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Question:

Should individuals be in more than one account type?

For example, if I have a Care Coordinator (professional relationship) and a family member or advocate (personal relationship) with an individual we support. Should we create 2 non-client Individual accounts for that individual - one that contains their personal information (home phone, home email, home address) and one that contains their professional information? For example, we may not want a person’s professional information/account linked in the relationship section and receiving correspondence regarding their personal relationship to their professional contact, nor do we want their personal information populating/viewable if someone needs view their information as a Care Coordinator from the client’s Care Management tab.

The issue is if we go to link the person under providers, their name will come up twice, without a way to differentiate which account his their provider account and which is their personal. The only way we can know is if we add some kind of designation to their name such as "CC" for the Care Coordinator professional relationship account.

Answer:

You can accomplish this via 2 different ways:

Option 1:

You can create 2 accounts, and on the professional non-client account, you can add a "CC" or other indicator after their name (even professional titles like "LCSW" after their name). When you do this, it, it would seem then as if you had 2 different individuals with similar names but different roles. And if you wanted to choose the account as a provider, you could quickly see and choose the one which was the family account or the professional one. But because there would be 2 accounts for that individual, if you ever had to do an update, you would want to check both accounts to see if both need to be updated or just one... and if you ever ran a report that included non-client individuals, you will need to know that the person could be counted twice - so your report requirements would need to be very specific on how you would want your individuals identified and captured in the report.

Option 2:

You can also use a single account for this - each account allows the entry of 2 emails, 2 phones, and 2 addresses (the Alternative Address). Then if you ran reports of client supporting individuals, it would correctly count this person as a single individual. And when you choose that account as a provider, only one account will be selectable.

While the choice of option really depends on how you typically use the individual in IMPOWR, OUR RECOMMENDATION is Option 2 because while the individual has 2 roles, they are still only 1 individual. You can use the Comment field to provide some details like the roles they hold (family and professional), you can add those roles to their title, you can set up a single relationship with the client (even if they are a care coordinator, they can still be a client advocate), you can setup and create a custom field for specific information that you want to track (if you wanted to add custom fields to non-client accounts), they can still have organizational affiliations, and you can add notes. When you go to select the individual, there will be only 1 account to choose from (please note the system will capture the first phone, email, and address, if you display their information on any grid in IMPOWR... but when you run reports, you can choose which of the emails, phone, or addresses to display.) The choice of option really depends on how you would use the account. If the account is typically used for the care coordinator role, you can enter the phone, email, and address associated with that role into the first email, phone, and address field. That way, if you add that account to a grid, that is the information that would display. Conversely, if the client's primary role is an advocate, you can enter the information associated with that role into those first fields.

In summary, either way you do it would work because if you want to create and run a standard report of clients and their family members or advocates (or something similar), you can always ask us to create a report for you and you can choose whether to display the 1st or 2nd email, phone, or address (or display both the 1st and 2nd one with appropriate column labels) in that report. It really depends on which would be best for you and your processes (and team).

Here is why Our Recommendation is Option 2:

The intent of IMPOWR is one-person-one-record.

If the reason you see a need for duplicates is that you need to use one email address for communication and in some cases another, or if there is information you want only some users to be able to see, (or other issues around how the data is used or accessed) then we can knowingly "bend the rule". But in that case, we suggest that we discuss those issues and see how we can address them in other ways (such as security privileges or adding new attributes for data elements like work email versus private email) and then restore the single record as soon as feasible.

Here is the thought process behind that opinion:

When IMPOWR was initially designed, we reviewed many different products which were in the market at that time, and held discussions many different care provider agencies. One of the most common and fundamental problems we found at all of those agencies was the replication of people in many systems and in many places even within one system. A person might be listed dozens of times - once in the HR system, once in the health record, once in a donor system, once in an emergency contact system, once on a driver list, once in a training system, and on and on. This caused a multitude of data management problems that we saw over and over in every organization whether they were big or small (something that was rather shocking to us, having experiences other types of businesses where data integrity is a major priority):

  • Data Integrity Data for the various records was a mess all over - sometimes presenting serious health, safety, privacy, and compliance risks. An example: A person may call and say they have a new emergency contact, or a new food allergy , or a new home address. That info gets updated on one system but not the others. When an emergency happens and their profile is called up - the data displayed may not be correct so cannot be trusted and realistically is worse than having no information at all. At some agencies, we sync with some of their other software so that helps reduce the issue - but only for certain data elements. To ensure data integrity, if we have multiple duplicates how do we confirm all are getting updated properly?

  • Accurate Reporting When people appear more than once (i.e., have multiple accounts setup for them) in any software, including IMPOWR, they get counted more than once in reports. We have one IMPOWR customer that switched to us from another system. When their data was imported what looked like 7,000 people in their old system (and that they told donors in their annual report that they serve), it turned out to actually only be 2,000 people because so many were duplicated - some as many as a dozen times. That kind of situation happened more than once and sometimes in dramatic ways. Even if your data is good it was managed very well with other software, why add to the problem if we can avoid it?

  • Replicated or Improper Communication When notifications or agency communications are sent out - recipients may receive multiple copies or the wrong people may get notified because the records are inconsistent. For example: sometimes a company might send you multiple copies of the same one catalog - each with a slightly different name - possibly they swapped some letters in your name, maybe they entered an initial for your first name, they might have spelled out your name more formally such as they used 'William' instead of 'Bill', they may have spelled the name phonetically, etc. It is simply annoying and wasteful, but depending on the purpose and content of communication, having multiple records could lead to a serious safety or compliance risk if inconsistent data causes communication that improperly exposes PHI or other private data, or contains outdated medical or certification information. In IMPOWR, we built some tools to reduce some of this (e.g. trying to deduplicate households when two people live at the same address) but it gets very complicated very quickly and that is with good data. Duplicated records with different data are very hard to detect because we don't know which is correct.

To prevent those kinds of problems happening in IMPOWR our design included two key concepts:

  • One person - one record. If a person was a client, staff, Board member, donor, event attendee, volunteer, whatever - they were still one person and should therefore have one record. This concept is not new. It's what a Social Security number is for and is also common in industry (e.g. one copier - one serial number; one product on SKU) but for some reason not common in social care.

  • Data clean-up tools. We've never seen this elsewhere but knowing that a lot of bad data gets entered (misspellings, data reconciliation issues when importing data from old systems) we knew we'd need tools to help people fund the duplicate data and merge them out. So, IMPOWR has many data reconciliation/cleanup tools that are aimed at achieving one-person-one-record.

Bottom line

We understand there may be rare cases where for convenience or as a temporary workaround, you may need to "bend the rules". But we recommend you try to avoid it and if you need to do it - try and go back later to correct the issue. That would be our approach here, too, and why Our Recommendation is that you only create one account for each individual.