Signed Case Plans and Documenting Progress

Hi ​@Naomi Katz ! We’d also love to hear how other agencies are approaching this, but I figured I’d jump in to share some best practices we’ve seen. Hope this helps!

Here is what we’d recommend:

Tier 2: Individual Case Plan

• Under the Participant Tier 1 to be filled out once and signed.
• Lock most fields from being edited after first completed. This can be done with Form Logic. We don’t recommend locking the entire record (at least not for all users) because you’ll want a Linking Field you can edit to connect the progress updates. 
• Add a Linking Field that will hold progress updates for an additional Tier 2. Consider selecting Wizard Style linking if you expect staff to fill this out only as it’s associated with a specific plan.

Tier 2: Plan Progress / Updates

• This will act like a “sub” Tier 2 linked to the Plan (as mentioned above).
• This is where you will capture status and history by filling out a new record for each update.
• Consider the option to Hide from the Document Folder if you only want these seen within a given Plan.

When it comes to reporting, you would have the history of updates with the “sub” Tier 2 so you can see date ranges, count of interactions, etc. Just make sure to update the linking relationship when pulling multiple Tier 2s into one report. But you can also report on the most recent status update if you just need to know where they are at a given point in time (using Limits).

Hi ​@AnnieNovacek ,

Thanks for the feedback! We actually tried that previously but had to move away from it. I completely agree that from a reporting standpoint your way is probably the best practice for Apricot. However, from a documentation standpoint it didn’t work for us.

The original case plan is enabled in Connect so parents can sign it. Our therapists are school-based so they have barely any contact with the parents and often need to send forms via Connect for signatures. When we added the link to a “case plan updates” form, we ended up with repeated errors on the form in Connect when parents tried to sign because linking fields are not supported in Connect. We even tried to solve this by replacing the link with an “appended text box”. We tested that and initially it was working, just not appearing in Connect. But ultimately that also caused errors because that field type is not supported in Connect.

Due to the challenges with reliably being able to prevent error messages, we decided to completely remake the form from scratch without links or appended notes fields. While we’re doing this rebuild I figured I’d ask what other agencies are doing to see if anyone’s figured out a better way.

If you think of any other options or specific agencies I should reach out to I’m all ears!

Best,

Naomi

Hey ​@Naomi Katz , that’s helpful context. You are correct that Linking and Append fields won’t work with Connect, and Connect is a great solution for getting signatures...

Questions to Consider:

• Is it only the Original Case Plan that requires signature (via Connect)? If so, maybe we still use the “sub” Tier 2 for updates, but find a workaround for linking.
• With that said, who is filling out the Tier 2 for updates? If it’s just internal staff and not Participants via Connect, then we could consider training folks on a workflow that shows connection even if they aren’t actually linked like a field where they have to copy the exact plan title or code?
• This is less ideal if you also have updates coming in from Participants via Connect since you have less control over how well they fill in a field, but you could have staff fill in that field afterwards? 
• For reporting, without a link between two Tier 2 forms, you wouldn’t get the best results trying to pull them in together, but if you have a field in the updates Tier 2 with the title of the Case Plan, then you could group by that.

I realize this is a more manual solution, so hopefully there are other ideas out there.

​@AnnieNovacek  Thanks for the thoughtful ideas! We really do rely on Connect for signatures so unfortunately we wouldn’t be able to remove the form from Connect.

Using a separate tier 2 is proably the way we’ll go. That’s a good suggestion. I’m less concerned with reporting results as we’re very skilled with report building in native and results reporting. Mostly I’m interested in making this information as easy to document and interprate as possible while providing services or reviewing a case file.

Our case plans are currently identified by the date of the plan, not by a plan name or type.

If there are any apricot administrators or users following - please chime in! I’m interested to hear how this is being solved by other agencies using Apricot.