An Integrated Approach to Developing Human Services Web Portals

A major goal for Human Services Web Portals is to make as much expertise available as possible for clients and their caregivers. The expertise covers three main areas - diagnosing a client’s problem, identifying available resources for solution, and finally, providing assistance to package these resources into a service plan that will serve as a solution for the client’s problem. The main challenge in setting up a human services web portal lies in the nature of diversity and complexity in both the client set and the set of problems clients want to address. Therefore offering prepackaged solutions is not an option. We describe an integrated human services web portal design and provide a phased approach for implementation. Finally, we generalize our design for other domains in which external expertise is required as a component of service delivery.