With Salesforce CRM, FSA Transforms Health and Human Services Delivery for Increased Client Recovery

Challenge

• Family Service Agency (FSA) of San Francisco, the city’s oldest nonsectarian, nonprofit charitable social-services provider, needed a system to help program managers and clinicians manage data on 12,000 clients. Management also sought to reduce the agency’s paper usage.
• As a major non-profit partner of the City and County of San Francisco, FSA wanted a HIPAA-compliant solution. 
• The growing organization, including over 30 programs serving the needy individuals and families of all ages in 11 major languages, was challenged to scale with its decades-old system of paper records for client tracking and reporting. Managers did not have easy access to data on key agency metrics.
• FSA wanted to increase the amount of time that clinicians could spend with clients; they were averaging 60 minutes of paperwork for each sixty minutes of client face time. 
• FSA needed to address the requirements of more than 66 funders, including the state of California’s Proposition 63, which provides financial support to develop new services for people with serious mental illness, and requires increased documentation. The organization also wanted to make it easier to bill government agencies and eliminate the loss of funding that sometimes occurred when documentation was lost.
• FSA needed to ensure that its records met the auditing requirements of its many funding sources in a timely and complete way.

Solution

• Using licenses donated by the Salesforce.com Foundation, FSA worked with salesforce.com partner Exponent Partners to customize Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition and create San Francisco’s first automated client and case management system.
• Using the Force.com platform, FSA built a custom human services case management application—called CIRCE—on top of Salesforce CRM. Initial deployments addressed client progress notes and documentation; subsequent phases included development of tools for client diagnosis and assessment, and for care planning. The next steps include expert systems diagnosis support, and integration with accounting and fundraising. 
• The solution was deployed to 215 users across all organizational functions, including 120 case workers, spread among four major service sites. 
• Administrators and key organizational users attended Salesforce.com Training & Certification programs. A Salesforce CRM advisory committee champions Salesforce CRM at FSA and drives adoption. 
• Salesforce CRM automates key functions including pre-populating forms to save administrative time; all documentation is stored within Salesforce CRM, eliminating the need for paper forms and files and making it easy to share information.
• Custom objects and tabs using S-controls help to track contacts and episodes. Clinicians and support personnel can easily share diagnoses, objectives, progress notes, and plans of care.
• FSA installed Print Anything from the AppExchange marketplace to enable printable copies of information captured in Salesforce CRM. Ajax Tools from AppExchange facilitates additional development with code, AJAX toolkit, or S-Controls.

Results

• Streamlined reporting process enables clinicians to spend less time on paperwork and documentation; time spent directly with clients has increased by 50 percent. Clients benefit from improved service and donors generate more impact from their donations.
• Information collection is more consistent and aligned with the Department of Public Health for easier reporting; time spent reconciling billing problems with the city of San Francisco has been significantly reduced and the agency is less likely to lose funding due to chart error or lost documentation.
• Dashboards provide easy access to operational and client data; managers can track individual client outcomes as well as program and clinician productivity. 
• Reports can easily be generated for billing and reporting purposes. Productivity reports, which used to take two months to compile, can now be compiled in minutes. Printed materials can be produced with just a few clicks.