Services to Ohio Mentally Ill Homeless Enhanced by Technology Donations
Community Support Services, Inc. (CSS), offers behavioral healthcare services to individuals living with mental illness or substance abuse disorders, who often are homeless or unemployed. Many of these services literally meet patients where they are, in order to avoid travel to the agency's facility. Care is client-centered, with staff working in collaboration with clients to develop individualized treatment plans. In 2008 alone, CSS's staff of 240 provided over 300,000 services to over 6,000 clients.
Among CSS's core values are innovation and flexibility. The willingness to innovate is evident in staff's use of technology, an endeavor made possible through the TechSoup software donation program. Donated Microsoft SQL Server, Visual Studio, and Office software makes managing CSS's many services and the collaboration with partner agencies possible.
Documents and databases are created using Office programs and developed in Visual Studio, all of which is supported by SQL Server. And the results are nothing less than incredible for both staff and patients. Staff can reliably access client data off site when they provide service thanks to patient records that were developed in-house using Visual Studio programming tools and SQL Server databases.
Patients who require help managing basic needs, such as housing and prompt payment of utility bills, are served faster and have easier access to funds. Clients can improve their job skills and increase independence using CSS's computer lab. And patient care has improved with easier collaboration between CSS and local healthcare providers due to electronic data sharing with the SQL Server.
