Happy New Year from iCarol

Tammy DiManna December 15, 2021 Events, iCarol, iCarol clients, iCarol Features, Enhancements, and Updates

It’s hard to believe that soon we’ll be closing out yet another year. The passage of time has felt especially fast lately. The year prior, everything was exceptionally strange and most agree 2020 far overstayed its welcome. By comparison, the months each felt only a few days long throughout 2021.

For our customers, 2021 was another year where you were asked to do more for your communities than ever before, stretching your resources as much as possible to meet emergent and rapidly evolving needs. Many of our customer organizations continued to play a critical roll in COVID-19 response, for example contracting with local health authorities to take calls for COVID-19 hotlines and in many cases assisting with vaccine rollout efforts. As a result, you have improved the health of your communities and helped save lives. We couldn’t be more proud or honored to be associated with the amazing work you do.

The global pandemic advanced the need for communities to solve problems by coordinating efforts between agencies to reduce duplication of work and ease participation for consumers of services, all while collecting and sharing important data to prove impact that drives creation of new services and the funding to make it happen. As a result, we’ve received more requests than ever before from customers who need to participate in health information exchanges, securely pass intake information to a partner, and close the loop on outcomes and results of the services received. We’re delighted that our customers are making use of iCarol’s flexibility to help you leverage your data and say “yes” to these projects, and it has motivated us to continue to stay ahead of the innovation happening in these areas. Meeting your needs with technology, and giving you options in how you can engage with others to help your communities, will always be something that drives us here at iCarol.

Looking ahead, we know that the impacts of COVID will be with us for a long time to come, and so we’re prepared to continue brainstorming solutions with you as needs evolve. We expect the mental health and economic impacts to reverberate for years to come, which means your core services providing listening and empathy, connection to helpful services, and crisis intervention will be more important than ever. It’s appropriate timing that the U.S. will launch three digit dialing for suicide prevention and mental/behavioral health crises in the form of 9-8-8, coming in July of 2022. We’ve spoken to many organizations who will be participating 988 centers asking us how iCarol can assist. We’re committed to helping this new network meet its goals of creating better, more comprehensive mental and behavioral health systems and look forward to those continuing conversations, your ideas, and finally seeing 9-8-8 become a reality in July.

In envisioning new and better ways for the systems of care to work, we understand that your work is growing less transactional and more about seeing someone through a situation long term, building a relationship and being a part of their network of support. To that end, you may recall we asked you some questions a few months back about your case management needs and how well they are being served by us. We’re excited to say that thanks to your feedback, we’ve discovered several areas where we can improve and add tools to iCarol that will help you do this work better. To learn a bit more about this, I hope you’ll join our upcoming annual “State of iCarol” webinar in January where we’ll share some of what we have in mind for these sorts of developments in 2022. Stay tuned to the blog, and watch your iCarol Dashboard and email inbox for an invite. If you don’t already get our emails, I hope you’ll sign up here so we can stay in touch with you.

I hope that each of you, and your entire teams, can take time to be with the people and do the things that are most meaningful and rejuvenating for you. We see you, your dedication to your work of helping others and improving the world around you, and the clear positive impact you have. We look forward to another year serving you and wish you a happy holiday season and a bright New Year.

Happy New Year from iCarol

Tammy DiManna December 29, 2020 Events, iCarol, iCarol clients, iCarol Features, Enhancements, and Updates

As 2020 comes to a close and we look forward to 2021, I like to reflect on the accomplishments of the past year. While they may have looked and felt different this year, they are accomplishments none the less.

I have had the opportunity to communicate with many of you this year, but for those I have not yet met, I joined iCarol as the Vice President of Operations in March of this year. Many of you know or have spoken previously to Rachel Wentink, who has served in this role for 5 years. Rachel is still working with us but is working part-time as she moves to semi-retirement. As I transitioned into this role from another Harris Business Unit, it struck me right away the absolute commitment and dedication that is a culture within the industries we serve. I love the sense of community that I experienced while attending various conferences this year, which says a lot given they were all held remotely. I look forward to “meeting” many more of you in 2021 and learning of the plans you have or need help with to drive towards the vision for your organizations.

While 2020 brought many hardships, I have been trying to focus on the positives and the accomplishments that we have achieved this year at iCarol.

We have had the privilege of welcoming many new organizations into the iCarol family, as well as continue to serve our current valued clients. Most of what we do is driven from input from our iCarol client family. We seek information and insights from all of you to guide us in what we continue to offer in iCarol. As a result, we have made many code changes that turned out 646 different features and bug fixes throughout the year. This included some rather large developments like the Referral Q and Provider Portal, as well as developments such as our Contact Record API updates. We have also focused our development efforts this year to continue to evolve security to better secure your data. A couple of these additions are the audit log and lock box enhancements, in addition to infrastructure security changes that were made in October. We discussed these enhancements on our Customer Webinar held on December 9. If you were not able to join us, you can access the recording through the iCarol Admin Dashboard or Help Center and watch it at your convenience. We look forward to sharing more of the accomplishments that our Tech Team has turned out in 2020 at our State of iCarol webinar in January. Details on the webinar will be coming soon, and we hope to see all of you there!

Early this year we moved our Support ticketing system to a new platform in an effort to better support all of you. This move has allowed us to better track support needs and streamline our internal processes. This was a large undertaking, as is any new system, but we believe it was time well spent and encourage feedback from all of you. One way we would love to hear from you is on the survey that is provided at the end of each support ticket. We have seen an increasing number of responses, and I would encourage those of you who bypass it to please take a few seconds and provide your feedback so we can do better.

I have heard many people utter the same sentiment, that the end of 2020 cannot come soon enough. It has been a challenging year. The impact of COVID-19 has had a profound impact on everyone, none more than all of you — those that assist help seekers struggling with the changes it has brought to a once normal life, while getting used to a remote working culture that many of you were not accustomed to yourselves, and finding a way to manage the increased volume of contacts at the same time. What you have accomplished this year has been nothing short of remarkable, and from all of us at iCarol we want to sincerely thank all of you for being the light in the darkness for so many this year.

Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year from all of us at iCarol.