Booking System for aged and home care services.

Aged Care

Aged care service provider business is a good example on how field service company in health care uses BookAndPay application. Aged care service provider manages and supports home visits by nurses and other home care services such as house work and gardening. The service provider also manages assets such as medical equipment in some cases.

Aged care service like other field services providers manages assets and provide services are customer locations. Other examples include building maintenance management companies, repair service etc.

Business Problem

Aged care service have several care providers ranging from nurses to people who helps in house chores and gardening. They are qualified and certified people who look after the elderly people at home.

Most of the scheduling, booking is done often by relatives, other family members of the elderly persons by phone call and email. The staff at the aged care provider manages the schedule and appointment and make booking consulting the roster / schedule of their direct and independent service providers.

The process is manual and time consuming. Reporting is manual via Excel spreadsheets and billing and invoicing was independent and hence more manual process in the work flow.

Function Previous Solution Notes
Scheduling and Booking Manual Availability and scheduling between care providers and care receivers done manually by emails and phone calls.
Cancellations / Changes Manual By email and phone calls
Reminders Partially Automatic Basic email reminder without specific details.
Payment Manual Manual invoicing and electronic payments.
Self Service Not available Independent service providers / nurses nor care receivers have to call office to get past invoices or make changes to bookings.
Reports Excel based No reporting available for care providers or receivers.

Solution

The solution was to automate the booking and work order processing without any additional programming. BookAndPay application was deployed on customers own virtual machines (hosted).

A new “Book Now” button was added to existing website. No programming was required for integration.

For automation, the workflow was divided into two parts

  1. Booking workflow

  2. Selfservice workflow

Payment workflow was not provided directly by BookAndPay application. Instead automation was achieved using connecting BookAndPay application to the online accounting software via Webhooks functionality of the BookAndPay application.

Booking workflow

The booking workflow automates the scheduling, booking, notifications aspects of the business. Once the BookAndPay application was deployed on customer owned virtual servers, the integration was painless with a simple addition of a “Book / Search” button on the franchise business website.

 

For full details of the booking features, see Features

Payment workflow

Payment workflow was not provided directly by BookAndPay application. Instead automation was achieved using connecting BookAndPay application to the online accounting software via Webhooks functionality of the BookAndPay application.

Self-service workflow

Self-service function enables customer, care providers and employees of the aged care service provider to manage various aspects of work orders and bookings. Self-service will also allow all users to view past and current bookings, make changes and update the details without calling staff during 9 to 5.

Self-service allows the users with certain roles to view and create reports. For example, approved staff of aged care service provider can create reports on customers and their bookings or care providers and their booking data.

 

Details of the self-service function can be found in self-service feature.

 

Features Used

Hosted Deployment
Advanced security including OAuth Authentication
Notifications
Scheduling and Calendar
Self-service
Reporting system with exporting capabilities to CSV, Excel and PDF
APIs
Work Order

 

Implementation

Deployment Method

BookAndPay application server is deployed on customers own on-premise server.

Integration Method

The client added “Book Service” button on existing PHP enabled website running on Apache webserver. No other integration required.

Configurations

Before the system goes live, aged care provider company IT staff and their care providers need to carry out few minimal tasks.

Aged care company IT staff

The aged care company IT staff carries out the following. The steps are often Deploy, Connect and Configure.

  1. Deploy: Decides how and where to deploy the BookAndPay server. In this case, the IT team implemented the BookAndPay application servers on their own on-premise server.
  2. Connect: The aged care service website is running on a PHP web server. The IT team connected the PHP website to the BookAndPay application servers.
  3. Configure: The aged care IT staff customize the application to suit their needs. This includes configuring information about
    1. configure customer notification messages
    2. configure how to receive payments from customers
    3. configure the colors and layout of booking pages
    4. configure care providers (e.g nurses) accounts
    5. configure security

Care providers role

The care provider (nurse) carries out the following

  1. Create their schedule / timetable in BookAndPay application and add this on Google calendar.

    An example might be like this

     ```
 Mondays 1 to 4, 
 Tuesdays: not available 
 Wednesdays 9 to 3 
 Thursday-Friday 1 to 5
 Not available on Sunday and on public holidays
 Minimum interval - 2 hours

 ```

    More details on how to create schedule can be found in schedule and calendar section

  2. Authorize BookAndPay service to access Google calendar to create new bookings and also to show availability to customers.

Benefits

  1. Improved customer experience
  2. Reduced a lot manual work order processing and resulting efficiency gain.
  3. Substantially reduced administrative overhead and associated cost.