Using Crisisworks for the COVID-19 pandemic

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Crisisworks changes in 2020 for COVID 19

While Crisisworks is an all hazards system for managing all small and large disasters as part of its normal use, there were several key areas that were added or enhanced to help with the management of COVID 19

  1. Updates to the case management system including

    1. Hide all structural damage questions behind one key question relating to possible or actual property damage

    2. Adding more default needs/tasks

    3. Enhancing the communications to external services providers via email notifications

    4. Addition of additional fields around referral sources and their own unique identifiers

    5. Modification to existing reports

    6. See CASI reporting section below for more details

  2. A new relief registration module was added with a public registration page to allow people to register from their smart phones or from internet connected PCs and devices.

    1. Relief registrations are then managed internally by authorised staff

    2. bulk communications to a filtered set of applicants using the communications module

  3. A new permit to travel module was added with a public registration page to allow people to register from their smart phones or from internet connected PCs and devices.

    1. Permit registrations are then managed internally by authorised staff including the ability to send the permits via email with an acknowledgement feature to confirm that it has been received the the applicant

CASI Reporting

We have prepared a support article on Generating CASI Reports in Crisisworks for information on how Councils can use the Crisisworks Recovery module to assist with their obligations under their Community Connector role.

Permits to travel for fire preparation during COVID

Crisisworks has a Permits to Travel solution that can be used for supporting owners to travel to their property to conduct fire preparation during COVID lockdowns. (Note: This system works using the general permits system so that the setup and management process is same, visit the Crisisworks Permit Module page. If you don’t wish to use this permit or permit to burn, you may deactivate it from the lookups as per the instructions on the Permits Module page)

The system includes:

  • A public registration form for travellers to register for a permit

  • Notification and back-end workflow to allow officers to review, approve or decline the permit request

  • A PDF permit is issued to the traveller by email with an acknowledgment option to confirm they have received it.

  • The permit is approved with a date range and optionally special conditions

  • The permit is automatically tracked as the approval date ranges are met, to automatically track permits as they progress through the states

Here is a video outlining the system.

To learn more please visit the Crisisworks Permit Module page.

Using Crisisworks Recovery for managing COVID support

The following 30 minute webinar discusses approaches to configuring and managing Crisisworks for the COVID-19 pandemic. This is not a for beginners and is aimed at Crisisworks system Administrators

Reporting on the “Recovery Services tasks” ->  “Needs and Tasks”

  • The Needs and Tasks report can be accessed via the overview menu.

    • Select reports then choose “Recovery” tab from the LHS

    • Then select the report “Recovery Needs and Tasks with Case Data”

    • When running your report make sure you select the external ID field and the date range.

  • You may prefer to find the records in the Needs and Tasks list and send those records to the report.

    • When running your report make sure you select the external ID field and the date range.

  • When running this report you can optionally make the report change the status of the records being a report on.

    • For example, you may filter for the status of “New” for a provider and have the report change the status to referred after the report has been run (see option two below).

Using Needs and Tasks to manage referrals to Councils’ Departments or External Organisations

Referral Sources and Business Categories 

If you want to add referral sources use the new fields on the RHS of the case form. You can also add the ID from the external referral source in the field named “External Case ID”

For business categories you can use tags. For example:

  • Business-Advertising, Business-Retail, Business-tradesman.

By using the same prefix, it helps with data entry after you type a couple of letters like “bu”.. It will list all of the previously entered tags starting with “bu” to help with data entry, it will also list all of the tags together.

Using a dash in your tag makes it easier to search for multiple tags later on.

Importing Cases

We have helped a couple of councils bulk import at-risk residents directly into Crisisworks cases, so they can call & case manage them. Once imported you can bulk create “recovery” tasks.

There are two different approaches to importing the data yourself (or with our help). If you will only have one contact per case in your import file, you can use the general Case Import.

If you are importing multiple people for one case, you can import “persons”, this will also create a new case for each unique address imported into the persons register and link them based on the address. 

Sending data to Councils’ Departments or External Organisations

There are a few options:

  1. Manually run a Needs and Tasks report assigned for each assigned resource. Then export the results and send them.

  2. Organise for Datalink to set up an automated report which will re-run your saved manual report (from the previous step). Email support@crisisworks.com with the Report Instance Number and the Crisisworks users IDs and the date & time of your automated report and we will set it up.

  3. Use automated notifications to send an email for each Recovery Task, this does require more set up. Each recipient needs to be added as a restricted Crisisworks Recovery User and have their email notifications enabled and be put on duty in the event.

Requests to track visitors and stay times

One of our Councils called yesterday with about how to help them manage the restriction of 20 people in the library at a time. They propose to only allow 15 minutes per person in their municipal library and have one door for entry and one door for the exit. They plan to use the Request Module and thought it would be helpful to share the idea with others.

As people enter the venue:

  1. Create a new request. The request creation time serves as the entry time.

  2. Add the visitor’s family name, the arrival time and number of people into the subject line: e.g. “Smith x 2 : 10:30 am”

  3. Add the due time e.g. “+15m” (calculates 15 minutes from now)

When they leave, resolve the request.

Requests that are overdue appear in the due counter, and help identify any visitors that have overstayed.

Using Crisisworks will not only help with this process but will also be helpful if you need to look back in time to see who was in the library at the time in case there was a COVID +ve resident in the library at a given time