Turning complexity into clarity – Case Management
What is meant by the term ‘Case Management’? It seems to mean different things to different people, so I thought I’d try to clarify the term based on my own experience working on public sector projects. I think perhaps the best way to define it is by example – by showing the type of problems that it can solve, writes Paul O’Neill.
In the UK, the Government commissioned Sir David Varney to advise on opportunities for transforming the delivery of public services. Varney highlighted one family’s long-running (and tortuous) engagement with a variety of government bodies in his Service Transformation paper (see “Appendix C – Mark’s Bereavement story”, p89 at http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/4/F/pbr06_varney_review.pdf). The family member’s death led to 44 contacts from various government departments over 180 days, without all the issues being resolved. For me, this is clearly the kind of problem case management is meant to solve. We can all cite similar examples of frustrating interactions whether it relates to building permits, benefits, births, marriages i.e. significant personal and financial events in our lives, which result in a range of public services being required, possibly from multiple agencies. We also see this in various social care scenarios (e.g. providing residential care for the elderly), where a range of agencies need to interact, and where the key challenge is to align all of these agencies and services around the citizen, in the right sequence and at the right time.
The conclusion that “the citizen who needs multiple services is left to join up the various islands of service to meet his or her needs” is an understandable one, given that each agency is interested in the specific “transaction” or isolated event that it is responsible for, rather than a joined up service to the citizen based on their needs. The related issue of “avoidable contact” (contacts with government agencies that could have been avoided through better joined-up processes) is a symptom rather than a problem in its own right. These contacts are the “glue” which is required to join up all of the services; the more “avoidable” contacts there are is a reliable measure of the frustration that the citizen is likely to experience.
So where does case management fit in? A case is the aggregation of all of the services that may be required to meet the needs of a citizen during a particular life event. It reflects all of the interactions with all of the relevant stake-holders involved in the case. It deals with the variety of business processes that may be executed (in whatever order is appropriate) to provide the integrated service to the citizen. The critical thing about these processes is that they model the interactions with the citizen and the various services as they may be required. They can react to external events and changes, all in the context of a single case – they do not ‘straightjacket’ the citizen into behaving in a rigid pre-determined manner designed by the agencies.
By drawing together from all stake-holders (internal and external) the appropriate business processes, the relevant data for a case and the artefacts such as documents all in the context of a single case definition, the citizen will experience a joined-up, seamless service that can be provided in a reliable way, each time, every time.
And this doesn’t just benefit the citizen, it also ensures efficiency on the part of the provider. Servicing unnecessary interactions with the citizen and other parts of government is a resource-intensive, time-consuming activity. Reduce that interaction while improving your service delivery frees up budget you can use elsewhere. Case management could be a key element in achieving the efficiency savings most government agencies are being driven to obtain. Joined-up services through a case-based approach for both citizen and government are a win-win situation.
For a good discussion on the definition of case management, see Bruce Silver’s blog entry from Feb last year - http://www.brsilver.com/wordpress/2007/02/23/lively-thread-on-case-management/
We’ll be publishing our own white paper on Case Management shortly, so please watch this space.
About the author: Paul O’Neill is Delivery Manager for Singularity’s Government unit.
Tags: BPM, Case-Management, Government