The Victorian Order of Nurses (VON) provides home care to assist caregivers, but, due to budgetary limitations, cannot provide 24-hour constant care.  VON recognized that 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.

Before our solution was built, VON Canada and their nurses were limited in the amount of collaboration they could accomplish due to many constraints, including limited time and a lack of a fully collaborative network.  Due to budgetary constraints, home care nurses working for VON are allowed just thirty minutes per visit with their patients.  The majority of this time was spent answering health-related questions about the patient with the caregiver, which meant that nurses and patients had very little time to interact directly with each other.

Navantis was selected to build a customized bilingual online social networking Web Content Management (WCM) solution, built using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, that allowed the caregivers to reach out to the healthcare community and receive answers to the questions they previously had to ask the home care nurses.  Our solution has dramatically decreased these ‘doorway conversations,’ enabling patients to have more one-on-one time with VON’s nurses.

In 2009, Navantis was awarded the Microsoft Ignite IT Award for IT Professional of the Year for the Community Caregiver Connect Portal. 

"Caregivers are an essential part of the Canadian health care system - providing over $5 billion in savings on health care costs. But caregiving can be isolating - and one of the goals of Caregiver Connect is to enhance autonomy, independence, and quality of life for caregivers and for those whom they provide care. The new Caregiver Connect portal is a one-stop shop of vital information for Canada's caregivers."

CUSTOMER PROFILE

VON Canada is a national health organization and registered charity offering a wide range of community health care solutions that meet the needs of Canadians from coast to coast. VON Canada is committed to continuous quality improvement and is accredited by Accreditation Canada.

BENEFITS

Now that an online collaborative portal is in place, caregivers and their patients have direct access to around-the-clock support from doctors, nurses, and other caregivers on the Caregiver Connect Portal.  VON’s home care nurses also have more time to focus on meaningful patient care.  In short, our solution has increased the efficiency of VON Canada’s nurses, simplified access to information and people, and enabled a more effective way for VON Canada to conduct business.

To read more about the award-winning Community Caregiver Connect Portal Solution, please see the official case study.