CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Personalisation appears to be hot topic as organisations who offer care services get to grips with with how ‘Personalisation’/Patient Centre Care affects them, how it will affect the services they offer and how they will record this. Clearly many organisations are going to start to use/increase their use of some kind of contact management to keep a track of Person Centered Care. Some of this information may already be in existing systems and may just need to be brought together or it many need new systems to help record new types of information e.g. questionnaires, recorded interviews/phone calls etc

I can imagine that different organisations will have different requirements but I am interested in whether CiviCRM could offer a solution for some non-profit organisations in helping to deliver/record personalised care. I’m sure there are many sides to the personalisation issue but the three areas I am currently looking at are:

1. A record of correspondence and contact with each individual on their personal care requirements possibly including recorded phone calls/ meetings and any correspondence including any documented final agreement
2. Tracking of the the actual care given and whether it actually met any agreed plan.
3. Financial records of 1 and 2 including planned/actual spend and personal budgets.

I would be interested in any thoughts people may have on the issue of personalisation, systems to help and whether CiviCRM could be part of the solution. Many thanks.

1. A record of correspondence and contact with each individual on their personal care requirements possibly including recorded phone calls/ meetings and any correspondence including any documented final agreement

Certainly CiviCase could be used to track meetings, phone calls etc for individuals.  You would want to set up case timelines, activities, roles etc. that reflected typical 'Person Centered Care pathways' through the organisation to ensure that you could track individual cases sensibly.

2. Tracking of the the actual care given and whether it actually met any agreed plan.

We are currenltly working on a pilot project to evaluating CiviCRM as a tool for measuring outcomes for contacts.  i.e. to measure change over time of a certain indicator (often reported by the client themselves).  We'll likely create some reports that show these changes.  It sounds like these reports might meet your need also, or at least, you might want to consider taking a similar approach.

3. Financial records of 1 and 2 including planned/actual spend and personal budgets.

CiviContribute would be useful here.  Would need to hear about this in more detail to understand whether CiviCRM could provide for this 'out of the box' using something like CiviGrant, or if you would require more integration - the ability to add/link financial information directly to a case.  Budgets, etc. is something that Civi doesn't do at the moment, but creating a budget might be as simple as creating a report that shows completed and pending contributions in relation to a budget line for a contact.

I would be interested in any thoughts people may have on the issue of personalisation, systems to help and whether CiviCRM could be part of the solution. Many thanks

It certainly could be.  It sounds like there would be a fair amount of customisation involved, but CiviCRM is built to be extended.

Thinking about this more from a project management point of view, initial steps would be to spec. out in more detail what you want to achieve on the wiki so you get a more of an idea of how this could be approached in CiviCRM, the amount of customisation you would need, how long it would take, etc.  You could then compare this approach with any off the shelf packages that are available.  Out of interest, how suitable, mature and expensive are off the shelf alternatives?

If it is a case of extending CiviCRM or starting from scratch / paying a lot for custom development of another solution, then I would definitely recommend CiviCRM, as it has a track record of succesfully developing these kind of solutions.

Also, I think you would also do well to look for potential partnerships / consortia / infrastructure / umbrella organisations that would be suitable and willing to fund this development as (depending on the size of your organisation and the cost of alternatives) it might be a challenge for a single organisation to develop - but that really depends on your budget.

Michael