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MyRCFE - Administration Software Application

CST 499 – Capstone Project Proposal

Lavinia Uruc

March 22, 2018

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Executive Summary

MyRCFE it is an application that will help administrators of any RCFE to manage their

business from anywhere and will feature a better communication between different parties and it

will lead to a better productivity for the administrators. This application will involve a great deal

of research and a lot of implementation work as it needs to feature a database, and a messaging

platform. The main purpose of this application is to ease the communication and information

sharing between administrators, caregivers and resident families.

This application will contain all the data regarding the residents of an RCFE, including

medication logs, care plans, all documents pertaining to an RCFE. Also, the application will

allow different parties to message each other through a messaging platform.

The main feature that makes this application unique is the messaging system and the data

sharing platform between families, administrators and caregivers. There is nothing at this time on

the market that features such an application as most of the applications are tailored either for

medication management or messaging.

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Table of Contents

Introduction……………………………………………………………………….5

• Project Name and Description…………………………………………….5

• Problem and/or issue in technology………………………………………5

• Solution to the problem and/or issue in technology………………………6

• Community and Stakeholders…………………………………………….6

• Evidence that the proposed project is needed………………….………….7

• Environmental scan…………………………………………….…………7

Project Goal and Objectives………………………………………………………8

• Project Goals………………………………………………………………8

• Project Objectives…………………………………………………………8

• Environmental Scan/ Literature Review……………………….…………10

Stakeholders and Community…………………………………………………….10

Approach/ Methodology………………………………………………………….11

Ethical and Legal Considerations…………………………………….……….….11

Project Scope ………………………………………………………………...….12

• Timeline……………………………………………….…………………12

• Milestones……………………………………………………….……….12

Resources Needed……………………………………………………………….12

Risks and Dependencies…………………………………………………………12

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Final Deliverables………………………………………………………….……13

Usability Testing/Evaluation………………………………………….…….…...13

Team members……………………………………………………………….….13
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Introduction

• Project Name and Description

This proposal is for MyRCFE, a software application for property and care management

that will be tailored to Residential Care Facilities for the Elderly (RCFEs). This application will

very useful for administrators, families and caregivers of a RCFE. In a business that is

management intensive a productivity tool becomes highly critical.

• Problem and/or issue in technology

The Residential Assisted Living business is a growing industry that faces significant

challenges in the area of property and care management. This industry has become highly

regulated by the State of California. Families demand a high level of care for their parents.

Residential Care Facility for the Elderly (RCFE) administrators interface with multiple

caregivers, health care providers, California Department of Social Services (DSS), supply

providers, residents and their families, to make sure that the proper care is given to residents on a

24-hour basis. Every resident has specific medications and a care plan that is provided by the on-

staff caregivers. Changes in a resident’s medication and care plan are communicated by health

care providers to the RCFE administrator. Changes in a resident’s condition are communicated

by the caregivers to the RCFE administrator, who in turn communicates this to the health care

providers and the resident’s families. The RCFE administrator coordinates these ongoing

changes by updating the care plan, communicating new tasks to caregivers, keeping the
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residents’ families up-to-date, and/or making requests to the families. This results in a

management intensive business that needs a comprehensive resident care management solution.

Without an effective tool, the RCFE administrator is required to visit the facilities more often

than necessary and invest a significant amount of time in communicating tasks to caregivers.

Also, making sure these tasks are executed and completed can be challenging without a proper

tool.

• Solution to the problem and/or issue in technology

Existing software solutions do not integrate the different areas of the RCFE

administration. They are intended for larger facilities with larger management budgets, they do

not provide messaging capabilities and are not caregiver friendly. In addition, these software

solutions are not tailored to the nature of RCFEs. This is a significant problem as RCFE’s have

different legal requirements than the larger facilities and therefore use different DSS forms,

documents, and business processes.

The solution proposed is a software application that allows a RCFE administrator to keep track

of resident profiles, care plans, medications, caregivers on duty, care task assignments.

• Community and Stakeholders

This application has 3 end users. The first is the administrator who primarily uses the

application to communicate messages to caregivers/resident’s families. The administrator’s

management tasks are supported by the different functions of the application such as medication
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and incident tracking. The second end user is the caregiver, who receives tasks or messages from

the administrator. The caregiver can also post medication order requests to the administrator.

He/she can create a facility supply order request. Lastly, the resident’s families will use this

application to receive notifications on their parent’s condition, doctor orders, or requests for

buying needed resident supplies.

• Evidence that the proposed project is needed

There is a complex interaction between the above stakeholders and the messaging

capabilities of the application are needed to facilitate the communication of the ongoing changes

of a resident’s condition.

• Environmental scan

Currently the marketplace offers a variety of care management applications. Some

applications are focused only on medication management, some are focused on care plan

management. Others do provide multiple features including client profile, medication

management, medication orders, calendar, to-do lists, contacts, and photos. However, these

applications have multiple issues as described below.

• Lack of messaging capabilities that involve the 3 end-users; administrator, caregivers,

and resident families.

• Applications do not provide a way to work with multiple customizable categories of tasks

for each of the end-users.

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• Applications do not allow for customizable resident file management that includes the

typical RCFE file components: Physician’s Report, Signed medication order, incident

reports, etc.

Project Goal and Objectives

• Project Goals

The main goal of the application is to use current messaging technology to bring

caregivers/administrator/resident families together in a more collaborative environment, closing

the communication gap between these parties to simplify the assisted living business

This software application aims at providing a comprehensive care management solution that

specifically targets the needs of a RCFE business.

• Project Objectives

o Reduce the number of calls/texts from/to caregivers/administrator/families that

are intended to communicate a resident’s change in condition

Simplify communication by allowing for ‘group’ messaging when multiple parties

(administrator/caregiver/family) need to be kept in the loop

o Reduce the number of calls/texts from administrators to caregivers that are

intended to communicate a task or a follow up on a task

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o Allow for documenting a resident’s critical change in condition that can easily be

inputted and reported to the DSS in the legal format required by title 22

o Automate the reporting of resident incidents to the DSS by automatically emailing

a DSS-formatted incident report to the assigned Licensing Program Analyst

(LPA)

o Reduce the legal liability by having incident information in the case of a lawsuit

o Centralize the information of a resident including their name, SSN, facility where

he/she resides, family contact phone number and email address, move in date,

dietary requirements, care plan, doctor orders, medical cards, doctor appointments

o Simplify medication management by centralizing medication information,

keeping track of medications, alerting the administrator before a resident runs out

of a medication

o Quickly and easily provide medication tracking information to a DSS LPA in the

format that title 22 requires in the case of an audit

o Simplify the RCFE/resident family relationship management by allowing the

RCFE administrator to place a request to a family

o Simplify employee management by allowing the RCFE administrator to place a

request to a caregiver and keep track of it

o Centralize caregiver information by providing a caregiver profile

o Simplify the tracking of facility supplies including food, care supplies, and

cleaning supplies
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Environmental Scan/ Literature Review

The research for similar applications found multiple products that offer property

management or care management capabilities. In the area of care management, one application

stands out, CareZone. This application provides basic medication tracking and basic resident file

management. However, it’s clearly not comprehensive enough to meet the needs of an RCFE

management tool. It also lacks the messaging capabilities that a RCFE requires to facilitate the

communication between the involved parties.

Other applications, such as MediSafe, focus on medication management. This application

allows for tracking of medication schedules to save when a medication was taken. The main

issue with this application is that it does not comply with the DSS regulations, which requires

that the records use a timestamp for when the medication was administered and who

administered the medication.

Stakeholders and Community

There are approximately 7,500 RCFE’s licensed in the State of California alone. These

facilities are in a great need of care management software that meet the goals and objectives

described in this proposal. With the assistance of MyRCFE, the administrator of a RCFE can be

more productive in managing the day to day operations. These applications can also enable a

company to growth to multiple facilities with a higher number of residents. Without the proper

care management tool, administrators can become overwhelmed with multiple requests from care

providers, resident families, residents, caregivers, etc.

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Approach/ Methodology

An object-oriented software engineering methodology will be used to perform analysis,

design, and implementation of the project. Tentatively, the target platform for this application

will be Android and the IDE will be Android Studio. The application will store data in MySQL.

Ethical and Legal Considerations

It is the purpose of this application to improve the RCFE administration by sharing

resident information between the parties involved. Even though the application will not be used

in a facility that provides medical care, it does deal with sensitive health-related information.

Therefore, the features offered by the application raise several ethical concerns. These are

derived from storing and sharing private resident information, such as medications taken, health

incident reports, doctor’s orders, health condition change reports, to mention a few. This

information will be available to the administrator and some of it to the resident’s family and

caregivers. If misused, or shared improperly, the resident’s privacy can be put at risk. For

example, if the medication schedule of one resident living in one facility is accessed by a

caregiver working on a different facility, the resident’s privacy is affected negatively.

Compromising a resident’s privacy is an ethical issue that an RCFE needs to address with

specific business policies.

In addition to the ethical concerns, there are legal implications because of the Title 22 state law

that regulate RCFE’s in the State of California and other federal laws governing online privacy
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and online health records. It’s critical that the application’s requirements define what of all the

resident’s personal information can be accessed and by whom because of it’s sensitive nature.

These requirements will aim to produce an application that is compliant with such laws and

shares information only to an authorized end user.

Project Scope

• Timeline

8 weeks, Starting March 24, 2018 - ending June 17, 2018

• Milestones

Task Name Duration Start End

Requirements Analysis 5 days Sun 4/22/18 Thu 4/26/18
Design 5 days Fri 4/27/18 Thu 5/3/18
Implementation 24 days Fri 5/4/18 Wed 6/6/18
Testing 8 days Thu 6/7/18 Sun 6/17/18

Resources Needed

• An android device to test the application.

• A personal computer with Java development environment and android studio installed.

Risks and Dependencies

This project requires specific technical skills in the area of mobile development with Java

and Android Studio platform. Extensive research in this area will need to be done to be able to

complete the project. This research will have to account for the short period of time that has been

allocated for this project.

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Final Deliverables

• Software specification document

• Design specification document

• MyRCFE application including source code, database and implementation

• Demo including screenshots of the different features of the application

• Final video presentation of the application

Usability Testing/Evaluation

Functional testing will be done by a few RCFE administrators to check for possible issues

and functional errors

A Senior Software Developer at Esurance will help me test and debug the application

Team members

This is a project that I will be doing by myself and I am responsible for completing all the

tasks
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References

Jacobson, I. (2007). Object-oriented software engineering: A use-case driven approach.

Wokingham: Addison-Wesley.