How to improve collaboration and reporting accuracy.
Centacare Catholic Family Services is a community service agency that provides more than 80 services to individuals and families in Adelaide, Australia. They offer programs ranging from disability, family, youth and children services, health and well-being, employment, education and training, homelessness, and domestic violence. They operate on the principle that everyone has the right to be treated with dignity and respect. Prior to using Penelope, Centacare was using Excel sheets, paper, and other formats for client records that weren't integrated or accessible across their 80+ services, and their client data was not accessible across multiple locations and didn't integrate with government systems. Since moving to Penelope in 2013, Centacare has established confidence with their clients and staff, as their records are now contained in a safe and secure system. The cloud-based platform allows their managers to access a complete overview of their services and data reports, while their administrative and clinical staff has generated efficiencies by implementing smart forms, workflows, and triggered reminders and notifications. Centacare has created documents in Penelope to capture custom data and has trained staff to complete them as part of their normal workday, making their funder reporting seamless. Preparing for quarterly, bi-annual, and yearly reporting for their funding bodies used to take weeks, but with Penelope has been reduced to a half-day assignment. With the introduction of Tableau, they now can connect to live data within Penelope to provide demographic dashboards for managers.
Kathy Knightly, Centacare’s Client Data Systems Manager, said that "From a general use and reporting standpoint, Athena has been extremely accommodating in allowing us access to the back-end to pull data out that’s collected with our own custom smart forms developed in-house. This is a very powerful feature of Penelope.”
Another major challenge Penelope helped Centacare overcome was supplying a connection to the Australian government’s Department of Social Services (DSS) data system.
With Penelope, they can enter the government’s data requirements directly into the system, and it will automatically transfer across to the DSS data system, therefore alleviating double entry.
Schedule a complimentary consultation with a Penelope expert to learn how your agency can improve collaboration and enhance reporting accuracy.