Client
TUSLA the Child and Family Agency was established on the 1st January 2014 and is now the dedicated State agency responsible for improving wellbeing and outcomes for children. It represents the most comprehensive reform of child protection, early intervention and family support services ever undertaken in Ireland.
The new agency brings together some 4,000 staff and an operational budget of over €600m. It comprises of HSE Children & Family Services, Family Support Agency and the national Educational Welfare Board as well as incorporating some psychological services and a range of services responding to domestic, sexual and gender based violence.
Situation
Before the formation of TUSLA, the responsibility for the wellbeing of children in Ireland was managed through the Health Services Executive (HSE) regional structures across Ireland using multiple local information systems. TUSLA needed a single, specialist information system that could improve data quality, provide better management information and provide more efficient ways of working across services. On top of this the system needed to meet all of the requirements under the updated Children First National Guidance and the new National Business Process.
Solution
CareDirector was implemented as a single IT system to in order to
- Provide ease of use for Social workers
- Meet statuary obligations
- Transform data into actionable information to inform resource decisions and deliver the best possible outcomes for children
CareDirector is based on technology that was designed specifically to aid multi-disciplinary working and more particularly the co-ordination of cases across agencies.
CareDirector is flexible and can be integrated with other systems e.g. for users experienced with Microsoft Outlook CareDirector builds upon the normal tools used today, such as email and calendars and appointments to help users complete, and in many cases automate, the often time consuming tasks they need to do like:
- scheduling meetings with colleagues or your clients/patients
- updating the relevant people when things change for a client/patient
- eliminating the repeat entry of data when cases pass between professionals or teams
It is available on a number of mobile platforms so that users can work anytime and anywhere.
The security model within CareDirector is designed for a multi-agency context because it is based on the twin concepts of security roles for individual users and business units which hold and protect discipline specific information that wouldn’t normally be accessible to other disciplines. This means information can be shared or restricted as required by multiple users with different access levels.
CareDirector supports local government reorganization
The solution supports a flexible multi-tenant architecture meaning that multiple organizations or divisions can share the same instance and infrastructure.
The CareDirector solution has given TUSLA more local control over their system
CareDirector has been architected to have the maximum possible flexibility to allow customers, without the need for programming effort, customize and configure it.
The solution allows TUSLA to extend the core system itself either within existing modules or by creating entirely new modules when needed locally.
CareDirector in Partnership with Microsoft
CareDirector is built on Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The system works seamlessly with a number of leading Microsoft applications:
- Microsoft Windows Server
- Microsoft SharePoint Foundation or Server
- Windows Identity Foundation
- SQL Server Enterprise Edition
