Planning

The CiviCase component allows for a high degree of customisation to meet the needs of a wide variety of organisations and workflows. It is important to understand CiviCase's underlying principles and assumptions, as well as the elements that can be customised, before you begin to plan and configure the component based on your requirements.

Assumptions

Although CiviCase is quite flexible, there are a number of assumptions about managing cases built-in to the component. These assumptions have been arrived at through an extensive trial and error process and although some of them may seem new or foreign at first, we encourage you to approach them with an open mind.

• Activities are single tasks or interactions between your organisation and a client or constituent, or between people within your organisation.
  
• Cases involve a sequence of interactions (activities). The record of these activities forms the case story and almost all information about a case should be stored as an activity.
  
• Classifying cases by case type allows you to define work-flows and evaluate results.
• Cases often have a predictable sequence of activities (a standard timeline). Creating a schedule with the expected timeline helps people working on the case to manage their work, and is a useful way to measure progress.
• Cases often involve a predictable set of people involved (staff, professionals, etc.). These are case roles. Knowing who is playing what role in a case is helpful, and provides an easy way to communicate case activities to other people who are also working on that case.
• Organisations may have additional people and/or outside organisations (case resources) who are frequently contacted or involved with most or all cases.

Case Types

The first step in planning your CiviCase configuration is to think about the types of cases your organisation needs to manage. Complex processes which include several activities, span several days or weeks, and involve multiple people are potentially good candidates for case management. Start by listing these processes and defining a case type for each one.

For example, the Physician Health Program provides support for physicians who are experiencing problems related to emotional health issues, the inappropriate use of alcohol and/or drugs or coping with physical illness. Some of the case types they use are:

• Inpatient Treatment
• Referral to Counsellor
• Relapse Prevention.

For a community services organisation, examples of case types might include:

• Housing Assistance
• Job Training
• Prenatal Counseling.
  

Think about the complex tasks that staff in your organisation do on a regular basis and make a list of potential case types.

Case Activities

Activities track specific interactions and tasks within a case. Activities may be scheduled or ad hoc, and may involve the case client or constituent, or a third party such as a family member or a professional who is assisting with the case. Each organisation needs to determine the level of detail to be recorded, but many organisations find it helpful to include every phone call, meeting or internal discussion in the case story by recording it as an activity.

Activity Types

CiviCRM is preconfigured with a number of predefined activity types such as Phone Calls, Meetings, Emails Sent, Interviews and Follow ups. These may be sufficient for your needs. However most organisations will want to track other specific tasks, and activity types can be added for these.

During the life of each case, some activities will be automatically created, such as:

• Open Case: created at the same time the case is created.
  
• Follow up: you can use this type when it isn't necessary to define a more specific one (see "activity data" below).
  
• Change Case Type: created every time the type is modified.
  
• Change Case Status: created every time the status is updated.
  

For a community services organisation, additional activity types might include:

• Client Intake
• Physician Referral
• Skills Evaluation.
  

For each of the case types you identified, create a list of the specific activities involved. Creating new types instead of relying only on "Follow up" will make the list of activities easier to read.

Activity Data

A standard set of information can be entered whenever a case activity is recorded in CiviCase:

• who recorded the activity and who reported the activity
• when and where the activity will (or did) occur
• free-form subject and detailed description
  
• time spent on the activity.
  

This is sufficient for some types of activities, however it is often useful to collect additional structured data. The "Open Case" (intake) activity is a common example where you may want to include a set of specific questions about the client and their situation.

Create a list of additional requirements (custom data) for each activity type, including the type of data being recorded (free text, multiple choice, date, etc.). For more information about custom data please refer to sections on custom data in the the CiviCRM flossmanual, or to the CiviCRM wiki.

Timelines

CiviCase allows you to define a workplan or an expected sequence of tasks and activities for each type of case. These are called standard timelines, and one is created automatically when a new case is opened.

For simple cases, the timeline might include only two items:

• Open Case
• Follow up.
  

Even in this example, the timeline is useful as it allows you to predefine when the persons assigned to the case should follow up with the client or constituent.

For more complex processes, the timeline provides a case plan that can help the people involved to stay on track. The timeline lists all the activities which are expected to occur and should be accomplished within a certain timeframe. You can define the expected number of days between the beginning of the case and each of the subsequent activities in the timeline.

If necessary, an activity can also define an offset from another activity. For example: for a "Referral to Specialist" case, the "facilitate first appointment" activity might be expected to occur within 2 days after the case is opened. "Survey client satisfaction" might be scheduled for 30 days after "facilitate first appointment".

You might also want to define a timeline based on the end date. If a case has to be completed by a specific date, each activity can be defined as needing to happen a number of days before this end date. You then set a negative offset on the timeline.

Case Roles and Relationships

CiviCase provides three mechanisms for relating people to cases and clients:

• Case Roles: people directly involved in this case. Examples include Intake Specialist, Case Coordinator, Addiction Counselor, Employment Counselor, etc. You can identify one of these roles as the case manager for a particular case type.
  
• Other Relationships: people related to the client, with relationships that exist beyond the context of a particular case. Examples include Spouse, Sibling, Family Doctor, etc. Generally, use relationships when you want someone to appear on ALL cases for the same client, otherwise use a case role.
• Case Resources: people and organisations that have involvement with many or all cases in your case management setting. Examples include: regulatory agency contact(s), service provider,  frequent referral contacts, etc.

CiviCRM provides relationship type definitions for most of the standard relationships you might track (e.g. Spouse, Child). However you will probably need to define additional relationship types for your case roles, such as:

• Case Coordinator
• Addiction Specialist
• Job Counsellor.

Make a list of the expected case roles for each type of case you've listed, then determine which role will normally be considered the "case manager" for that case type.

Controlling Access to Case Data

This section applies to Drupal installations only.

You can assign permissions to users in order to control whether or not they have access to the CiviCase component, as well as what case data they can see (Administer -> Users -> Permissions). Here is a list of the CiviCase-related permissions.

Access my cases and activities

Allows a user to create new cases, add activities to the cases they've created and edit those activities. Users with this permission can NOT see cases or activities created by others.

If you need to restrict certain users to ONLY seeing case data (i.e. hide all other contact information from them), assign access my cases and activities permission WITHOUT edit and view contacts permissions. This permissioning model is useful for users who work in external agencies and who should not be allowed to see contact details. 

Access all cases and activities

Allows a user to create new cases, as well as view and add activities to any case (regardless of who initially created the case).

Delete in CiviCase

Allows a user to mark cases or case activities as deleted. Cases and activities are never physically deleted from your database, but only "hidden" when you mark them as deleted.

Users with this permission can also find and undelete these cases and activities by checking the Deleted Cases option in Find Cases and the Deleted Activities option in the Case Activities Search Filter.

Administer CiviCase

Gives access to Administer -> CiviCase options including:

• create and edit case types and case statuses
• set rules for redacting case data. These rules are used to disguise data which could be used to identify the case client in case reports which are shared with external reviewers.