Readify save costs and increase the level of help provided to clients by Barnardos

 

"Readify have been a most responsive and flexible partner in the development of the MyStory project and we are looking forward to an ongoing relationship in the further development for some time to come. Additionally, Readify have provided a broader service to Barnardos including assistance with recruiting technical staff, coaching and mentoring existing staff and re skilling Java Developers to .Net for this project."  Sue Cribb, Senior IT Manager at Barnardos Australia

 

Situation

For over 120 years, Barnardos has been at the forefront of child welfare service provision and has embraced a tradition of innovation and holistic approach in their quest to find real, permanent solutions for Australian children in desperate need.
To facilitate much of their work, Barnardos had a number of software solutions managing different client services. A number of disparate systems have been in operation with no interconnectivity.
It was difficult for Barnardos to track a child's journey as they moved through the different services with the system tracking around 3,000+ clients per day, 365 days a year.
Barnardos sought to simplify their operations by providing a single solution for these workloads to simplify the user experience, improve collaboration and enable reporting of information that is more accurate.  With multiple systems, key information could be lost or overlooked.
Readify was asked to assist in the development of this solution, and that is how the MyStory project came about.

Solution

As the largest provider of family services in the state, Barnardos have a heavy emphasis on practice development. A dedicated Practice Development Centre works to develop assessment models, care plans, and guidance for carers and workers.
A child may move from one model to the other as their life circumstances change. For example, a mother and child could start with an entry in one particular system for receiving an electricity voucher.  They could come back to receive emergency accommodation and family counselling recorded in another system,  then become separated when the mother goes into hospital to receive emergency treatment and so the child moves to foster care and thus into a different system yet again. In this scenario, all of the child's records are split between the separate systems with no integration, making it very difficult to manage. My Story has replaced these three systems and created a seamless methodology for transition of a client within the one system.
Welfare in Australia is covered by different state legislations and policies.  Despite this, there is a wealth of research based knowledge of what constitutes good practice.  MyStory incorporates such research knowledge in line with varying state requirements.  It builds on and integrates previous Barnardos service specific case management systems that have been widely accepted and used by many other agencies in NSW, ACT, Queensland, Tasmania and New Zealand.
The MyStory system will be offered to other agencies via an affordable Software-as-a-Service model. Hosted on Windows Azure, it allows Barnardos to easily scale up the infrastructure as new agencies join, without extensive lead times, costly provisioning work or upfront capital expenditure.

Benefits

Low Costs

The contrast between Barnardos' before and after scenarios is very positive. Previously, there were multiple systems, high costs, poor user experience, lack of integrated data and user collaboration and no elasticity for demand spikes.
 Now, Barnardos are enjoying low-cost high-Service Level Agreement with limited IT involvement, elasticity, low cost of scale to elasticity, integrated systems and a much improved user experience.

Easy to use

• Intuitive & easy to use by all users, managers & caseworkers alike; MyStory provides an engaging interface that is clean, intuitive & engaging.
 • MyStory is easily accessible by all workers whether in or out of the office.  It can be used from any computer or tablet with an internet connection and provides flexible ways for users to enter information.
 • For clients & carers in out of home care, MyStory will meet legislative requirements for recording and sharing information between the worker, client, carer and government agency.  It will make it easy for participants to contribute to and share the information, collaborating in decision making.

Flexible

  • The system is designed to be expanded to include new features, and a capacity to respond to changing legislative and social policy requirements.
   • Mystory will provide interconnectivity with other systems: eg financial systems to facilitate carer payments.

Secure
 
MyStory is built in the cloud using the Windows Azure platform and is a multi-tenancy system so it can easily be made available for use by other agencies. Windows Azure alleviates many of the day-to-day management tasks through automatic updates and role recovery. Ultimately, if required, the application can be redeployed from scratch by a single click on the build server interface.

Supported by Microsoft

Readify approached Microsoft to discuss supporting the project with Business Investment Funds. Microsoft was pleased to support the development effort through that mechanism to help Barnardos adapt to the Windows Azure platform.
 
Quality and Simplicity

The quality of tools, the ease of deployment, and the simplicity of management of Windows Azure are all very important to Barnardos. Barnardos no longer need to worry about managing their infrastructure and can instead focus on helping more clients so desperately in need of critical assistance.