Lumacare

Overview

Faced with an outdated system that failed to scale out services, Lumacare approached Firestitch to:

Set up a manageable dashboard and tracking system catered to the specific needs of supervisors and workers
Engage a more usable interface to onboard clients at a faster rate
Improve overall site efficiency

The problem

In January 2014, Lumacare had a great problem. They had recently launched a service that enabled seniors to avoid long-term care accommodations, allowing them to remain in their own homes with the help of PSWs or Personal Support Worker visits. For each client, a PSW would arrive at certain times during the week, provide a set of services, and report back to the office. At the time, the service had grown to around 30 clients with over a hundred appointments a week. There was a great demand but there were also inefficiencies that threatened to suffocate growth. Lumacare already had a huge ERP system where it could store all the data relating to the new service; however, it lacked the specific process optimizations needed to scale out these services.

The solution

In order to create a more efficient and seamless process, Firestitch developed a two-part solution.

For supervisors:

Firestitch went to work creating a management dashboard that defined both client and worker schedules. From this, a user-friendly schedule view was interlaid to make scheduling events amongst thousands of people as simple as managing a personal calendar.

Additonal logic was added to appointments, including the ability to create recurring events and detailed requirements. This now enables the user to define the expectation once, such as a recurring appointment, to translate into every occurrence.

For workers:

A secure tablet application was created that makes viewing a schedule, checking in, submitting data, communications, and checking out simpler than tying a shoe. The application also embedded standards and tracking quality through the process, and created visibility for supervisors to manage the team intelligently.

Results

Data intelligence

“We can address surprises and changes very quickly with the new system because (a) we have live and linked data at our fingertips (b) our changes happen immediately and appear automatically for affected people. If someone calls in to complain, we can see the exact history from all staff available immediately.”

Worker oversight

“It helps our team to stay on time, and gives management visibility into the actual time”
“Seeing real data on checkins and checkouts allow us to understand performance.”

Setting expectations and client satisfaction

“We spent tremendous time tracking data, but still never had a full picture of our performance. Now we have dashboards that provide detailed answers with real- time data”

Training and quality assurance

“Without the app new employees were confused, inefficient and error- prone. As soon as they get the app, our new hires know what they need to do. We specify requirements once, then the app enforces these requirements for each appointment. Individuals don’t have to remember standards, on the contrary, you have to work hard to break standards and the system will. ”

Results by the numbers

It can be hard to quantify training and intelligence benefits of a business automation system. Instead, we’ll look at just 3 simple task duration metrics that were transformed by the app:

To onboard a client, it took 1 hour of scheduling and now it takes only 6 minutes.
To reschedule an existing client, it took 4 hours and now it only takes 1 hour.
To transcribe reports from an appointment, it took 8 minutes and now it takes 0 time.

I recommend Firestitch to all the tech founders who are serious about building a high quality product and who want the benefits of a full stack team without the overhead.