How can we improve our community referrals process?
In order to understand how managers track community referrals and how they could improve the process, MAAC created a Tableau dashboard to visualize the referral project.
By creating this dashboard, managers were able to quickly spot the cases that need attention and could easily review the case notes. They could also track the types of resources, the outcomes, and the amount of time it took for the community referral processes to be completed to identify opportunities to improve the process.
ANALYSIS
MAAC’s dashboard allows managers to more effectively monitor community referrals to ensure that families are receiving the necessary services.
Each row of the dashboard represents a referral for one of the families they serve. The right half of the dashboard allows manager to quickly scan and see which referrals have been completed (those in blue), which are pending (grey), and for which the family did not receive services (red). When a manager has a question about a referral, she can hover over the bar in the chart and review the associated case notes.
The length of the bars corresponds to the amount of time it took for a referral to be completed, allowing managers to identify patterns of long/short referral processes by site or service type.
RESULT
MAAC identified some sites where families had particularly long waiting time for receiving community referrals. They also identified some sites that should be provided with more community resources.
ADDITIONAL DETAILS
AUDIENCE: Leadership, management
LEVEL OF ANALYSIS: Family, center
DIFFICULTY: Advanced
CONTENT AREA: Family and community engagement
DATA SOURCES: ChildPlus, Tableau
CONSIDERATIONS AND CAVEATS: This information can also be used to identify opportunities for providing parent training sessions on certain topics based on needs identified at the site level.
TECHNICAL APPENDIX
The data was exported from ChildPlus and imported into Tableau and visualized as a Gantt chart for analysis. The dashboards were created in Tableau using calculations of time elapsed between different event dates. The different referral outcomes were also color-coded to easily identify each status.
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