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Case Study

Profile and care application for senior living communities


Project Overview

LifeConnect is a web-based application used by retirement communities to ensure their residents receive the proper level of care.

Industry

  • Healthcare, Retirement Communities

Project Type

  • Web App

Project Size

  • 34.5 person months

Services

  • Product Development
  • Software Development
  • Software Design

Technical Nitty Gritty

  • Ruby on Rails
  • HTML5 (Cache Manifest, LocalStorage)
  • MySQL
  • Memcached

Context and Business Goals

Covenant Retirement Communities is an Illinois-based organization with 12 campuses. CRC came to Atomic to create a custom product that would allow their nurses to administer a higher level of care and increase their resident’s overall wellness. CRC also wanted to sell the application to other retirement communities. The solution, LifeConnect, is a web-based software application that assesses residents’ levels of care. The assessment starts with a survey that covers a broad range of topics including mental health, dietary needs and favorite pastimes. The survey results are used to create an in-depth profile for a resident that determines the proper level of care.

The application

The LifeConnect Profile has many benefits for nurses, administrators, and residents.

The profile:

  • helps nurses administer the proper level of care based on a resident’s expressed needs
  • guides activities offered in the communities based on aggregate and individual preferences
  • ensures that care intensity matches the cost for the resident, leading to fairer prices for all residents.

Offline Mode

There were major technical and process wins on the LifeConnect project. A highlight includes the ability for nurses to fill out the entire survey while offline. The team utilized the latest HTML5 technology to allow much of the application to function while offline. Offline functionality ensured that nurses could fill out a profile for a resident without an internet connection, locally store the information, and then push the results to the database once a connection could be established. The team created and continuously verified complex permissions logic to keep CRC compliant with strict HIPAA guidelines.

Optimized for iPad

Thinking through the use of the application, we realized that iPads offered an ideal platform for CRC’s goals in the project because of its form factor. Using an intimate device like the iPad makes the survey experience more personal by removing the barrier between patient and care provider. Our dev team was able to make minor adjustments to the application to make it more amenable to a touch-screen device. For instance, scrollbars within a dialogue are more difficult on an iPad because you need to use two fingers in order to make them scroll. The team also accounted for minor differences between Safari on Mac and iPad, especially to support the offline usage.

Results & Feedback

The project team collected significant amounts of user feedback to guide feature selection and validate design choices. Atomic and CRC deployed LifeConnect to three communities during early development and gained invaluable feedback that helped shape the final application.

The true impact of this project is felt by CRC residents. After a year of development, LifeConnect has been successfully deployed at 9 of 12 CRC facilities. CRC residents are consistently enjoying high levels of care, customized to meet their individual needs.

Customer Feedback

“It has been a pleasure working with Atomic Object both professionally and personally. We considered a number of Rails development companies, including some big names in the industry, but the superior quality of AO’s work was apparent from the beginning. We continue to be impressed by the consistent attention to detail AO has demonstrated, from the initial proposal through the discovery and development stages. Their top-notch developers, testers and designers have consistently maintained high professional standards as well as thorough and frank communication. The tight feedback loop built into their agile development methodology has allowed us to quickly iterate over feature requirements and cut down on potential rework. Their responsiveness could not have been better. As other reviewers have pointed out, AO does not just ‘do as ordered’. They actively engage in finding the best solution and we have learned to trust their expertise. They truly own the project. Most of our work with AO has been done remotely, but we have not felt this to detract from the quality of interaction and progress in any way. We highly recommend Atomic Object to anyone.”

Marina Ferguson, Project Manager LifeConnect, Covenant Retirement Communities

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