Why Mobile Working Really Matters in Social Care

It is interesting to see how, irrespective of geography, the business pressures and processes are so similar in many respects between what we experience in local government in this country when compared to similar agencies in other parts of the world. For instance, within the UK we have Wolverhampton City Council who selected NetMotion Mobility as the secure mobile working architecture for their existing Social Care application, CareFirst. They had found that CareFirst performed poorly (or not at all) when using GPRS or 3G connections outside the office. Once they implemented a no cost evaluation of the NetMotion Mobility XE software, not only did the application work, but it shielded end users from frustrating interruptions in the application when the connection dropped for any reason, or when they were roaming from one network to another.

As a parallel to this, the Florida Department of Children and Family Services (DCF) is currently rolling out NetMotion Mobility XE to 4,000 Mobile Case Workers throughout the State of Florida (this includes agencies like OurKids - the focus of this case study)

I owe thanks for this article to a colleague from the analyst company, Strategic Analytics, Philippe Winthrop  - Director at Strategy Analytics. Philippe describes the opening keynote of the Mobile Enterprise Executive Summit that was held in Los Angeles in November. It is a powerful reminder as to why secure mobile working matters so much today.

For IT technical folks, it is so easy to get caught up on issues around platforms, devices, carriers, suppliers, and every other issue that goes on within technology.  A fresh perspective on how important this is comes when one shares in the presentation by Francis P. Allegra, CEO and Pat Smith, CIO of Florida's OurKids.

OurKids is a private, not for profit foster care agency for Miami and Florida Keys.  They focus on helping some of the people who face the greatest needs and challenges - young children who don't have adult family members who can take care of them. As we prepare for the seasonal festivities, stop for a moment and really think about that and consider how fortunate the majority of us are to have been raised in happy, healthy and safe homes.  Here are some fast facts for you that the OurKids presentation shared about foster care in the USA:

• 800,000 children spend time in foster care each year in the US
• 60% enter in response to a report of child abuse or neglect
• Average time in foster care is 28 months
• A child in foster care changes homes on average 1-2 times a year
• There's almost a 50% turnover in case management staff

That offers a sense of the very strenuous work environment for OurKids care workers. Not only do they have to go to schools to see counsellors, teachers and principals, but it gets even more stressful when they have to go to court to testify on behalf of a child.  It offers an insight into why there's such a high turnover in case management staff.

At this point the CEO of OurKids poses a question: now imagine if you didn't have the tools to do your job most effectively and efficiently so that you could focus on what really matters.  The children.

OurKids' Chief Information Officer Pat Smith comes from corporate America (banking and pharmaceutical IT background) and joined OurKids so she could do something she found more gratifying.  Soon after joining OurKids, she and the CEO launched a program to help the case management staff use enterprise mobility technology to spend less time doing paperwork and spend more of that time with children.  From a technology perspective this implementation is a close parallel to the classic field service solution, or last month Westminster parking solution for mobile enforcement officers, when one considers the component parts required.  By being able to extend secure mobile working to a Windows Mobile smartphone alongside a laptop OurKids have been able to accomplish (among other things):

• Better scheduling to know which children need to be seen that day and which are highlighted and have to be seen by the end of the month (every child needs to be seen every 6 months)
• Reduced time filling out paperwork in triplicate (getting rid of those carbon paper forms that never work)
• A way to track the children by taking a photograph of the child through the smartphone that also tags the photo with a timestamp and GPS location - which automatically gets uploaded to a central server through military-grade secure connection
• Mileage tracking and other analytic reporting to offer management and supervisory information to identify areas for improvement

There were a welter of other typical benefits users mentioned with the solution ... as well as the challenges of accommodating change in a stressful work environment that is already busy enough. The point they make is, technology not only improved employee satisfaction (they could focus on the priority, in their case, the children) but equally importantly it also improved the quality of care provided.  In addition to being able to satisfy their financial responsibilities by demonstrating Return on Investment benefits, they have the satisfaction of the true ROI. As they put it is well - how do you measure the value of a good childhood?  It's priceless.

Please click on ‘next' below to refer to the case studies of care professionals that have benefitted from secure mobile working. If you would like to measure these benefits for our organisation, please click here to request a no cost evaluation of NetMotion Mobility XE software.