Explore Inspections and Dynamic Assessments

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain inspections and dynamic assessments in Public Sector Solutions.
List the differences between inspections and dynamic assessments.

Prerequisites

Before you start, make sure you complete the following required content.

Licensing, Permitting, and Inspections Data Model in Public Sector Solutions

Also, consider completing the following recommended content.

Streamline Public Sector Processes

Inspectors in the field lose valuable time in planning visits, manually retyping their notes into back-office systems, and recording information across many different forms.

Amelia Zhu is a public sector inspector in the city of Cosville, the city you visited in the Licensing, Permitting, and Inspections with Public Sector Solutions Trailhead module. She spends most of her time in the field, carrying out inspections of business sites and ensuring that individuals, businesses, and facilities uphold regulatory codes. Unfortunately, she has no easy way to associate pictures and videos captured during inspections with predefined regulatory codes and violations.

Amelia would love to get more done, but by the time she’s gone back to the office to retype her handwritten notes, it’s already the end of the day!

Enter Public Sector Solutions. It gives you power, automation, and flexibility in conducting your inspections and compliance reviews. Using the application, Amelia can view the regulatory codes specific to the business she’s inspecting, check out the license and permit details, take photos, and assess violations—all using a mobile device.

With Public Sector Solutions, you can use either inspections (static) or dynamic assessments. Inspections and dynamic assessments are key parts of different public sector assessments, audits, examinations, investigations, inspections, and other compliance review needs. Public sector organizations can use them independently or in conjunction with each other.

Cosville is ready to streamline its inspection processes with Public Sector Solutions. Susan Adams, a resident of the town of Cosville, has applied for a business license application for the establishment of a salon named Sunshine Spa and Salon. But Tishon Nichols, Cosville’s Public Sector Solutions admin, is not sure if she should use inspections, dynamic assessments, or both for Susan’s business license application.

In this module, follow along as Tishon explores inspections and dynamic assessments and sets up an inspection process so Amelia can review Susan’s business license application. Find out how the team works together to perform inspections and enforce actions against violations.

Introduction to Inspections and Dynamic Assessments

Let’s try to understand inspections and dynamic assessments in more detail.

Inspections (or static assessments) empower inspectors by providing the right information to increase inspection effectiveness and elevate compliance. Inspectors can access all the information they need to conduct inspections from their mobile devices using the Inspection Management app. This includes daily visit plans, route information, configure visit checklists, and code lookup. With static assessments, inspectors can easily collect and review inspection data, enter corrective actions, and share feedback with the home office and constituents in real time.

Dynamic Assessments give compliance officers, inspectors, and caseworkers greater flexibility and control over inspections, investigations, and evaluations. With dynamic assessments, you can design detailed assessment questions and tasks that include conditional logic and dependencies. This ensures that every assessment your agency conducts is complete and considers all applicable safety and legal requirements and regulations.

Let's consider an example where a constituent applies for a permit to open a salon. As part of the business license application process, an inspector conducts a site visit to make sure that the salon meets safety requirements, such as having fire extinguishers on the premises. However, the number of fire extinguishers the salon needs depends on how large the establishment is. Dynamic assessments guide the inspector through a series of questions and tasks that consider these dependencies and ensure that the site is inspected completely and accurately.

In our next section, we dive deeper to understand when to use inspections and when to use dynamic assessments in various public sector use cases.

Differences Between Inspections and Dynamic Assessments

Let’s understand some basic differences between inspections and dynamic assessments.

Inspections	Dynamic Assessments
Inspections use a fixed set of assessment questions with responses in different formats, such as text, boolean, date and time, percentage, and number. They do not use conditional logic and have limited editing capability.	Dynamic assessments use dynamic forms built using OmniScripts. The forms include assessment questionnaires with dependencies and conditional logic. Dynamic assessments are designed to be used in broader contexts, such as to assess constituent needs for social services or benefits like care plans.
Inspections are applicable to use cases with onsite visits. They require inspectors to make site visits to check for regulatory code compliance.	Dynamic assessments are applicable to both visit-based and non–visit-based use cases. They can be conducted virtually and don’t always have to be onsite. For example, a caseworker can conduct a dynamic assessment to follow up on a public complaint by a teacher who’s concerned about bruises on a student.
Inspections are built using the Visit object and can be initiated from objects like Business License Applications, Individual Applications, Public Complaints, and so forth.	You can schedule a dynamic assessment on several Public Sector Solutions objects, including Business License Applications, Individual Applications, Care Plans, Visits, Complaints, and more.
Inspections are ideal for a simple straightforward investigation.	For complex and multistep investigations, dynamic assessments are used. For example, you can use dynamic assessments to investigate all types of public complaints, including reported neglect, safety concerns, and concerns that someone is experiencing physical, emotional, or sexual abuse.
To set up an inspection process, limited admin configuration is required. End users can also create their own inspection checklist using action plan templates.	Dynamic assessments require a higher level of admin setup and configuration.
Inspections are used to verify various licenses and permit applications that require a mandatory visit to the location, such as a Business Establishment License or a Sign Permit application. Inspections are also used to perform compliance checks to see if safety measures are in place.	Dynamic assessments are used to screen the severity of a complaint or a situation to determine the right plan of action. For example, you’d use dynamic assessments for cases related to child welfare, assessments aid decision-making on child safety, permanency, and wellbeing for children and families. Dynamic assessments are also used to measure progress against a care plan goal.

Tishon now knows the benefits of both inspections and dynamic assessments and when to use each. To process Susan’s business license application, Tishon and her team must first make sure that Susan’s business is in compliance. Since compliance check requires an onsite visit, she decides to set up an inspection. That way, Amelia knows exactly what information she needs to collect during her onsite visit. As a first step, Tishon needs to set up a regulatory framework, which you’ll see in the next unit.