Case-workers such as social workers or health workers, divide their time between clients. The purpose of our app is to support them in their work. And to make the inevitable paperwork - reporting as simple as possible.
The bureaucracy in our society keeps expanding, in the private and the public sector.
Nurses and teachers in some regions are complaining that they have to spend half of their time on 'paperwork'.
We strongly dislike this trend and the main goal of our app is for workers to gain more time to spend on what matters - clients.
This is not to say paperwork, forms and reports are not needed. Of course we have to measure things if we want to improve. Of course we have to keep records, because human memory is fallible at best and unreliable at worst. Of course it make sense to follow best-practices.
Of course paperwork is needed. However we believe, we took some wrong turns, and what was supposed to be a supporting act - became the main course.
To be blunt, paperwork is secondary and must be kept to a minimum. The value of paperwork is only indirect, by making the real work with clients better and faster.
What does it mean for our app? It is designed to be used as little as possible.
How does this work in practice?
Case-worker’s daily tasks are recorded in the app in the form of activity records. An activity record has a fixed date, duration and captures the work for or on-behalf of a client. Caseworkers can also enter their non-client work, such as education or internal meetings.
The lifecycle of an activity record is quite straightforward.
The activity is usually planned ahead. Here the app’s calendar is the tool to use. With a double click a new activity can be planned wherever the worker has a free time slot. The calendar can also display organization's exchange calendars in the same view. This way education or internal meetings will not create conflicts with client work.
Next the activity is executed, for example the worker meets with clients. App supports the case worker during her work, by showing the complete history of completed activities. Many organizations also configure the app to automatically suggest talking points or activities for the meeting, depending on the client type and progress.
Finally the activity is completed, the results and next steps recorded. Here the app can enforce certain fields to be filled before completion. Completed activities are usually immutable.
Of course sometimes activities need to be rescheduled. This can be done on the activity page or much faster by drag&drop on the calendar.
If the activity cannot be completed, the worker can mark it as canceled.
We already hinted at different types of activities, and usually organizations employ a much richer set of categories. Let’s review.
The basic type of activity:
You might also come across organizations where direct work is called a consultation, and indirected work an intervention.
Whether the work is done in person, online or over a phone is usually also recorded. We call it the form of the actvity.
Organization also track where in-person meetings take place. Sometimes this can be a simple office/client toggle. A predefined option set, possibly with custom user input is also quite common. This is one place, where we caution customers, why is this needed and how exact this information has to be. Don't waste the workers time, if you don't need the full address.
The topic of the activity is also almost always categorized. This can be an option set where the user can choose a topic, up to multi level and multiple choice mandatory topic selection.
What’s more organization can mandate that certain topics are covered in the course of work with a client.
The topic information is mostly used for reporting. Being a necessary evil, we wish to make it as straightforward as possible. It should always be a list of options and if possible filtered to options that make sense for the client situation.
Automatic activity naming with optional counters is also available. If we know what the activity was about from the topic selection, let's not ask the user to type it again.
Future activities can be planned straight from the current activity. The meeting notes or agreed next steps are automatically copied to the future activity. Obviously the most common action when looking at an activity record is to check what was done previously. And when we should meet next. Again, obviously, these actions must be fast and intuitive.
Finally, what might seem obvious the activity has to record who was the client. Organizations and even different types of activities can differ widely in who is considered a client, which and how many clients can be added to an activity.
Three scenarios are covered in the app by default. These are an individual activity, where a single client was present. A group activity for two or more clients.
The third is a single-visit activity type. When is this used? Whenever we don't want or can't record more information about the client, for example when organizations provide low-threshold services.
Organizations can add additional fields to the activity record, depending on the needs.
For example if a contract is signed with clients, we wish to record it on the activity. Of course the user should choose only from active contracts and for the selected client. If only one contract is active it can be even preselected automatically.
Another example is organizations that receive funding from multiple source. In this case activities need to be attributed to a particular funding source or project. This might be complicated by fact that not all workers can receive funding from any source.
Social services often require two workers to be present for some activities. Naturally we wish to create the activity once, but it has to be accessible for both workers. Other organizations have specialist workers who record activites, but the primary case worker needs access to them too. Our app comes with flexibly permissions setup to cover all possible scenarios, from individual case-workers to complex multi-worker teams and regional managers.
Right away we find that there are many possible ways to define a client, or types of clients. And often multiple types are used within a single organization.
At the end of the day, case workers are working with people. The first question is whether the focus of their work is an individual or a household/family. Some services are strictly oriented towards families, others are focusing on children. In both cases mapping the family relationships is necessary.
Another important aspect where clients differ is long term vs. short term cooperation. For example many nonprofit organizations offer low threshold services, thus none or very little client information is collected.
To further complicate matters clients can move within these categories. With growing client trust random client visits gradually morph into a long term approach, and meetings with an individual client turn into whole family visits.
Thus our app is prepared to cover all these scenarios. What do we mean by prepared? Simply that we can selectively turn on the features that make sense for your organization. Do you only work with long term individual clients? No problem, family, relationships and short-term functionality will not be enabled and thus will not get in the way.
Mapping of relationships between clients is an often requested feature. The group of clients is usually called family or household, basically everyone living under the same roof. Now being part of an household is only the beginning, there are several types of relationships involved.
Why is this useful. First of all it is valuable to know and understand the social background of clients. Then it is often useful to navigate the relationships. Relationships make it possible to filter and group data, such as seeing activities related to a household in a single place, or understanding how much time workers spent on activities with members of a given household. Finally, organization are sometimes required to report activities aggregated by household.
Our app comes prepared to handle the complexities of people relationships. But again, if this is way more complicated than is needed in your scenario, it can be easily turned off.
Simply put a contract represents the basis of working with clients. It frames the work both in time and scope, when the work started&ended, what are the reasons and goals for the cooperations. Apart from these basic fields, every organization has a unique set of information that needs to be collected on the contract. Our app contains an extensible set of problems, goals, methods and tasks that can be applied to the contract. Additionally the distribution - how the client was referred can also be predefined.
Often an evaluation at the end is enough, but with long running (multiyear) contracts, regular milestones and measurements are required.
Contract legal documents can be stored within the app, or integrated/interconnected through sharepoint. Legal documents can be even generated from Microsoft Word templates.
Organizations usually offer their services in a structured way by creating programs or projects that are tailored to a specific audience, problems and/or goals. In our app this top level work definition is modeled as a contract type. Using them allows the work to be standardized. For example by attaching a methodology/documentation, a high level plan, a set of milestones with evaluation criteria (check progress twice a year on a scale 1..4) and even rules (a meeting twice a month is required). Integrated documentation helps new workers to get on board faster and lets seasoned workers discover a new technique when stuck. Rules ensure no step is forgotten and quality of service is maintained. Finally periodic evaluation captures (objective) progress towards the selected goals and creates opportunities for reflection, adjustment or celebration.
Organizations that receive funding from multiple source need a way to connect each activity to a funding source. Based on our experience, we designed the app so that the source of funding can be attached to any object.
One case is if a project/program (contract type) is financed via a single source. Then all activities that are tied to clients with contracts of the specific type can be attributed to the source.
Workers with one or more funding sources is another case. In this scenario the worker has to choose a funding source for each activity. This can be automated by allowing the user to choose a default funding source. One reason this happens is that funding is provided for work that requires a certified worker.
There are many more possibilities. Sometimes two workers working on the same activity use different funding. Or the funding is tied to the specific type of work performed within the activity. It just goes on and on. We will work with you to correctly setup the attribution model and automate it as much as possible.
Finally the app can help track hours of funding left/spend, with automated notifications when limit is (almost) reached.
Once we configure the app to attach funding down to the single activity level, we can generate any report required by the funding source organization. Whether monthly, quarterly and or yearly reports, aggregated or per client, worker or region. Reports can be generated and even sent automatically as excel or pdf files. We understand that what and how is reported is sometimes quite complex and the rules differ between funding organizations.
On top of that, interactive dashboards are available within the app directly for managers, accountants or marketing.
Social, health and other people-focus services can benefit greatly from our case-management app.
Because our app works for the user. Which means minimizing the time spent on paperwork and thus maximizing the time spent with the client.
Check out our success stories Usmev, Filip.
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