Providing Safe and Effective Home Care During COVID-19
Enhanced digital tools to help protect vulnerable seniors and their care workers.
Project Overview
Updated March 31, 2023.
The Problem
Two groups at a high risk from COVID-19 are seniors who receive home care services and the caregivers supporting these individuals. These essential workers provide critical services such as health assessments, support for daily living and medication management.
Many of these seniors receive multiple visits through the course of a day or week from a variety of care professionals such as personal support workers, therapists and nurses. In turn, these caregivers visit other patients through the course of a day. Most of these older patients have health conditions that make them even more vulnerable if they contract COVID-19.
How We Are Solving It
In response, the Providing Safe and Effective Home Care project aims to help protect vulnerable seniors and their care providers with a digital toolkit for use during the pandemic.
The project is led by AlayaCare in partnership with Careteam Technologies, AceAge, e-Cobalt, University of Victoria, SE Health, PICN, Paramed, Acclaim Health and Bayshore Home Health.
Tools include employee and patient pre-screening, contact tracing and real-time alerts to service providers about symptomatic employees or patients. In combination, these solutions will help minimize and intercept risks, and prevent spread. Alerts of a positive COVID-19 employee or patient will automatically trigger altered schedules, deployment of personal protective equipment, and communication with employees and patients as well as health officials.
The project will also use an algorithm to optimize visit schedules in a way that minimizes risk, reducing travel and maximizing the continuity of service. A mobile app will be used for daily employee and patient pre-visit screening so it can be seamlessly incorporated into standard procedures.
Beyond the immediate implementation of new COVID-19 tools, the project is aiming to integrate data and patient information more broadly to deliver better health outcomes and improve care collaboration.
The Result
This project sought to significantly increase the functionality of AlayaCare’s existing digital toolkit to accelerate their ability to deliver COVID-19 specific functionality and quickly bring lifesaving and capacity-preserving tools to market aiding the homecare industry during the critical early stages of the pandemic. From the project, AlayaCare was able to implement COVID screening forms, contact-tracing reporting, and incidence response tools in weeks vs. months, protecting the lives of Canada’s aging and most vulnerable population.
