In helping clients and their families achieve self-sufficiency, Cúram Integrated Case Management recognizes the importance of understanding the needs of individual family members in relation to each other. Understanding the social context of the family is essential to identifying and treating the root cause of need. To meet the needs of families, it is often necessary for the different people who provide care and protection to work together towards a common goal. To achieve this, Cúram Integrated Case Management also recognizes the importance of collaboration.
Within an integrated case, each family member is assigned the role of case member. Case members are registered persons added to an integrated case for the purpose of determining their eligibility for benefits and services. If relationships are recorded for the person who is the primary client of the case, case workers can add all of that person's family members to an integrated case. This eliminates the need for the case worker to add the family members one at a time. The family members that can be added are automatically derived from the relationships recorded for the person as part of participant management. For information on recording relationships, see the Cúram Participant Management Guide.
Any other individuals, organizations, or agencies that interact with the family members are assigned a case participant role. Case participants include any persons, prospects, employers, service suppliers, information providers, product providers, external parties, and utilities affiliated with the case; this includes the case members themselves.
Case participants also include any nominees, contacts, and correspondents on the case. Participant roles are created automatically based on the information entered about the case. For example, when a product delivery case is created, a primary client is added to the case's list of participant roles. The primary client is the person who the case is created for. A participant can have multiple roles on a single case. For example, if a communication is sent to a person, an additional role of 'correspondent' is assigned to the person. If the person is also the nominee who receives the benefit payment, a further role of 'nominee' is assigned to the person. In this example, the person has three participant roles on one case: primary client, correspondent, and nominee.
Clients can also be associated to a case as part of a case group. Different types of case groups may be created, for example, a Benefit group can be used to group the case members that are eligible for assistance and a Financial group can be used to group the members whose income and resources are considered during eligibility determination. Case groups are typically created automatically by the system based on the execution of the eligibility and entitlement rules that are defined for a benefit product.