IgniteIT Awards Finalist - Navantis
Project: The Community Caregiver Portal Solution by Navantis - Social Networking in Action
The Challenge
Describe the situation, challenge or problem you or your team faced.
Have you ever had a family member or loved one with a chronic disease or an acute condition that relied on you as the main source of constant care? If you have, you may understand the difficulties that a caregiver faces. Caregivers have great difficulty finding services to assist them, finding people that understand their experience, and finding resources to help them better understand what their family member or loved is experiencing. VON understood these difficulties caregivers face and selected Navantis to build an online solution that would alleviate these issues. Navantis faced a difficult challenge: We needed to create a bilingual, collaborative, user-friendly, and informative social networking platform to serve 3 million caregivers across Canada. The portal needed to provide caregivers with valuable resources and a network of support.
The Solution
Describe how your solution helped overcome the challenge. Tell us about the innovative ways you used technology to create this solution.
What obstacles or roadblocks were overcome? Is the solution reusable elsewhere? Be specific!
Navantis built a bilingual social networking platform using MOSS 2007. The platform allowed the Canadian caregiver community to: •Connect with other caregivers across Canada, for information sharing and moral support •Create highly customizable features specific to the caregiver and make a profile visible to other users •Quickly and easily update the portal with information on new diseases and condition-related content •Ask health questions to a team of experts •Access features to create an eHealth record based on the caregiver’s observations and understanding of a patient’s conditions •Communicate a patient’s health conditions directly to doctors and nurses through the discussion board and other Web 2.0 features •Experience a sense of belonging through collaboration and support The goal of Caregiver Connect was to enhance autonomy, independence, and quality of life for caregivers and their patients. This goal was achieved thanks to the dedicated Navantis team.
The Results
What positive impact did your solution have in the workplace, the community, or at home?
It is estimated that caregivers provide over $5 billion in savings on healthcare costs every year. As such, they are essential to the Canadian healthcare system. However, caregivers often feel isolated due to the sustained challenges of caring for a loved one with an illness or disability over a long duration. Our solution has addressed this problem by providing an interactive link between caregivers and patients, doctors, and nurses. Our portal gives these caregivers a voice, and alleviates their burden by providing a network of support. Now over three million caregivers across Canada have access to a site that allows direct communication with doctors, nurses, and patients. The portal is fully bilingual, and provides access to information and resources that caregivers need to care for themselves, to provide better quality care to their family members and/or friends, and to connect and share with other caregivers through a virtual discussion forum.
Other Information
Feel free to let the community know about any interesting or humorous tidbits you feel will add to your submission.
VON is a not-for-profit, national health care organization and registered charity offering a wide range of community health care solutions, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Navantis was commissioned to build an integrated health services web-based caregiver community portal, using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, to provide a medium where communication between doctors, nurses, and patients is possible. The portal was needed to improve access and provide caregivers with up-to-date, accessible, community specific health information. To access the Community Caregiver Portal, visit www.caregiver-connect.ca.
Products Used
To help the community understand the scope of your project, please select the technologies utilized.
Development Platform/Tools
Web Technologies
Collaboration
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Submission Hyperlink
https://www.microsoft.com/canada/igniteit-awards/view_submissiondetails.aspx?id=332