The FAMCare Blog

With more and more of our workforce operating form their 'home' bases, at times it can be difficult to manage your teams workload.  With this in mind we have created a second short video, highlighting the powerful dashboard tool in FAMCare.  We want to help you to oversee and manage your team whether your working at the office or remotely from home. 

One of FAMCare's major advantages is our configurable billing module and tools.  We want to help our clients take the 'complicated' out of billing.  We understand that accurate billing and cost tracking is critical to the running of your agency.  Different clients have different needs.   Fee for Service, Census, Foster Care, mixed funding sources, grants, Medicaid 837/835, and other electronic submission or cost tracking services are all possible. FAMCare’s Cost Tracking & Billing Module can be configured to automate many functions so billing is faster, more accurate and consistent.

Great responsibility yields great reward.  This is especially true of SARCOA (Southern Alabama Regional Council on Aging), the Area Agency on Aging (AAA) serving senior citizens of Barbour, Coffee, Covington, Dale, Geneva, Henry, and Houston counties of southeast Alabama.  By continuously seeking ways to better serve the rapidly growing senior population through planning, coordinating, and developing community levels of service, SARCOA is able to make a huge difference as one of 13 AAA’s in Alabama, and one of more than 650 AAA’s in the nation


"Our experiences working with the Global Vision Technologies family have been very positive.”


In addition to assisting the senior population as an Area Agency on Aging, SARCOA is also an Aging and Disabilities Resource Center (ADRC). Launched in 2003 and designed to be a “one-stop-shop” for individuals of any age seeking long-term support services, the ADRC works to streamline access to assistance services, programs, and information for older adults and all persons with disabilities, family caregivers, veterans, and long-term support service providers. The overall goal of the ADRC program is to empower individuals to effectively navigate their health and other long-term support options.

To accomplish these goals, SARCOA chose FAMCare as their platform, data warehouse, and primary tool for our Medicaid Waiver programs; as well as their system of record in support of activities related to Case Management and Care Coordination activities. After researching various SaaS platforms available to social services agencies, they believed FAMCare was the most cost effective, expandable, most agile solution to our needs.

             

“While cost is not always the primary driver, SARCOA is extremely focused on value. Other SaaS solutions came at a much higher cost; and while some offered what they describe as “off the shelf” functionality, we feel our experiences working with the Global Vision Technologies family have been very positive,” stated Joe Strickland, Director of Home and Community Services.

Due to the current environment and our continuing battle against the Corona virus, we've included new tools in FAMCare to help track and report on client health issues related to Covid-19.  Our Covid-19 tool set includes data forms, Geo-mapping tools and reports to help you manage your population more effectively.

With more and more of our workforce operating from their 'home' bases, at times it can be difficult to track performance.  Is my team OK?  Are they able to do the work?  Are they keeping up to date?  And whether you're at the office or home yourself - its' important to know that FAMCare's logging and auditing functions helps you see what's going on.  FAMCare helps you help your team stay compliant and on track.

Some people say that the devil is in the details, but some say details can be a devil to deal with!  According to Heather Lytle, Executive Director of F.A.C.T. (Family Advocacy and Community Training), an agency that mentors and empowers families to improve the quality of life and opportunities for children and adults with disabilities, “FAMCare was our first choice for case management because they understand that a small, family organization of 40 employees needs a software that focuses on the details without being too clinical.”  F.A.C.T. has been a FAMCare client since 2014 and chose them over several other products because of their ability to modify the software to fit F.A.C.T.’s needs, as well as the constant technical support that FAMCare offers its clients.

One way for a software solution to help you be HIPAA compliant is to offer you HIPAA encryption as part of the package. But is that something you need to be HIPAA compliant? Technically, no, it’s not mandatory.

The rules state you should use encryption if it would be needed to safeguard electronic Protected Health Information (PHI). But, they do say if you don’t use encryption, you need to have an alternative to encryption that will safeguard as well as encrypting would. Or you need to have documentation with justifiable cause, as to why have taken a different tact with regard to safeguarding PHI.

Government agencies in general tend to stay in their own siloes and be reluctant to share information. Some of it is agency caseworkers being too busy. Some of it is concerns about being HIPAA compliant. And some of it is a healthy paranoia about data security. The right government software solutions can alleviate much of those concerns.

In our last post, we talked about how we are constantly in hackathon mode and how listening to and working with social workers in the field helps us find better solutions. In talking to those caseworkers and their supervisors recently, we were able to pull together a list of some of the top things that cause them frustration. Here is what they said and how we can help solve the problems.

Social workers across the country often ask us how we create the software products that have become the standard for the industry. The answer is…collaboration. Global Vision Technology designers and engineers are constantly collaborating with social work professionals to design and redesign the FAMCare suite of products now used by thousands of social workers in hundreds of diverse agencies. We are conducting an ongoing social work hackathon.