Agile Curam Development Requirements Gathering: Case types

Out of the box Curam comes with quite a number of core case types: Integrated Case, Screening Case, Assessment Case, Product Delivery Case. I am not going to re-iterate what the documentation center will discuss, that would be left as an exercise to the reader.

The Bad Stuff

There are two things that you should avoid as a BA.

• Avoiding the use of some case types. Curam has many different case types and each of them have a reason to exist. If you decide to drop one of them, you have to make sure you know what you are doing.
• Naming the case types as Integrated Case, Screening Case, Assessment Case, Product Delivery Case. This is an indication that you don't really know what you are trying to achieve with Curam's cases.

Screening Cases

Screening case as the name implies tries to screen people that are trying to get into your system.

Trying to determine whether to use a screening case is very easy, and usually the answer to the following question is NO.

Are you going to accept and process delivery for every person that gets registered into your system?

If the answer is NO, then you'd have to create a screening case which will determine if

• Prospect person you are trying to register into the system is a valid person
• Figure out the rules to see if the person is eligible for any benefits or not.

If for some strange reason the answer is YES, you really need to make sure that all data that gets into the Curam application is "trusted". Meaning someone has already verified the participant data outside of Curam and ensure that all required data is present.

When trying to name a screening case, it is best to figure out where it is coming from. So you can have Call Center Screening Case, Web Form Screening Case, or Office Visit Screening Case as examples of screening cases you would be dealing with.

Integrated Cases

An integrated case simply put is a collection of delivery cases and evidence that is shared across all the delivery cases. The goal of an integrated case is a specific outcome for the primary client which cannot be changed.  That's the technical summary, but how would I ask the business? Well fortunately, the answer to those questions can be derived from the very first thing we gathered: the end-to-end scenarios.

The end-to-end scenarios would be able to group together products that you would need to deliver. These groupings turn into an outcome that they would want for a primary client.  Chances are unless there are multiple delivery organizations within the customer's organization. An example of something with multiple delivery organizations would be child welfare, which may have something that delivers to foster care and something that delivers to parental support. That would usually involve two separate set of evidence and products. In which case there are two integrated cases.

Most likely when it is the first Curam implementation, there would only be one. However, do not remove that concept and just make product deliveries directly as it would cause you grief later on when you want to share evidences. You may specify a usage scenario where-by the integrated case type is automatically selected rather than getting rid of it.

The best way of naming an integrated case is not Integrated Case, but use something with the organization name and a high level name group name for the outcome group that they want such as Ivalice Employable Citizen Case or Rabanastre Household Support Case. By naming them, you allow your client to create new integrated case groupings and expire old ones more easily.

If your client asks:

What if I do not know what the outcome should be, because I am just trying to get information about a client?

Then your response should be:

That is the definition of a screening case.  An integrated case has a target outcome, if you are not sure because you are just capturing information, then that should be a screening case.

You also need to define what kind of members you would have in an integrated case.  If you don't define it properly, then you'd end up with evidence capturing memberships (which would look odd to say the least).

Assessment Cases

Assessment cases run the rules engine to generate a report whether a person is eligible or not.

Product Delivery Cases

A product delivery case represents either a benefit or liability for a case member. Like Assessments they run the rules engine against known evidence. However, an active product delivery case will generate financial components or other objectives to a case member.

You can go all out an do one benefit for one product delivery if you desire. Or lump a few together as one cohesive item. The best way to decide on grouping them is to find out from the marketing department what is the actual name of the product they are delivering to the people. Then group them as such.

An example of a good product delivery name would be Rabanastre Self-Employment Support which may give a training courses and some capital in the form of money as two benefits in order to give a person support to start his own business.

Other Case Types

Curam provides other case types. These other case types may require a separate license, but it would be good for you to consider them if it will save you time.

One of the better ones I have used is the Service Plans which allow you to manage the delivery of multiple products to achieve a goal.

The others I guess are okay, but I never really used them well enough to make a good judgement call on them.