Helping to Reduce Costs with Mobile Working at Cumbria.

Overview

Cumbria is the second largest county in England but has a population of less than 500,000. Over 50% of these people live in rural communities, bringing with it diverse and unique challenges. The county is divided into 6 districts, which range in population density from just 0.2 persons per hectare in Eden, to 9.2 persons per hectare in Barrow.

With the added factor of a wide spread rural population, Cumbria County Council worked with technology partner, Agilisys, to find a flexible software solution to enable care planning and case management across the district with minimum disruption to its 600 users, 300 of which are care practitioners.

Selecting the Right Technologies

Following the success of using the Liquidlogic Children’s Social Care System (LCS), Cumbria Council was interested in upgrading their current case management system in Adults’ Services. With features incorporating full case management, personalisation and the ability to offer mobile working, the Liquidlogic Adults’ Social Care System (LAS) was selected by the Council.

Mobile Working

Around a year after go live the Council implemented Liquidlogic’s mobile working functionality, Briefcase. This formed part of a wider project within the Council, “Better Places for Work”. Liquidlogic Briefcase enables practitioners to complete assessments, re-assessments, update demographic information and enter case notes whilst with a service user.

Liquidlogic Briefcase has improved working conditions and reduced costs by taking away the need for practitioners to go back to the office following visits to service users. At the same time hot desking, docking stations and laptops were introduced to staff to support the Council’s new vision.

Becky Taylor, Systems Development Manager at Cumbria County Council comments: “We wanted an intuitive system that staff would be able to pick up quickly. The workflow functionality does help users and managers see exactly where a service user is in the care planning process.”

Standard Functionality

All Liquidlogic solutions are equipped as standard with Briefcase, which provides both online and offline mobile working. The Briefcase feature within LAS is enabled via a link on the home page of the application. The application allows staff to enter information to portable devices such as laptops or PDAs, so they can be taken off line and filled in at a later date. This is extremely valuable for social workers visiting adults in their homes to carry out assessments. These documents are still encrypted to ensure full confidentiality of information.

Because Liquidlogic LAS is an efficient browser-based application, it directly supports on line working via 3G or GPRS. Assessments and other forms can be completed or part-completed on the mobile device; once the user is in a position to establish a connection with the server then the assessment will synchronise with the main server record. The forms or assessments that the user has checked out to the Briefcase are shown as locked to users of the system. If the mobile device is lost then all the data is encrypted as standard so that no service user data is visible.

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