In this article, we'll review the new Family Service Management feature.
Additional Articles about Family Service Management can be found Here
The key items that will be covered are:
- Understanding what the update is and why
- How to turn on other services your program offers
- Creating new families and managing their services
- Updates to reports
- What change will you see for your existing families? We'll review examples of how family Status Histories updated to Family Services
Understanding the update
Family services can now be managed from the new Family Service Management section which can be accessed on the Family Home page. What use to be "Statuses", with start and end dates, is now "Services". With Statuses, a family could only have 1 Status assigned at a time. But with Services, a family can have more than 1 service open at the same time.
Services are grouped into 3 main sections:
- Pre-Enrollment Services - Recruit, Waiting List, Mailing List
- Home Visiting Services - which still remains the primary service provided
- Other services - Doula, Group Only, Screening Only and Other
So why the new Family Service Management update?
We've heard from many programs over the years about how they are providing other services to families such as screening only, doula, group only services, etc. With Statuses, there was no way to indicate a family was receiving a service other than home visiting - or in addition to. So programs had to come up with "work-arounds".
This update eliminates the "work-arounds" and allows a family, for example, to have a home visiting service period and a screening only service at the same time.
Or maybe a family was being recruited, decided not to enroll into home visiting but decided to only attend group meetings.
The last section in this article will review specific scenarios and demonstrate how the Family Service Management will look for each scenario.
This update also eliminates discrepancies between the family status and the child status. No longer will home visitors have to navigate back-and-forth between the Family Data page, Guardian Data page and Child Data page in order to manage statuses for each individual family member.
When adding a service to a family, home visitors can choose which family members will receive the service. Service periods and all the family members participating will be managed from the Family Service Management section.
Turning on these other services
Home visiting and Pre-enrollment services are always enabled in each account. For programs that provide other services like Doula and Group Only, for example, need to turn on these services from the SETUP section.
Creating a new family
NOTE: The scenario demonstrated in this section is only to illustrate how this new feature can be used. It is up to the programs to decide how best to document a family's services.
Let's create a new family. The program will first provide Doula Services for the family but the doula home visitor is hasn't been hired yet. So the family will be placed on the Waiting List.
Now that the doula has been hired, let's add a Doula service period for the family. The family will still be waiting to enroll into home visiting services
Now let's enroll the family into home visiting services.
Managing family services
In this tutorial, we'll review how to update services and family members.
Reports
Any reports where you could select to run the report by STATUS, you will now be able to run the report by SERVICE.
Let's look at a couple of examples.
Service Counts
If we run this report By Family and select Home Visiting, Doula and Screening Only services, this is what we'll see:
Child List Export
In this the Child List Export example, the report was run selecting to report all children in home visiting services. Under the Child Services and Family Services, all open services that child and family are receiving will be displayed.
However, no child or family will be listed that is not currently receiving Home Visiting Services.
Existing Family Scenarios - How Statuses Changed to Services
In this section, we'll show some screenshots of what a family's current enrollment history is compared to what it looks like after the update.
NOTE: Any names that are shown are fake names.
EXAMPLE
Here's a example of a family's enrollment history before the update.
This family also has 3 children - 2 exited and 1 enrolled prenatal child - who also have their own enrollment history but not shown here.
CURRENT HISTORY
UPDATED SERVICE -
FAMILY HOME
FAMILY SERVICE MANAGEMENT