National Association of Disability Examiners (NADE)
675 Joralemon Street
Belleville, NJ 07109

Dear Ms. LaMorte:

Thank you for your letter of June 27, and for your continuing support of our efforts to develop and implement revised disability interview forms. We appreciate your comments on the draft interview forms. We also appreciated Terri Spurgeon’s participation in developing the training package for the new forms. Terri has made valuable contributions on the draft forms, and we look forward to working with her and the other members of the Workgroup in evaluating the results of the field test and in the other steps which we will be taking before the revised forms are introduced next year.

Now, I would like to respond to the issues you raised in your letter.

First, we agree that the target dates for comments on the draft revisions, resolution of comments, and the field test are very tight. However, the forms were developed by the Disability Interview Forms Workgroup, with representation from all of the involved components, and for this reason we expect that they were a good reflection of the users’ requirements for the forms. Workgroup members assisted us in reviewing the comments and developing the prototypes of the revised forms for testing. We believe that the prototypes adequately address the concerns and issues raised in the comments.

Second, the study protocol for the field test of the revised forms will provide the users with the opportunity to gain experience with them and provide us with sufficient information to make an initial evaluation of the forms before we make a decision on their incorporation into the Reengineered Disability System (RDS), Release 2.0. While we will confirm and update this decision in October as the users gain more experience with the forms, we do not anticipate that this will require extensive changes in the requirements for RDS. We will also make any further refinements to the forms based on the field test before they are finalized for distribution in July 1998.

Third, we support the plan proposed by the Workgroup at their June meeting, that persons with current case development and case adjudication experience should play an integral role in the development of national symptoms and function forms during the September meeting. We also believe that persons with current interviewing experience should play a role, as well. For these reasons, we agree with the Workgroup’s suggestion that the various regional sessions also include field office and regional office representatives when the Workgroup meets to develop recommendations for these national forms. We welcome Terri Spurgeon’s participation as NADE’s representative during these discussions.

Thank you again for your continuing support of this important project.

Sincerely,

Susan M. Daniels, Ph.D.
Associate Commissioner for Disability