new technology in the human services

Manning B (2000) Co-ordinating care provision: toward sharing case-critical information
New Technology in the Human Services 13 (1 & 2), pp. 9-17


Abstract The introduction of the Care Programme Approach to improve multi-disciplinary, multi-agency management of severely mentally ill patients in the UK emphasised the need for better and faster communication between all of the parties involved in service provision. Since the various agencies and disciplines involved invariably operate out of a host of different locations, access to key information, especially in crisis situations, can be vital. The central problems that this situation poses are how to gain secure access from any location to highly fragmented and distributed sets of case records; plus how to restrict this access to ‘need to know’ information only, when it is often held within highly sensitive and confidential case records. The approach used has been to develop the concept of a multi-level record with security access controls at each level set by the professional owning the case casenotes concerned. The key issue of identifying specific records within such a ‘virtual shared record’ uses an index based on an ongoing automatic compilation of all carer diary entries per client within the set of agencies involved. The system is based on the use of standard groupware tools with access provided over the public switched network to semi-autonomous network servers at key locations which are automatically backed up to a central support server at regular intervals. All carers within the set of co-operating agencies can use a variety of palmtop, laptop or locality based PCs to maintain their professional diaries in the normal way, whilst groupware software automatically cross-indexes all entries to ‘virtual client care diaries’ which are available to all carers with access to the system.

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