What Is Core Case Management?
Salesforce summarises this as ‘long term hands-on support provided to an individual client working with your organisation.’
They are typically recipients of programs or services, but in the context of a case, we are helping guide individuals through a case plan with goals and objectives plus assessments to track their progress.
Up until this point we have been happy with Nonprofit Cloud Case Management (NCCM), this was an absolute delight to work with and clients (both old and new) loved the new functionality of intake processes and tying everything together with a neat little bow.
That functionality is remaining, but has been improved with Core Case Management; and even better, it’s now included within the core cost of the platform!
So let’s go through the main changes, additions and improvements here to help showcase some of the functionality that you could be taking advantage of right now!
Key differences between NCCM and the new Core Case Management product:
- Can add assessments to the intake process at any time
- Can setup eligibility for guided flow using the business rules engine
- Case workers can now have more guided flows to complete assessments
- Can add many additional fields to the assessment object
- Case can now relate to more participants than just the individual i.e a household
- More easily assign permissions for the case using Case Teams
- Case plans now support groups
- Case plans are linked to benefits (historically we needed to track the care plan and the services offered independently – whereas now they are linked!)
- Case Plan Templates with predefined goals, benefits, and tasks to easily identify a plan that can be added and altered on a per client basis
- Utilisation of program teams – a core selection of staff (including the case worker) to collaborate on goals and drive the individual through to the goals identified.
Referral/Case Life Cycle:
Intake Process
Within the NCCM we would create a case, and link the case to an intake record – that excellent screen providing all the information and checklists that you need to capture in order to perform the intake process. This always felt a little backward in the sense that you had a case before you had an intake form.
Now, in the core platform we create referrals via the intake form which uses Omniscripts and FlexCards, however, we can also switch these two steps around and create the referral first, then perform the intake (which feels more sensible!).
Intake & Assessment
- Guided process to intake the client, assess their needs with interview forms and collect information to fully engage and assist the individual
- Dynamic assessments alter the assessment questions based on the answers provided (conditional questions)
Referral process
In the NCCM we would have a case record that represents an inbound referral. This was typically driven by the status of the case itself. However within the new core product, a referral is its own record which allows us to segregate the two points of contact.
We then create the case record from the referral, so the overall path so far is an inbound referral which would have an intake record linked (optional), and then we create the case following the review of both. The even better news is that we are not tied into the way the platform works out of the box, so if you still want to have referral as a case, and intake against the case, these are omnistudio components that can be lifted and placed anywhere on the platform, so we can simply add these to the case layout and et voila! back to the NCCM functionality!
Care Plans
Similar to the NCCM, we can still create a personalised case plan with the individual and work with the case teams to build out the correct goals and targets based on care plan templates that have been predefined.
We can still create outbound referrals and collaborate with service providers
to communicate client needs effectively and report on the outbound referrals as needed, however one new feature is the ability to configure top level goals per individual and have different top level goals for family groups.
This means we can help an individual and their family groups with different plans and track different goals/objectives – something that is regularly requested from our clients!
By adding a care plan against the case, we can also default the program engagement records and add the client directly to benefits – so now we have a care plan template that generates a series of tasks and activities, and onboards the client onto the next session scheduled all within a few clicks.
Even though we add a care plan template to the case, we can also add additional benefits and goals set on an individual basis.
We have a larger note-taking canvas which can be added anywhere on the case, referral or intake elements to ensure that more accurate notes are being captured and shared throughout the whole case management process.
We will be covering more regarding the programme management capabilities of the platform soon, however for now, let’s jump into tracking cases and their outcomes!
Participant Profile
This is a huge change from NCCM functionality; the interface has changed, the detail that can be seen has changed, and the overall accessibility of the data is profound.
That is a lot of information at a glance, and can be a little confusing or intimidating to begin with, however if we drill down into some of these sections in more detail, hopefully you will realise that it’s an excellent layout with a lot of hidden information.
Let’s start down on the left-hand side bar:
Profile details at a glance, no need to focus on the record detail if you don’t need to.
Tags anyone?
Yup, they are finally available as standard, out of the box.
Apply tagging to any record in the system and have tags automatically recommended when adding specific records as well – this is neat!
Client Timeline seems fairly straightforward when you first look at it, but as with everything in the new Nonprofit Cloud, there are some hidden tricks, such as expanding the timeline to see the records that spawned that item in the first place.
I have spoken to many, many customers over the years regarding their legacy platforms and the need to be able to identify key events and specific activities without wanting to trawl through an endless list of records. My previous answer was the Lightning interface’s activity timeline, which is brilliant – a long chronologically ordered list of tasks, calls, emails and events – and that is absolutely still present and amazingly good.
However, this client timeline lets you focus on the bigger impactful changes, and expand the section out to see so much more information and actively engage with those records within the same component – yup, you can edit those records, in that component.
Oh, and did you notice the little tab at the top called Life Events? It’s the same thing, but tracking different elements.
The Relationships tab is looking a little bit different these days as well, gone are the list views of Organisation Affiliations and Contact Relationships, here is Actionably Related Lists (ARC):
Yes it is interactable.
Yes it is showing data in real time.
Yes it is awesome.
And to top it all off, the right-hand side bar contains the usual Action Launcher – create those same calls, tasks, emails and meetings like you’ve always been able to within Salesforce.
The Interaction Summaries component takes your notes and engagement to another level – filter, sort, and tag your notes whilst capturing far more information that is as easily shareable with other team members as it is privatised.
And how about the ability to link the interaction summary to many other records such as the case, or a goal? Done.
We only have good things to say about the new Core Case Management, what do you think so far?