Higher Ground | a Wild Bamboo case study

Elite reporting adds value to therapeutic community 

 

About Higher Ground Drug Rehabilitation Trust

Higher Ground was established in Auckland in 1984. It provides quality abstinence, within a therapeutic community for adult New Zealanders. Higher Ground’s primary goal is to foster personal growth and to minimise harm to self and society. Higher Ground provides rehabilitation programmes based on the principles of 12 Steps of Recovery. For more information about Higher Ground visit: www.higherground.org.nz

The situation

Prior to implementing Recordbase Elite, Higher Ground captured all treatment and reporting information manually. Their previous system relied on a number of standard Word templates for assessments and intake interviews, and Excel spreadsheets for resident logs.

Fed-up with tedious and time-consuming data entry and reporting, Higher Ground started searching for a smart system that would improve information management and assist them with their contractual reporting requirements.

After looking far and wide, including assessing systems from the UK and Australia, Higher Ground chose New Zealand NGO Wild Bamboo and its information management solution, Recordbase Elite. Being an NGO and understanding the challenges faced by NGOs was a key factor in Higher Ground’s decision to select Wild Bamboo.

The Wild Bamboo partnership approach

Implementation

Higher Ground is the first AOD (Alcohol and other Drugs) therapeutic community to use Wild Bamboo’s Recordbase Elite information management system to become PRIMHD compliant.

Wild Bamboo and Higher Ground worked collaboratively to ensure Recordbase Elite captured all the necessary information for producing reports that met PRIMHD and DHB reporting requirements.

As Recordbase Elite is designed for the mental health sector, Higher Ground found some of the terminology and fields were not relevant for the AOD sector. As a simple and effective solution, some fields and section changes were made to accommodate items such as clinical formulations, psychological assessments and social history.

Any early concerns around downtime and lost data were quickly dispelled through Wild Bamboo’s service support and step-by-step process for maintaining data security.

Training

Key users attended on-site training over two days in a relaxed and informative setting. Initially, there was some apprehension around change and using the new software, but with Wild Bamboo’s thorough training programme and Higher Ground’s in-house champion-users, it didn’t take long for Recordbase Elite to be accepted and welcomed into everyday practice.

The results

With its ease of use, consistency and accessibility, Recordbase Elite has given the Higher Ground team ‘information at their fingertips’, which has created more time for working within the therapeutic community.

A number of features are having an immediate and positive impact on the service, such as the ability to access Recordbase Elite remotely, which is vital to the service as it continues to grow. The Recordbase Elite reporting function has also provided in-house capabilities for quickly generating a number of reports.

Higher Ground is now PRIMHD compliant, and is confidently meeting the Ministry of Health’s requirements and reporting standards.

Melissa Girling, Higher Ground’s research analyst says, “the level of collaboration and support we’ve received from Wild Bamboo has been great and we’ve successfully worked together to implement changes to the software to best suit our needs.”

Download this case study (PDF, 468KB).