HIFIS 4 Implementation Masterclass | Term 3: Fine-Tuning › Look-Up Tables

Should I customize our look-up tables?

Updated Jan 26, 2023

To customize, or not to customize? That is the question. Sometimes, communities in the early stages of HIFIS 4 implementation might want to customize everything so that it’s completely perfect and matches their system exactly. Other communities might hesitate to modify anything for fear of making something suddenly stop working.

From experience, its probably best for communities to be somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. First of all, if you want to customize everything, that’s a lot of customization! There are over 100 Look-up tables in HIFIS 4, and you’re probably not going to use them all. It would take a huge amount of resources to go through them all and thoughtfully consider each value. To add to the challenge, sometimes what sounds like a good idea at the time might not work out in practice.

Case Study

One community wanted to get everything perfect before they launched HIFIS 4 system-wide. This was an admirable goal, but they ran into some challenges. First, they started asking partner agencies for feedback on each and every look-up table, but partner agencies became reluctant to participate after they realized the scope of is request. It's one thing to thoughtfully discuss one look-up table at one meeting, but when it is dozens or hundreds of tables over the course of many, many meetings, stakeholders felt that they had more important things to do with their time.

So, partner agencies directed the HIFIS 4 Project Team to come up with a proposal that they would then approve. The Project Team spent hours going through every option in every table with a fine-toothed comb, and had valid reasons for the decisions they made. And they sought approval from the stakeholders, which was provided (at this point, the partner agencies were eager to launch).

After launch, however, the Project Team started to receive feedback that they hadn't considered some situation or circumstance and they really needed X or Y option in Z look-up table. Ironically, many of these were requests to re-enable default values that had been disabled!

By spending too much time trying to customize everything, the Project Team in this case failed to prioritize the most important areas - the ones front-line staff would be dealing with on a day-to-day basis - and didn't get meaningful feedback.

On the other hand, however, if you don’t customize anything at all, you and all your users will have to put up with a system that doesn’t reflect your local realities.

Case Study

One community wanted to launch as quickly as possible, with the basic assumption that HIFIS 4 had been tested and used enough that it would mostly handle common needs. They didn't spend any time looking at look-up tables and instead promised to modify them after launch, should the need arise. Overall, this approach was more-or-less successful, but they did get many requests from front-line staff immediately after launch which could have been resolved by spending a little bit of time looking for obvious flaws. For example, the "Income Type" look-up table includes a value for "Provincial Social Assistance" and a value for "Public / Social Assistance" but doesn't include the names of any specific social assistance programs, like "Ontario Works (OW)" or "Saskatchewan Assistance Program (SAP)." This led to a lot of questions about when to select one option or the other, and why the specific provincial program wasn't listed.

We suggest that you customize a few key tables prior to HIFIS 4 launch. Then, if after you’ve been using HIFIS for a while, you want to further refine things, that’s a great course of action. Prioritize first the ones that you think your staff will be dealing with most frequently, and you'll get greater buy-in from your front-line staff!

Some tables you might want to customize in advance include:

  • Geographic Region
  • Reason for Service
  • Reason for Discharge
  • Reason for Turnaway
  • Reason for Restriction
  • Services Types (if using Goods & Services)
  • Goods Types (if using Goods & Services)
  • Group Activities Types (if using Group Activities)
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