Optimizing Client & Staff Care While Short Staffed

It’s no secret many organizations are short staffed at the moment. In the human services and nonprofit sector, staff turnover can be high—overburdening remaining employees with added responsibilities. Case managers do important work meeting clients who require assistance with housing and other needs. Managerial and administrative staff try to keep things organized and ensure they’re tracking the right metrics while focused on community goals.

No one wants to become bogged down in their HMIS, expending valuable time answering assessment questions that don’t relate to their clients, or running sluggish and unnecessary reports. You want to minimize relying on your vendor for customization requests in the system and find an HMIS that makes everyone’s jobs easier.

Ultimately, maximizing the capacity of your staff and HMIS are essential to mitigating burnout and turnover.

Bitfocus’ Clarity Human Services (Clarity) HMIS helps overcome these challenges with several key elements, including:

• Top-tier system administration tools that enable easy system configuration and assistance for case managers
• Expert walkthroughs of processes and projects such as coordinated entry system redesign or custom assessment development
• System administrative assistance and management from Bitfocus

So what does all of this look like?

Case Management: Clarity Features That Optimize Efficiency

As you seek to optimize care while short staffed, there are several ways Clarity can save you time and lighten your employees’ workloads.

Enhancing the user experience, tooltip text provides system administrators short explanations for each feature, salvaging time wasted on confusing interfaces.

Conditional logic and display constraints mean you only have to answer questions most relevant to the client at hand—decluttering your intake screens.

Warning labels are configurable to make sure data does not conflict. For example, users cannot mention that a client has a disabling condition on one field without selecting a disabling condition somewhere on the form.

By minimizing data entry time, cascading data reduces the instances clients have to recount memories of difficult or traumatic events.

Personalized dashboards enable you to assign tasks to staff members, including caseload tabs and assessment due date reminders.

Clarity also provides reports that keep tabs on staff workload, ensuring responsibilities are distributed evenly.

System Administrator Tools

Clarity is an industry-leading software enabling you to effortlessly coordinate housing and services within your community, so you can concentrate on what matters most—your clients.

We designed our HMIS to empower system administrators with incredible insight into what's happening in their system, both technically and functionally. Arguably, system administrators have more autonomy with Clarity than with any other HMIS on the market.

This is due, in large part, to Clarity’s' extensive configurability. Autonomously customizable, administrators have the capacity to arrange the system themselves with minimal reliance on the Bitfocus technical support team.

We are, of course, always standing by to assist, but we guarantee your authorized users will be pleasantly surprised by how easy the system is to configure.

Let’s run through some of it.

Control the Type of Data Going Into the System

Put simply, you manage how data is collected.

System administrators can use the customizability features in Clarity to ensure collected data is humanizing, secured, and actually tracking toward desired outcomes. In other words, you can mold the system to the shape you need to match local priorities.

For instance, authorized users can create new, customizable screens and fields using the drag-and-drop screen editor, or design custom fields and forms to support unique funding requirements. These can be further specified at the system or agency level.

Tailorable program templates aid users in the consistent and efficient gathering of unique data elements for each program type. Additionally, system administrators can customize any standard assessment to reflect the unique needs and priorities of their communities, including custom scored assessments.

Data Quality Measures

By controlling data quality as it enters the system, Clarity provides administrators the tools needed to maintain its integrity. Data entry controls include built-in validation checks in full compliance with Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) requirements.

System administrators can employ data validation and conditional logic when building their own forms or customizing existing screens, and create tooltip text for any custom field. This feature serves as a guide for completing the field, saving overburdened staff significant time.

For example, when completing an intake, a user can mouse over the “Residence Prior to Program Entry” data field and a textbox will appear stating that this data field should document where the client slept the night before they entered their program.

Users also have access to Clarity’s extensive report library, including more than 175 canned reports, such as a monthly staff report, which can be automatically emailed to designated recipients—helping you keep track of work distribution among a short-staffed team.

Control Who Accesses the Data

Customizable access roles can be created and assigned to individual staff members or groups. When you assign an access role, you designate which information and capabilities they will have access to within your system.

Control the End User Experience

Navigation Profiles enable you to control the visibility and order arrangement of various tabs within your system. Once configured, the Navigation Profile can then be assigned to an agency, streamlining staff processes.

Agency managers can use our Data Analysis Tool to create custom dashboards and reports and assign them to individual staff members—helping each user better understand their objectives and impact.

Control Data Coming Out of the System

The public data model in our Data Analysis Tools enables analysts to confidently create public-facing dashboards, reports, and queries while ensuring personally identifiable information will not be accessible from public-facing websites.

Clarity’s Data Analysis Tools also give analysts access to query both HUD and custom data elements, build and save custom calculations, and create custom reports and dashboards.

On a weekly or monthly basis, our canned Emailed Reports can be automatically sent in PDF form to a recipient list of primary contacts or program managers at each participating agency. These provide data quality scoring elements down to the user/staff level—once again, saving staff valuable time.

Project Support When You Need External Guidance

Bitfocus has a cross-functional team of subject matter experts dedicated to providing complex customizations, and more. We provide consulting, analytical, and implementation support services to ensure external and internal customers succeed.

We help customers implement and customize Clarity for their unique requirements, providing a platform that can dramatically improve their service delivery.

Our Professional Services team is responsible for engaging and supporting the completion of many unique customer projects, and includes a PMO function that handles acceptance, coordination, prioritization, and the delivery of those to internal and external stakeholders.

Our staff experts have extensive experience implementing and supporting Clarity in many areas, including implementation, engineering, data analytics, coordinated entry system configuration, software configuration, software development specification, requirements gathering, policy support, best practices implementation, federal compliance reporting, data quality, project planning, case management, and federal compliance.

Capacity building is made easier when you have a team helping you set up your system to mirror your community initiatives, track the right data the right way, and monitor the progress you've made. We routinely assist customers with advanced projects such as program configuration, coordinated entry workflow redesign, and custom report and dashboard creation.

With an efficient, incredibly customizable HMIS and a vendor willing to offer as much or little administrative support as you need, your community can deliver whole person care effectively, while lightening the load of your staff.

Clarity Human Services is a sophisticated HMIS created by Bitfocus to connect your community's most vulnerable populations to the most appropriate services and resources available to them. We’ve streamlined the service provider workflow and analytics necessary to support informed decision-making. Contact us today to learn more about how Clarity can help you optimize care while short staffed.