Motion Case Studies

Cumbria County Council Social Services Department Integrates Best of Old Manual Financial Assessment Methods with Efficiency of Motion Tablet PCs Project wins third place in UK SOCITM eExcellence Awards

The Background:

Cumbria County Council oversees a broad range of public services — from education to trading standards — for nearly 500,000 people who live in this largely rural northwestern area of England. Among the most vital and highly scrutinized of these services are social services for children and their families, older adults, and people with disabilities or mental illnesses. The Council’s Social Services Department provides some of these services in-house with others provided through independent and voluntary organizations. When an adult receives residential care or a non-residential service such as home care, then a Social Services Financial Assessment Officer (FAO) undertakes an in-depth financial assessment to determine how much the service user can afford to contribute toward that care. These assessments must be updated every year, for all of the nearly 8,000 service users, in order to reflect changes in each person’s financial status or care.

The Challenge: Providing In-home Assessments over Large Geographic Areas

The Department of Health’s National “Fairer Charging” regulations mandate that, wherever possible, assessments are conducted in the person’s home. Until recently, the 24 FAOs in the Social Services Department had to collect financial information on paper forms. Then, they had to return to the office to manually key the information into the council’s centralized computer system, where assessments are calculated and stored. Once the assessment was processed, then the financial assessment and charge letters were dispatched to the service user. Often a week or two could lapse between the visit and receipt of the letter. Some people occasionally would forget the visit and wouldn’t approve the charge until the officer reviewed all the information with them again.

Two other factors further complicated the process: the geographic size of Cumbria and the defined period during which the annual reassessments for ongoing clients must be completed each year. The FAOs must complete the annual reassessments in addition to their usual work between April and June –– a timeframe as narrow as some of the country roads that they must use when traveling back and forth to people’s homes around the 6,810 square kilometers of Cumbria, England’s second largest county.

Any extra travel not only costs a considerable amount, but also reduces the time FAOs could spend doing the in-home assessments or completing follow-up work.

The Solution: Motion Tablet PCs Maintain Familiarity, Make Paper Processes Redundant

The Financial Assessment process required a highly portable, yet fully featured computer that could be used as an electronic pen and paper pad in face-to-face meetings with service users. Only “slate” style tablet PCs were found to meet this requirement. These combined the power and features of a traditional “clamshell” laptop with the flexibility to capture handwritten notes on the screen.

The council’s IT department performed an informal comparison of tablet PCs. It then “road tested” two different manufacturers’ versions, including the Motion Computing M1400, an ultra-mobile tablet that packs a 1.1 gigahertz Pentium M processor, 512 megabits of DDR SDRAM and 30 gigabytes of storage into a case that is less than an inch thick.

The M1400 was the unanimous choice for Cumbria. The Council’s IT department recognized the industry awards Motion had won, as well as Motion’s ability to provide long-term support. But the biggest bonus for the Financial Assessment Officers was the compact size and ergonomic design of the Motion M1400, which is similar in size to a notepad and weighs just over three pounds.

“We didn’t want to adapt our working practice to fit with a computerized system,” said Sheila Don, Head of Departmental Management Services Unit for Cumbria’s Social Services Department, “With the Motion M1400, we’ve been able to maintain the good aspects of the paper assessments, eliminate many of the inefficiencies of the manual system, and still provide the human touch for our service users.”

Unlike a standard laptop PC, the M1400 has no flip-up screen to create a barrier between the FAO and the service user. Nor is there a need to enter information by typing, which the FAOs considered a distraction. Instead, the officers use the M1400’s pen-like stylus to capture handwritten notes and fill out digital copies of the assessment forms on the tablet’s 12.1” screen.

The FAOs hold the tablets in the crook of their arm or on their lap as they fill out the electronic forms. “It doesn’t block interpersonal communication any more than the paper forms they used to use,” said Sheila Don. “This makes the service user, especially our older clients, feel at ease with the technology.”

The Motion tablet PCs come pre-loaded with Microsoft® Windows® XP Tablet PC Edition which provides excellent handwriting recognition. In addition, Fascia software from application developer Data Interface was required to enable the FAOs to conduct the assessments to Cumbria Council’s specification. This software has been specifically designed to enable mobile professionals to do all their job tasks within one simple and intuitive environment. It includes business intelligence, verification and validation features to enable processes to be streamlined and to identify if information is missing or wrongly entered.

The Fascia Electronic Assessments application instantly calculates the service user’s assessment, based on the information the FAO has entered into the electronic form. Then a tailored Assessment Letter is automatically produced by the system and printed on a small portable printer. The FAO can then explain anything the service user is unclear about. Once the charge is approved, the FAO then captures the person’s signature electronically using the stylus. When they return to their desks and connect their tablets to the office network (simply slotting their tablets into the Motion docking station), the assessment information is automatically transferred and stored in the council’s permanent electronic records system. Once docked the tablets PCs are used like “ordinary” office PCs; i.e. with keyboard, mouse and full sized monitor.

The Results: More Time Translates to Better Service

The system has been proven and is in use with the Penrith team, one of the Social Services teams across the county. The Council expects to deploy the Motion Tablet PCs to FAOs in the Kendal district at the end of October, with full roll-out the system to all districts by the end of 2005.

By eliminating the manual entry of financial information into the council’s computer system, the FAOs should be able to complete the 2006/07 annual reassessments in two months - a month less than it used to take – and will reduce the time it takes to complete assessments for people seeking new services. In prototype tests at London Borough of Sutton, time logging showed a 30% time saving in the completion of assessments.

Time saved translates to money saved for the Council. Sheila Don estimates the savings at $80,000 to $90,000 each year in staff overtime, weekend pay and other expenses. The increased efficiency will eliminate the need to employ additional FAOs to cope with the increasing demand for services. It also provides the FAOs more time to collect payments from people who have fallen behind and to ensure the accuracy of service user’s information.

Just as importantly, the extra time and efficiency will allow the Council to fulfill its commitment to improving its social services, enable more of its services to be accessible electronically and to promote the well-being of vulnerable people and their care givers.

When FAOs make home visits, they can now spend more time with service users and determine whether he or she might be eligible for additional benefits or other assistance. Auto-fill functions within the tablet’s software have also reduced the amount of information the officers need to add to the forms, further increasing the attention they can give the person, rather than the manual process. “In addition to improving the service, the extra time allows the financial assessment officers to build their observational and assessments skills,” said Sheila Don.

“The end result of the assessment might be the same, but the Motion tablet PCs have allowed us to change how we do our jobs,” she said. “We are now able to give people a better quality, more complete service, and reduce duplication and inefficiency.”

Note: This project has recently been awarded third place (highly commended) in the SOCITM (Society of Information Technology Management) e-Excellence Awards. This is the professional association for ICT managers working in and for the UK public sector. It provides a widely respected forum for the promotion, use and development of ICT best practice and also plays a leading role in the implementation of local e-government in the UK.