“Redbourne has helped take our organisation into the 21st century by becoming a paperless organisation. Having access to client information no matter where you are located from the main office to an outreach location is such a benefit.”

– Gail Davies

Odyssey House NSW aims to build safe and healthy communities by minimising the harmful effects of alcohol and other drugs on the person’s health and by extension our society. The organisation has a holistic treatment model that focuses on the person and helping them develop skills to cope with the underlying reasons they resorted to alcohol and other drug use.

Odyssey House NSW provides a diverse range of services from The Withdrawal Unit, Parents and Children’s Program, MERIT (Magistrates Early Referrals Into Treatment program), residential rehabilitation, numeracy and literacy education and community based services.

In April 2017, following the acquisition of Blacktown addiction counselling organisation, Bridges Incorporated, by Odyssey House NSW, the organisation moved into community-based services as part of its strategy to make our proven drug rehabilitation expertise more widely available to people.

Odyssey House Community Services provides a range of interventions that can help individuals face challenges that may be impacting not only their life and health but their friends, family and wider community. The organisation offers free individual and Group Counselling support, information and education to people who are concerned about theirs or another loved one’s drug and/or alcohol use and the impact on their Mental Health.

Today, Odyssey House operates across the whole of Sydney, with 25 staff using RediCASE likely to support approximately 2000 clients a year enrolled in community day-based programs.

Former Bridges Executive Officer, Gail Davies, now Odyssey House Community Services Manager – North and West Regions, first made rediCASE available to Odyssey House staff in July 2015, after investigating how its sister organisation, Odyssey House Victoria, was using the program.

“I was really impressed. I saw how Redbourne had done a lot of customisation to fit Victoria’s business needs and understood how it could be a valuable client management tool. It was faster than other case management software systems I’d come across, offered inbuilt government reporting metrics and was web-based, giving access from anywhere.”

“Even though we were a smaller organisation as Bridges Incorporated, we still had clients who would move to a different suburb and want to go to another one of our sites for their treatment,” said Gail.

“By using rediCASE our staff, no matter their location, could access all the information and treatment history for each client. That was a big plus.

“Our experience with rediCASE at Bridges Incorporated enabled Odyssey House NSW to decide to use rediCASE as our client database for all our Community Services locations as it is a sophisticated, reliable, system that met the needs of data collection, and reportage. This has ensured our sustainability and also means we can potentially offer our programs to more people across Sydney, drawing on our expertise in alcohol and other drugs treatment,” she said.

Importantly for Odyssey House NSW, rediCASE is a solution that will work across the entire organisation. The new Residential Module, now available as part of rediCASE, provides the ability to manage client payments for residential programs and bed allocations within the system. “It makes sense to leave the non-cloud based, slower and less-functional system behind and for all staff to work online.”

Gail said what they also liked about rediCASE was it allowed them to add customised fields to capture data outside the minimum data that they had to report on. “We can capture and view additional statistics on our treatment programs and see the bigger picture with respect to program success, usage trends etc.”

“The customisation has also gone further than that,” continued Gail.

“Our experience with rediCASE is that if we saw things in the product that we would have liked to see improved, bugs, peculiarities or nice to have features, if Redbourne saw they were of benefit to the sector then they would just add them to the product and we would get them when they released product updates.

“For example, when we first started with the software they just had ‘programs’ as a field. We had a need to have ‘sub-programs’ as a field as well. When we had treatment episodes for someone we tracked them by types of services we provided (they could have 3 treatment episode, different counselling and different groups such as anger management, alcohol and other drugs) and we tracked how that person was funded under each different program. It was one more level. This is now a standard feature of the software.”

“rediCASE has benefitted not just our staff but also our clients,’ claims Gail. “Because we can share client information across sites, if a client shows up in one location and then moves to another they don’t have to fill in a new profile form or treatment history. Our staff are saved from doing unnecessary data entry and it saves us the headache of having duplicate files within the organisation.

“rediCASE is on my laptop, whatever site I go to, wherever I am, even working from home,” said Gail.

“Going paperless has been the best thing ever. We don’t have to worry about misplaced files lying around, confidentiality issues. It’s all secure and available to those with access permission.

“Because Redbourne has worked with government agencies to ensure the Alcohol and Other Drug National Minimum Data Set (NMDS & MDS) measurements are built into the system, it means we can pull our reports directly from rediCASE.

If we didn’t have rediCASE we would have to do duplicate data entry to report funding to government,” added Gail.

“This is a massive time saving for us, saving us approximately 20 minutes per client.

“On top of that we have other reporting requirements. We are part of funding arrangements that include more than one funding source. We have to collect data and report separately to these four sources. rediCASE has helped simplify this data collection.”

Gail said she was very happy with the support and help the rediCASE team had offered.

“They have been very responsive and helpful. If we have questions and they can’t figure out how to make something work for us, they dive in and let us know if it’s possible and if so, how to do it. Their knowledge of the alcohol and other drugs sector has also increased since they have been working with us – maybe we had something to do with that!”

Odyssey House NSW plans to use rediCASE in its residential and withdrawal programs in the next 6-12 months.

Based on their rediCASE implementation Gail advised that some organisations might experience resistance from some staff not wanting to give up their paper-based systems. Work through this as the benefits of going online were worth it, she said.

Her biggest tip: “Have someone lead your rediCASE implementation who understands the business requirements of your clinicians and also the reporting requirements of the organisation and funders. And who can get up to speed quickly with what rediCASE can do for you.”

Redbourne definitely takes a genuine interest in our business. When talking through ideas about what our needs are, they understand the concepts of what we are talking about and their responses show their understanding.

– Gail Davies

Amazing solution

Key impacts

Discover the major benefits our client get from rediCASE.

Access

Access client files anywhere, anytime because everything is housed in the cloud. Can work on files when not in the office if need be.

Sharing

Share client info across numerous work locations is great for when clients move. Makes counsellors more informed about client history. Makes clients feel like we care about them.

Paperless office

No need to file, no need for excess paperwork, improved confidentiality and security.

Time saving

Removes dual data entry system.

Organised

Enables us to be more informed, organised and professional.

Scalable

Able to use for residential services as well as community services, and for future sites that might join us.

Reporting

Makes reporting with NADA easy – as data fields already in system. Saves time as no more entering figures twice.

We deliver flexible case management solution.

rediCASE is an advanced case management system developed in Australia specifically designed for the needs of service providers and treatment facilities caring for drug, alcohol and mental health clients and a growing list of other health and community service-type programs. As such it is highly flexible and scalable software solution.

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