All questions relate to the following Case Study.

A new type of home-based elder care model, called Virtual Elder Care Home or Elder Care Home without Walls, has gained popularity in China.It features home care agencies providing a wide range of personal care and homemaker services in elders' homes. Services are initiated by phone calls to a local government-sponsored information and service center, which then directs a qualified service provider (a staff member) to the elder's home.

Participating providers (Virtual Elder Care Home or Elder Care Home without Walls organisations) contract with the local government and are reimbursed for services purchased by the government on behalf of eligible care recipients, the majority of whom are vulnerable. Since its inception in 2007 in the city of Suzhou, in eastern China's Jiangsu Province, the Virtual Elder Care Home model has spread to many parts of the country, including Gansu Province in northwest China. (sourced from Z Feng, C Liu, X Guan, V Mor. China's Rapidly Aging Population Creates Policy Challenges In Shaping A Viable Long-Term Care System. Health affairs (Project Hope), 2012 - ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

You have been contacted by the Ningbo Virtual Elder Care Service to research and document requirements for a computer system to help establish the new service in that city. The service is already functioning but using paper-based systems. Currently the HVCS (home-visiting care staff) need to come to the office in the morning to receive the list of clients to visit along with details of their conditions and the services they require. If there is a change then the call centre staff try to contact the HVCS by phone.

The HVCS complain that they do not have all the information they need when visiting a client in terms of clinical history, family member contact details, or means of referring the client to other services including doctors when needed. They also complain they need to keep manual records of clients and of the services they provided. At the end of the day the HVCS deliver their time-sheets with times and some details of the visits to clients.

System Capabilities

The new system should do the following:

Deliver the daily work schedule on-line to the mobile work-force along with relevant data about the clients and automatically generate the time-sheets.