Comparing Noted to other client management systems

Noted

Questions to consider

Ease of use

Noted is designed from the ground up to reflect the workflow of its users, so they can access what they need, when they need it, with a minimum of searching or clicking through menus.

• Is information on a client accessible from a single place in the application?
• How much information is hidden away in different tabs, or parts of the application?

Noted forms are tailored to each team, so workers can enter the information they need to meet the requirements of safe practice, and funders in a standardised way that makes it easier to coordinate with other team members.

• How are case notes recorded? Are they just free text?
• Are forms set up to your organisation’s needs?
• If they provide forms, how expensive are they to edit?
• Is it possible to report from case notes?

Many, diverse teams working securely on a unified system

Noted holds a single repository on each client, group and whānau. This is possible because each team is provided with the forms they need for their workflow and because Noted’s access controls filter records so that each user only sees what they are supposed to.

Noted takes a unique approach to access control, providing fine-grained control over who can access entities in the system, at the level of individual records, clients, groups, and whānau. 

There are three levels of access:

• Full access 
• Limited access (I can see it exists, but I can’t read it
• No access (I don’t know it exists)

This approach allows organisations, with highly diverse teams, ranging from food parcel delivery to addiction services and nursing teams to all safely and efficiently work from the same system, while meeting privacy and contractual requirements in a way that doesn’t interfere with the practical needs of staff.

A similar approach is taken with controlling access privileges and features. The Role Groups feature allows organisations to create groups of users, such as supervisors, who are able to edit access controls or amend and delete records.

• Do the access controls in the system enable records on clients to be held in one place while only allowing appropriate information to be viewed by users who should see it?
• Is it possible to edit access to an individual record?
• Can all interactions with a team be completely hidden?
• Is it possible to see notes have been written without displaying their contents?
• Can a staff member work efficiently across multiple teams?
• Does the system provide the ability to easily control what privileges a type of user has?
• Does the system require staff to maintain information elsewhere to keep it secure?

Whānau/family as a first class entity

In Noted a whānau is a ‘client made up of clients’. A whānau can have its own goals and outcomes. Notes kept against interactions with whānau automatically flow through to whānau members’ records, so they can be read on the whānau or on the client.

Capturing information on whānau is important from the point of view of working efficiently and safely with whānau, as well as from a data capture perspective.

At a time when family/whānau-centric care is seen as a priority, this functionality sets us well apart from our competitors.

• Is there a place to record information on whānau in the system?
• Can case notes entered on whānau also be viewed in a whānau member’s notes?
• Is it possible to capture notes on individuals within the whānau meeting that are only otherwise viewable in the notes of that client?
• Is it easy to capture whānau needs and outcomes?

Group sessions

Noted allows customers to set up groups and record attendance and session records that flow through to the records of group participants.

This functionality makes record keeping much more secure and efficient than alternatives.

• Is there a place to record information on groups in the system?
• Can case notes entered on groups also be viewed in a group participant’s notes?
• Is it possible to capture notes on individuals within the group session  that are only otherwise viewable in the notes of that client?
• Is it possible to easily capture group session attendance?
• Is it easy to report on group attendance?

End-to-end data capture, management and analytics

Noted’s semi-structured forms allow workers to capture fine-grained data transparently, while simply taking case notes. Client information is synchronised every 24 hours through to Noted's own data warehouse and surfaced to users using the advanced data analytics system, Qlik Cloud.

Noted has built a highly sophisticated series of data visualisations that provide our customers with tools that would normally only be available to extremely large organisations, such as hospitals.

They enable our customers to:

• Create their own data dictionary, allowing them to use their own language and terms
• Manage their data quality
• Get a detailed understanding of their clients’ demographics, needs and outcomes
• Get a detailed understanding of their whānau demographics, needs and outcomes
• View information on group and whānau sessions
• View client journeys through services
• Manage worker caseloads
• Easily access information required by funders
• Demonstrate impact to contract providers and other stakeholders

These tools are available right out of the box.

• Does the system capture queryable information within case notes that follow the workflow of staff?
• Does the system have its own data warehouse and analytics tools?
• Does the system come with tools to enable supervisors to easily manage the data quality of their teams? 
• Will you be able to easily manage worker caseloads?
• How easy will it be for you to demonstrate the impact your organisation is making?
• If connecting to an external data analytics solution:
• How much quality data will be captured and transferred?
• How long will it take to set it up?
• How much will it cost to set up?
• How much will the ongoing cost be?

Committed to integrating with the wider health and social ecosystem

Our customers rely on a variety of external systems. Noted is committed to connecting with as many of these systems as possible to enable our users to work as efficiently as possible, without double entry or additional work.

Systems that Noted seamlessly works with in New Zealand:

• ACC billing
• ACC PO billing, including Sensitive Claims
• PRIMHD (Te Whatu Ora primary mental health contract)
• School management systems
• Vimeo (video calling)
• Google address lookup

Planned integrations for 2023 and 2024:

• Te Whatu Ora:
• NHI lookup
• CPN lookup
• HPI lookup
• ERMS (electronic referral management system, currently in use across the whole of the South Island)
• HealthOne (Electronic health record, currently for South Island only)
• NZ Electronic Prescription Service (allows users to see prescribed and dispensed medications)
• NZ Formulary (required for prescribing)
• Medicly (health information exchange

• Does the system integrate with other systems that you rely on, particularly for your contracts?
• Is the system provider committed to continually expanding connectivity and interoperability with the health and social ecosystem?
• Does the system have an API that allows for this interconnectivity?

A sector-wide solution

Noted customers include single practitioner clinics, right through to complex organisations with hundreds of staff and tens of teams. Similarly, the professions of users range from social workers and allied health professionals to medical doctors.

No other system is designed to offer a solution that can operate effectively across the entire community-based health and social ecosystem.

• Does the system work well for all your staff, or will many have to compromise?

Built on webnative technology

Noted is webnative and heavily leverages the latest developments in cloud technology provided by Amazon Web Services. This offers a number of significant advantages:

• Security
• Scalability
• Data processing capability
• Availability
• Disaster recovery capability
• Speed

• Will you have to pay for and maintain your own hosting infrastructure, whether cloud based or on locally housed servers?
• Was the system originally built on cloud infrastructure, or was it migrated into the cloud later?
• Do you have to install any software on your devices?
• Does the system work on all operating systems?
• Does it work on mobile devices?
• Does the system have multi factor authentication?
• Can the system provider offer 99.9% uptime?

Dedicated support team

Noted has a team of business process specialists that work with our customers with:

• Ensuring that Noted is configured to their requirements
• Supporting them to update their processes
• Change management
• Staff training

Post onboarding, they offer ongoing support and advice, as required and are involved in account management.

• Can the system be configured to meet the needs of all of your teams?
• Does the system provider have a dedicated team to support you with change management and setup?
• Does the provider provide comprehensive training documentation for each of your teams?
• Does the provider offer responsive, ongoing support?

Dedicated engineering team

At present, Noted has nine engineers in its product delivery team who are purely focused on developing Noted’s products. The size of this team is set to grow as they work through an ambitious development roadmap.

• How many software engineers does the system provider have?
• What is their development roadmap?