Written by Bart Sullivan, Market Researcher for Caretivity
I have spent the last year and a half researching how multi-disciplinary teams work in the social services field. I have tried to observe as many real-life scenarios as possible, including specialty court teams, wraparound teams, family team meetings, and IEP meetings.
During one of these observations, I witnessed the multi-disciplinary team attempting to react to a life-changing crisis that came to the team’s attention during their face-to-face meeting.
They found out via a phone call from a team member that was not physically present in the room. The incident had occurred days prior, but the rest of the team was just finding out about it.
The team members that were in the room tried to hash out a plan for how they were going to react to this situation. However, they quickly realized that key team members for this plan were not present in the meeting.
They scrambled to contact the other members and as they struggled, they started changing the plan to account for if they couldn’t reach some of the others in time.
It took about four days from this life-changing incident for all the key team members to be informed and able to coordinate a plan.
That afternoon, as I was preparing to head home from work, I received a notification on my phone. The notification came from an app the coach and parents on my son’s soccer team use.
It said that my son’s soccer practice was getting pushed back 30 minutes because the coach would be running late.
That’s when it hit me: Why are youth soccer teams able to communicate so easily with NOTHING important on the line, yet social services multi-disciplinary teams struggle so much with LIVES on the line?
Social workers had no tool built specifically for them to do their jobs more efficiently.
Essentially, they did not have a team coordination app like my son’s soccer team had.
Our soccer team had an app built specifically for youth sports team coordination, and it kept us informed quickly and easily. It was a convenience that made our experience better.
I could not find any apps like that built specifically for social workers. Social workers are stuck either trying to use their “database-style” systems for communication and coordination (which is a square-peg-in-a-round-hole experience for the user), or they’re forced to use some other tool like text or email, which quickly becomes convoluted and may not follow their organization’s privacy policies.
This is why we decided to create Caretivity. It is a team coordination app built for social workers. Our app makes multi-disciplinary team coordination quick and easy, allowing teams to stay focused on helping the children and families that they serve.
Get Caretivity for Your Team
Caretivity makes service coordination and team communication easy. Through the app, teams can send real-time messages to the team, establish goals, and assign to-dos to team members with just a few taps.
You can download the app for free, invite your team, and start collaborating.
