Design Concepts

Concept 1

The human services industry is about managing people: clients, staff, volunteers, donors, board members, therapists, physicians …. Any computer system designed to support the management of human service agencies must include all.

Conventional software is built around a limited number of these, typically one. Case management software is built around the client or patient; human resource systems, around staff; fund raising software, around donors, and so on. In so doing, these systems wall themselves off; they combat efforts to integrate them as one. Users must forever enter much the same individual data into each separate system, e.g. entering the address of an individual who happens to be both a client and staff member into both the case management and human resource systems, or who happens to be a staff member and donor or volunteer into the human resources and fund-raising systems.

Danic Tools is built around the individual. It is the central object in the Danic Meta-Model. The Meta-Model treats client, staff, donor, board member, physician . . . as roles-another object. An individual may have more than one role attached to him or her. This singular design means that Danic can at once be configured as a case management system, human resources system, fund raising system and more, or can logically integrate with such systems. It effectively eliminates the need to enter information on any individual more than once as the individual is only in one system.

Concept 2

In the human services industry, an individual is different than a case; both must be managed.

Conventional case management practice and software in the human services industry, owing to their origins in the health care industry, treat cases and individuals as one. Ask most care management professionals for their caseload and they will count up the number of individuals they serve. Treating the individual as a case is flawed both from the standpoint of data management and practice management. It muddies management responsibility and accountability. More often than not, different individuals manage the different activities in which a client engages; there may or may not be an individual responsible for the individual or sum total of the activities. This leads to breakdowns in service coordination and tracking of individual activities and events. It muddies counts. Unduplicated counts of individuals cannot be obtained directly. Duplicated counts of individuals engaged in different activities must first be taken and the duplicates then eliminated in order to get to an unduplicated count of individuals served.

In the Danic Meta-Model, individuals and cases are separate and distinct objects. Cases define any number of possible sets of activities in which an individual might engage. DCAM requires that there be a case manager (by whatever name) responsible for monitoring if not administering each of these types of activities and for entering related information in the Danic system. Danic imposes this discipline to assure that the data has integrity and is complete. This discipline often has the added benefit of improving agency practice by clearly identifying and fixing responsibility and hence accountability for each individual and for each type of manageable activity in which they participate.