Innovate With Your Data!

Posted by Lisa Sayler on 2/25/16 1:00 PM
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We’ve shown you how to  Locate & Organize Your Data and how to Manage People, Not Data using CorrectTech’s Data Manager. Now it’s time to take that data (and all that extra time we’ve given you) to innovate to make informed decisions for your agency programs and clients. 

For example let’s talk about discharge.

Discharge - a time to report on all that hard work your client and program staff have completed together! Some good, some not so perfect.

Puff up with pride as you share your successful discharge results. 

Cringe a bit as you share the unsuccessful numbers.

Seems like simple stuff: just tell the story – the whole story. But a lot of time and effort goes into that data collection, right? Well, it’s time consuming when you don’t have a data management system in your community corrections software, that is. Allow me to elaborate.

Let’s go back in time a bit. 

We used to have a shared spreadsheet that each case manager had to fill out at the end of each month reporting on their caseload discharges (and intakes for that matter) for administration to use in our program analysis and board reporting.

That’s a lot of hands in the pot; a lot of reminder calls each month; and a lot of sighs of annoyance when someone didn’t get the information in on time.

Case managers created thorough discharge reports for each of our referral agencies. We pulled data from a variety of areas in the paper files and compiled this data into the discharge reports. Then we took this data and put it into the spreadsheet. And, we did it all over again the next month. Ugh.

Discharge data reporting didn’t stop there. Case managers then entered similar data in a statewide database for statewide community corrections data analysis.

Sorry, I’m not done yet.

Our executive director was (and still is) required to complete a thorough data analysis of all of that data entered into numerous spreadsheets throughout the year to produce an annual report. I actually felt bad for the boss man!

Seems tedious, but data analysis and reporting is important. But – hey we have lots of time on our hands, right!? NOT. Unfortunately, when we spent so much time collecting and duplicating data so we could study it, we had little time to focus on improving our processes, our results and ourselves.

Fast forward to today.

Problem solved.

After looking far and wide for the right case management software, our executive director helped design CorrectTech to ensure easy access to data results without all of the hassle. He made sure the CorrectTech data management system captured all of the information he and his team needed in the community corrections software.

Simply put – data is entered once. Period.

Every client demographic, every case plan, every event, every incident, every positive reinforcement, every intermediate outcome (you get the picture) is all just waiting to tell us a story! Pulling a discharge data analysis now takes seconds, not an hour or so.

More than that, we can ask questions of our system that we hadn’t even thought about ahead of time… because it only takes a few seconds! Replace sigh of annoyance with… pure joy!

Let Us Show You How!

See how CorrectTech’s Data Manager can replace all of these steps and more with simple ONE TIME data entry to give front line staff a lot more time in their days and enable administration to make powerful changes at your agency.

To see more videos on how CorrectTech’s software features can help you save time, share information and innovate, check out our video library here.

To request more information or schedule an online demonstration of our community corrections software, click here. We offer integrated software and support services for probation/parole, residential and reentry programs. Our Program Foundation Platform and twenty robust modules were designed by community corrections professionals to guide organizations toward a powerful EBP implementation, relieve them of strenuous paperwork and manual processes, and enable them to focus on what matters - people!

 

Topics: Community Corrections, Evidence Based Practices, Software

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