Some observations and questions

[creea1]

It is great to see the work being done on this project.
I am investigating 2.2B2 currently.

I am interested to see how well this will fit the work flow of a community trust i work with. They provide support services to the family of people with addictions. In New Zealand we have some well defined requirements to report on the ethnic groups that people identify with, and it seems this could be easily be manged with the custom fields.

We have a need to record and report on a number of work flows as following;
Brief Intervention - a few 1 -3 sessions of support to a family member.
Support - any number of sessions to family members.
At these sessions the whole family group could attend, and the actual subject may not be there. In the standard activities there is a feature "with contact"  for recording many contacts as attendees, but this seems to have been removed from the "Case" activities. Is it intended that this will be returned to functionality ?

They also run a number of group sessions such as Group therapy, support groups, and education groups. We need to report both on number of groups and the number of attendees. I see we could use the standard activities for this, but I am not sure how the total number of attendees would be calculated for the reporting, especially when on some of the planned attendees may not actually get there. Also using the standard activities would mean it is not included as part of the case, which may cause confusion.

Also a couple of observations;
It seems that to get someone on your civiCase dashboard you needed to have used the case summary to create a case role. However, it seems that to end this relationship (and get the person off your caseload) the only option is to delete, not given an end date as in the general relationships tab. This means that there is no longitudal record of your involvement with that person (other than the activities themselves).

Also can someone explain how the "Open case" works, i cannot see it as an activity in the case activities list, is it assumed this is an administrative action only and the first time the patient is actually seen and assessed is recorded as a separate action?

Also "close case"; it seems to be no relationship between the "close case" activity and changing the case status to "resolved" - is there any intension to tie these actions together to make it less complex for the user?

 Many thanks if someone can give their opinions on these observations.

[petednz]

Hey Creea - good to see you on the forum. We met at Drupal South. I see you are getting your head stuck in to civiCase which seems like an excellent fit for your needs, not that I have yet had reason to wrestle it to meet the needs of a client - but won't be far away hopefully.

[Barry1]

Some good questions Creea.

1. I agree that "with contact" would be a helpful feature for the 'Case' activiites.
2. It would make sense to me to see "Open Case" as an administrative action, to be followed up in various ways as appropriate - e.g. If we get a POL400 domestic violence referral, the first step might be to make contact by phone and see if they wish to work with us - they may not want to, so it would be a short, simple contact. Or we may find they are interested, so we would - after the initial contact - conduct an intake interview. Both times though, we'd need to open a case first.
3. Perhaps with the group sessions, the user needs  "refer to group" (or whatever appropriate name) defined as a case activity - that would record the group work as part of the case, though it doesn't deal with the other isses you raised.
4. It makes sense to me that 'closed' and 'resolved' are not the same. We work with people where we might close the case because we are not working them anymore (e.g. left town) or close to reopen for administrative reasons (case must be closed after 'x" number of hours, because that's what the contract specifies) - but in both cases closing might not mean 'resolving' the case.
5. But it might be useful in future to have the "close case" activity prompt to check if the user wants to change status at the same time.

Cheers, Barry