Ladies and Gentlemen, introducing... case management, the beginning!

A while ago, I gave a brief preview of new CiviCRM's functionality in 2.0 on this blog. "Two-point-oh" was a bit of a "wild dreams" back than - but it didn't really lasted long when we got into the stage where this milestone version is behind the door. There we go, code freeze for CiviCRM 2.0 is scheduled in two weeks, and it will contain some exciting new things. One of them is first version of case management functionality. Many nonprofits' work is organised around case-based actions: staff's activities are initiated with specific action, take specific set of tasks that need to be performed in order to "serve" it and can be named as successfully finished under specific conditions. Along that road, a lot of data is gathered, needs to be analysed, evaluated and decisions need to be made based on that. It's a very simple and generic vision of how case management works, since there is much more than that in different flavours of nonprofit work. CiviCRM always had functionality available for storing information about interactions with contacts in the database, however never had any advanced mechanism that would allow ordering those interactions, grouping them and taking advantage of more detailed analysis of those interactions. With CiviReport introduced, a part of that gap has been stopped, however, it is still difficult to implement any kind of case management with CiviCRM. For that reason, we decided to implement very simple mechanism which would help to improve the situation. It is an uncomplicated tool - case management in CiviCRM 2.0 basically allows you to group single contact's activities into groups called cases. You can name the case, assign some categories to them, set the start and end dates date and - finally - go on with groupping activities under them. I admit - we're not very fluent in case management. Within our team, we have some experience in human rights, medical and children care oriented case management, but it's not much. Our plan is to start with something very basic and turn to our community to tell us about real world needs, teach us about mechanism that would make case oriented work easier and more effective. If your work include this kind of activities, make sure you try out this new functionality in CiviCRM 2.0 when it's out and come back to us with tough love, ideas and suggestions!

Comments

This actively developed, open source case management package might provide some inspiration for this development:

http://www.lcm.ngo-bg.org/en

If you consider building into CiviCRM the capacity to document abuses of human rights, then also consider this data standard and relational model for the same:

http://huridocs.org/tools/tools/esfen.pdf