The new social work

ABSTRACT

Social work practice is an industry based mostly on therapist intuition and gut feelings. There are virtually no real-time, reliable data showing the performance of any patient outcomes or on therapists providing treatment services. In this paper a new system is recommended, performance-based practice. In the future, the New Social Work proposed will not operate as a system in which patients enter community facilities to sit in waiting rooms and interact with a randomly assigned therapist for one hour a few times weekly. Social service building will transform into technology centers where therapists use tools to measure and intervene with patients in real-time. The New Social Work will finally understand that people do not recover or learn how to recover in therapist’s offices—but in their own communities—with assistance from high-performance professional therapists interacting in the moment.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance-based practice
• social work
• clinical dashboard
• electronic health records
• technology tools