WCSI - Building a better Community through Positive Approaches and Recovery.

Organization Information:

Organization Name:
Westmoreland Casemanagement and Supports, Inc.
City & State:
Greensburg, 
Pennsylvania
Organization Website:
www.wcsi.org
Organization's Mission Statement

The mission of Westmoreland Casemanagement and Supports, Inc. (WCSI) is to assist children, adolescents, and adults, seeking mental health, mental retardation, early intervention and educational/vocational services, in accessing and receiving effective treatment, referrals for service, coordination and monitoring of services and supports. The organization will continue utilizing Positive Approaches and the Recovery Model, enabling clients to live, work, learn and participate fully in their community.

Submission Information

Impact Essay

Westmoreland Casemanagement and Supports, Inc. is a non-profit Human Services Agency who serves the underprivileged in Westmoreland County by providing service coordination services to these individuals in the areas of Behavioral Health, Intellectual Developmental Disabilities and Early Intervention.

We currently serve over 7,000 people in Westmoreland County in each of the disciplines described above. We are also a covered entity under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA).

Because we have regulations that govern the programs we administer we have had to rely on the use of technology to make the Case Manager’s jobs easier and make more efficient use of their time. We are currently working on an initiative instituting SharePoint to help the efficiency factor in the work that needs to be done. During the last year we have been providing laptops to our Intellectual Developmental Disabilities Supports Coordinators so they can perform their work out in the field. This has shown an increase in the amount of clients they have visited as well as seeing them more frequently than in the past which improves the quality of life for our clients. This project was piloted by our Early Intervention Service Coordinators and found to be very successful, thus rolling it out to the Intellectual Developmental Disabilities Supports Coordinators was the next step. We would also like to extend this technology to our Behavioral Health Department by sending our Case Managers out in the field with laptops. The expectation is expected to be the same for the Behavioral Health clients. Feedback from the Service Coordinators and Supports Coordinators has been extremely positive.

We have built an outcomes database using Microsoft Access for the Behavioral Health Department. The outcomes database tracks the mental health clients’ progression through the programs they utilize. This data is helpful for the Behavioral Health administration to track trends and to be able to recognize if programs are helping the client’s to recover from their mental illness.

Because we are moving to a more mobile work force, we have begun using the shared calendar feature in Microsoft Outlook. Each supervisor is able to see what appointments each of their staff have made and are able to reach then should the need arise. The calendar feature will also be utilized with the Agency’s Leadership Team and with the various committees within the Agency as well as each department. We are also looking to put a conference room scheduler on the SharePoint site to remove the burdensome approach we currently have which is through paper calendars.

With our SharePoint initiative we hope to make use of the Microsoft Communication Manager. We would like to be able to hold meetings with our other satellite sites, reducing the travel involved which equates to time away from their clients. This will allow more effective use of all employees’ time by utilizing this program to produce more efficient and effective communications.

All of the technologies we have or are in the process of deploying are all centered towards making our workforce more efficient and effective. The result is more quality time that can be spent towards our Behavioral Health, Intellectual Developmental Disabilities and Early Intervention clients.

None of this would have been possible without Tech Soup. We live on a limited budget and the pricing that Tech Soup offers has made it possible to move forward with technologies we would not otherwise be able to afford. We have benefited greatly from Tech Soup.

Submission Category
Optimize Mission Delivery
Supporting Work Files