The FAMCare Blog

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

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.

Watch this short overview of the powerful logging tools in FAMCare.

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.

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.

You have good caseworkers who are committed to their clients. They work long hours and go above and beyond to make sure everyone is getting the help they need. Yet, it’s still too easy for someone to slip through the cracks if you’re using an antiquated or old school record system. Or if the caseworker is overwhelmed with too much to do and too little time to do it. Using the right case management software can alleviate some of these issues and help make sure nobody falls through the cracks.

Despite low unemployment rates and a fairly strong economy, the number of homeless and food insecure continue to rise. According to the recently released State of the Homeless 2019 report, as of January, in New York City alone, an all-time record number (63,839) of men, women and children slept in shelters each night. And, according to Feeding America, 40-million people struggle with hunger in the U.S., including more than 12-million children.

If you run a shelter or food bank, chances are you have more to do and more to process every day. That’s where having the right social services software can help you focus more on providing food and shelter and less on paperwork and processes.

I recently read an article in Forbes about how Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are broken. And while some of the points they made were appalling, they weren’t surprising – at least, not to me. We’ve known about the limitations of the government approved EHRs for some time now.

In recent years, funders are demanding that social service organizations analyze their program activities and outputs in a more meaningful way. For agencies to just say they are “doing good” is no longer enough. Organizations now need to justify costs by demonstrating program value. They must be able to justify their programs and funding by illustrating the quality of their services and show that their programs are producing meaningful outcomes that are aligned with larger policy priorities.

Let’s begin 2019 with some good news…

This Christmas Brian Breach got into the spirit of giving, but with a twist; he decided to give to givers. He dressed down as if he were homeless, printed a sign that asked for donations to feed his family at Christmas, and stood in front of a mall with a tin cup. When anyone approached and dropped coins into his cup, he would give them a crisp new $100 bill. “I wanted to recognize the good giving people who would willingly share the little they have to help a stranger in need.”