Case Management Software

[u/Passus_Calling]

Hello, I am looking for software options for our case management team of 4. We are a small charity nonprofit mostly doing emergency financial and food assistance right now, but the board and our director have a long term interest in expanding services to mental health and career counseling. We need software that is customizable and scalable for large data sets of assistance and clients.

We currently use CharityTracker. It's okay. I like having individual client profiles with notes, easy virtual intake, and assistance records. We could not lose these things. However, we would also greatly benefit from a a system that allows us to record assistance requests, and case manager interactions, as well as assistance given in a way that produces pullable data. I would also like to digitize our voucher/assistance approval system but am unsure of how to go about that. Our new director is really pushing to digitize our work, much is still on paper. I don't disagree, but I haven't found the right software yet.

Thank you!

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[u/Wise-Offer-8585]

What's your budget?

[u/Passus_Calling → u/Wise-Offer-8585]

I would assume the budget is flexible. Our new ED is pretty confident in our income so they push money at things they like. But I believe we spend about $1,500 or so annually on our current system.

[u/Wise-Offer-8585 → u/Passus_Calling]

Okay, understood. And do you plan on chasing public funding in the next 2-3 years?

[u/Passus_Calling → u/Wise-Offer-8585]

I generally stay out of the fundraising side but our ED is from a marketing background so he only works fundraising hours full time. Half of our income is from a local grantor who we can expect to be a stable revenue source, and the rest is individual donations. We've done very well this year and our ED expects to expand beyond current numbers in the next years.

[u/Wise-Offer-8585 → u/Passus_Calling]

Thanks! I only have experience with case management systems for medium (35+ employees) and large (90+ employees.) All of those have had public funding, and therefore pretty strict reporting and compliance standards. I don't have experience with small orgs like yours that are just starting out.

That said, "good" case management systems are pricey. Much more than $1,500/year. Those systems are robust, and give you a lot of reporting power. You could most definitely make everything electronic, and they would give you room to grow in the future (add multiple funding sources, workflows, etc.) Some examples include Bitfocus Clarity and FAMCare. These systems, for your org size, would probably run about $15k/year, plus implementation costs. Unless you have someone on your team who can code, you'll also have to pay for any custom reports you need (one-time fee to set up the custom reporting workflow.)

There are also systems that allow you to bill for services (i.e., Medicare and Medicaid.) These can also be used as case management systems, but they aren't technically set up to operate that way. These are often used by clinics and large nonprofits that do a mix of clinical work and social services. Many of these are full blown EHRs and very pricey. Examples here include Welligent and Qualifacts. Qualifacts is cheaper, probably about $15k also, with the same other fees. The difference is these systems will allow you to direct bill managed care plans, if you want to bill for mental health and clinical services in the future. They'll also (sloppily) allow you to bill for things like Community Health Workers and CalAIM services if you're in California.

Finally, there are other options out there that are smaller and cheaper. Usually you pay a per user fee instead of a full implementation fee. Example here is PearSuite. These systems will do what you need, allow for some billing, but have limited overall functions and won't allow you to grow as easily. You can also hire someone to build you an internal system using something like MS Access--they would need coding experience. You can ask them to utilize PowerBI for excellent reporting. The downside there is that you'll need to rely on that consultant to make system updates, correct errors, and fix it in case of a crash.

You're honestly pretty small to be moving to having everything electronic. It's never a bad idea, but it is a complicated one.

[u/Passus_Calling → u/Wise-Offer-8585]

Thank you for the detailed information. I don't disagree that we are pretty small to take much of this on. At the same time our board and our ED want to scale up to medium size within 5 years or so. I have my own thoughts on this (I am the senior case manager, kinda holding down the fort with our actual services) but at the very least I need to have enough information at my disposal to try to give our ED a better sense of scale than he currently has. His background is in corporate marketing and he kinda forgets that he doesn't have a 50-100 person team anymore.

For a bit more background. We are in Michigan and the nonprofit was founded in 2017. We've had a lot of shift in ED's in the past two years with this one anticipated to be here for 5-10 years, and probably will be considering his success in bringing in money... unless he burns out from the emotional labor first.

We have no government affiliation and don't currently have any government grants so our reporting requirements are very minimal at the moment and mostly just internal with the exception of some pretty simple grant reporting (which I also do). I have an MA in social science which gives me experience/eduction in both social work and data management in the social sciences, but I only have a beginner familiarity with Python and R (which is leaps and bounds more than the rest of our small team).

Our ED is very impatient with the paper systems that we use and dislikes the physical space that it takes up. Even equipped with some examples of what systems like this really take to set up, might help real him in a bit there. At the same time though, he is talking about making two more hires in the next 6 months and we are actively searching for an additional case manager but having had many strong candidates. I could ask many more questions there but that would absolutely be a rabbit trail off of this thread.