The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major disruption to multi-disciplinary teams’ coordination and service delivery. Teams are now forced to find new solutions for common practices, like in-person meetings, without losing progress toward successful outcomes.
Below we explore some of these new solutions and the pros and cons for each.
Text Messages and Email
The good: Text messages and email can keep your team coordinated for free, and can easily be adopted by all team members.
Everyone from clinical team members to natural supports already use text messages and email, so you can immediately communicate and keep your team on track without the lag time associated with new technology adoption.
The bad: Text messages and email create a lack of separation between personal and work communication and lack data security. Also, you cannot seamlessly extract important insights and reports from these platforms that can be used by member organizations to bolster documentation.
As teams grow and change, text message and email threads become long and convoluted. Information often gets lost, and teams can miss out on important details.
Video Conferencing
The good: There are a lot of free or low-cost video conferencing solutions that offer the benefits of face-to-face communication. Some even allow you to record a meeting to send to team members who couldn’t make it.
The bad: Just like with in-person meetings, it can be difficult to coordinate with everyone’s schedules and ensure the right people are invited and participate. The less tech-savvy members of the team may find it difficult to adopt these practices.
Plus, video conferencing platforms may not have the level of security required for multi-disciplinary care coordination.
Team Collaboration Platforms
The good: These solutions allow the team coordinator to add and remove team members and keep track of who is on the team at all times. They also allow the team to communicate and collaborate in real time, to constantly evaluate needs and deliver appropriate services to clients.
The bad: These solutions often require users to have pre-negotiated accounts or licenses, and are also so feature-rich that team members must be trained on how to use them before they can be fully implemented by the team. The longer time to adoption increases the likelihood that many team members never join or use the solution.
Case Management Systems and Electronic Health Records
The good: These systems can be customized to meet the needs of each agency and organization, including the specific types of reports that need to be automatically generated and also the level of data security and confidentiality needed to meet their compliance requirements.
The bad: These systems have a 0% chance of being adopted by all team members. They are costly, take forever to build necessary customizations, and require lengthy user training prior to implementation. Also, these systems are not flexible enough to meet the ever-changing needs of real-time team collaboration.
As we have seen, each of these solutions has benefits, but none of them meet all the needs of multi-disciplinary team service coordination—which is why we created Caretivity!
Caretivity is:
- Easy to adopt – It’s FREE, with no contracts to negotiate and no training required.
- Usable by ALL team members – It just requires a smartphone and data plan or access to Wi-Fi.
- Built for team collaboration – Easily add and remove team members, view a roster of the team members and their roles, send messages, and work toward care plan goals and milestones.
- Secure – The high level of encryption and data security meets all federal and state requirements.
- Insightful (COMING SOON) – Pull reports from the app that government and private organizations represented within the team can use to see the team’s activities, their mission, and how they measure progress toward a successful outcome.
Caretivity REALLY helped us coordinate an emergency situation that would have been more confusing via email!
I’m so thankful that we were already rolling it out in our county with our movement to work-from-home for the foreseeable future!
