Homelessness and Housing Support Services

Case Management

Read our case study detailing the implementation of ODM at the City of Edinburgh Homelessness and Housing Department.

Organisational Profile

The City of Edinburgh Homelessness and Housing Department co-ordinates homelessness and housing services throughout Edinburgh. With almost 300 service provider agencies including hostels, advice and support services, over 1200 end users overseeing 30,000 cases, this is a big operation.

The organisation has 4 main aims:
• Prevention
• Access to Housing
• Temporary Accommodation
• Sustainable Solutions

Brief

City of Edinburgh were looking for a robust case management system flexible to allow them to change and update it in house, so it could meet any future service requirements.

The system needed to help and support the organisation measure their client outcomes, to allow them to prove that the services provided were making a difference.

The outcomes matrix which measured the client’s journey of care needed to be integrated into the new system.

Price was also a consideration; the organisation needed value for money and to safeguard against any future expensive bespoke changes.

Solution

The Gallery Partnership recommended the ODM as a good fit:

The system’s inbuilt flexibility was well matched to The City of Edinburgh’s needs. The ODM Designer feature allows the in house system administrators to add, update or delete fields, screens and reports as required.

The ODM has simple and easy to use client outcome reporting, with the ability to report on any data required.

Edinburgh’s outcomes matrix could be easily incorporated, as were key measurements for client impact reports.

The ODM provides good value for money. It is affordable with no reliance on expensive bespoke changes because the system can adapt in house. There is no specialist IT equipment required beyond a PC and a broadband connection.

Gallery hosts the data, manages back up servers, keeping the data safe and secure and providing ongoing technical support, so that the user only needs a broadband connection and a browser.

Implementation

In summary, the Gallery Partnership and City of Edinburgh Team had several planning meetings and workshops to consider data capture, reporting and data sharing requirements. After an initial customised ODM was built, the client was invited to for further meeting to refine the system as necessary. Once the system was built Gallery held customised workshops to train the system administrators, so they could go on to manage the system in house in the future. Gallery does of course continue to provide technical support where needed.

Edinburgh had never had a system shared between different physical locations before. The data had always been held locally. This presented many opportunities and also some challenges around access permissions, as the organisation had not had to think about working in this way before.

Benefits

“The ODM is the software to monitor client outcomes: capturing, sharing and reporting, enabling collaborative and effective case management.”

Bernie Giles, City of Edinburgh Homelessness & Housing Support Services

The end users have a “single case view” of clients they are working with, across the various different agencies and services which provide homelessness and housing services in Edinburgh. This allows the Council to deliver improved and joined up housing services.

The City of Edinburgh can measure the outcomes/impact of its services and easily identify which clients are having negative outcomes and require immediate attention. Staff can directly intervene to assist clients thereby positively influencing outcomes.

The system can grow and change to meet any future requirements.

The ODM has provided value for money. It is managed in house and has no reliance on Gallery for expensive programming work.

Since the system was first implemented in 2006 the ODM has grown significantly to accommodate many more clients.