Author Topic: Case management (Read 2027 times)

twowheeler · November 21, 2007, 04:26:06 am

Just following up on Michal's blog post about case management. This would be a very nice addition to CiviCRM. I can give you an idea of how we could use this functionality if it were available.

Part of our organization does mentoring of troubled young people. We train the adult mentors, match them with a "protege" (the young person) and track the progress of the relationship over a period of time.

Already in CiviCRM I have built in custom data fields representing if the contact is a mentor or a protege, when the mentor started training, when they finished training, when they were matched to a protege, etc. Also there is a CiviCRM relationship between the mentor and protege contacts.

I think what we need as a next step are work queues, a canned search on certain items that presents a report to the user which says, here are the people who signed up to be mentors who should be invited to the next training, or here are the mentors who need a phone call to check on progress. It would be nice if a work queue could be assignable to a particular user or group of users, but not essential. I suppose that a work queue could be as simple as a custom report.

There would need to be a way to define the steps in a process so that once a contact is marked as completing one step, they move to the queue for the next step. The steps could be defined to be most anything, like starting with an indication of interest on the web site, to attendance at an event or a phone contact or receipt of a form with a signature. It would be nice if a time period could be associated with a step in the process, like step 3 should occur within 60 days after step 2. The staff's job would be to keep people moving through the queues.

My other concern is how we keep a history of such actions. At the moment I only have one set of custom fields in the contact for this data. This is not ideal. If a mentor continues with us and is assigned a new protege, we would end up overwriting the first data set with the new one, so the history would be lost. So perhaps we need a new concept of a case that would be filled with whatever custom data is needed. One of the fields would be an arbitrary case number or code. Mentors and proteges would be associated with one case, and then the case would be moved through the work queues until it is closed. Each contact could then be associated with an arbitrary number of cases, similar to how you currently handle events.

Hope that helps.

Michał Mach · November 22, 2007, 03:04:52 am

Hey,

Thanks for your feedback, it's really valuable. I started a page on our wiki to keep track of different opinions, and potentially build some specification based on it.

Disclaimer first: I'm throwing out ideas as they come, so not all of them might be that useful or really make sense. Feel free to criticize, suggest different approaches etc. I (sometimes too heavily believe in creative power of freeform brainstorming.

To start with real life problem: I would propose addressing the problem of "history of actions" with currently available functionality. You probably saw "Activities" tab in CiviCRM contact screen, where you can record different interaction with a contact. It allows registering "Other activities", extended with custom fields available through CiviCRM administration. I already had occasion to use this mechanism in similar circumstances - you basically create a custom activity type (let's call it: "Mentoring cycle") , extend it with proper custom fields and you should be able to store multiple occurences of the same kind of activity without the risk of overwriting historical data.

I also see some potential to improve the way you use CiviCRM with upcoming simple case management functionality. You could - for example - treat each "mentoring cycle" as a case and register different activities under it. In general, I would encourage you to revisit your requirements when CiviCRM 2.0 is out. Activities has been extended a bit in this version (for example, three "directions" of activity-contact association can be defined, which means you can say: Mr. A assigned Ms. B to start mentoring Mrs. C - all within single activity record), and it might be possible to get much finer granulation in tracking different stages of mentoring process that you describe.

Coming back to case management functionality, from what you're suggesting, I can see we could use some kind of a simple workflow engine, where you could not only "write down" different steps in the process, but would also be able to trigger some actions based on state changes. This is currently doable through manual process - you can have someone in your office to go through some saved search results showing people in different stages of mentoring process, but obviously it would be useful to have this process slightly more automated. It's a bit too early to sketch it out in detail at this stage, but it's definitely a good idea to keep in mind when we start thinking about implementation details.

Thx,
m

twowheeler · November 22, 2007, 06:46:39 am

Hmm, I haven't done much with the activities tab and will investigate that further. Thank you!

MacRonin · November 22, 2007, 09:14:23 am

For the workflow idea you might want to take a look at Workflow-ng ( http://drupal.org/project/workflow_ng ) in the Drupal world. Both for ideas that you might be able to borrow or its possible that the drupal Workflow-ng module might be able to interact with CiviCRM activities. I haven't used it yet my self so I can't be sure. And for Drupal 6 the Actions module has also been extended over what is in Drupal 5.

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Author Topic: Case management (Read 2027 times)

twowheeler

Case management

Michał Mach

Re: Case management

twowheeler

Re: Case management

MacRonin

Re: Case management