recommended software for appointments/medications

[FLATcura]

hey,

i work at a homeless shelter in ottawa, and i am currently looking for something for the staff in one of our supportive living program

ive found a few options but i was hoping i could get some opinions from the smartest crew in the internet

we have about 40 residents with many medications each, and a lot of doctor appointments and other various things needing to be tracked via day planner type software with a per resident interface, but i need it available over the network for other programs in the rather large building to track.

ive looked into a few of the available php calendars around the internet, most are buggy and not easy to use (our staff are social workers and mostly not so savvy)

i would love any help, suggestions i can get

thanks

 

[PTNL]

Expect to conduct a user training session on whatever package is decided. User apathy will really work against you unless you take that by the reigns. It's better to get buy-in through a couple simple training sessions with a projector/laptop, than be later tasked with a ton of data cleanup.

If a calendar option really seemed sufficient for you (at least initially), you should elaborate on why it failed or was dismissed.

 

[J-Will]

My first concern with this idea is patient privacy. If its easy to get access to a patients appointments and medications, then this could offend some.

My first idea with something like this, to keep it easy would be to use MS outlook, esp if the staff is already using it for email. Have the IT dept create another user 'ApptSched' in Exchange, and share that user's calendar. Then whomever is responsible for keeping it up to date would have access to it in which they would create the appointments. You could even get fancy and when an appt is created (by the front office), have it send out a calendar invite sent to 'ApptSched' which would just go through and accept all invites.
This way would require the least amount of training since it would be a platform already being used. It would require a slight modification of the way appts are done, but shouldnt be enough to cause an uproar.

 

[J-Will]

If you do not use Exchange/ Outlook, then I would be curious to know what you do have access to, so we can think about implementing the lowest cost solution available to your situation.

Another suggestion would be to create a DB or even an Excel sheet and it display info on a simple website for all the appt for that day or week. But that would alter a large amount of how the staff operates, and would take time to implement. As well as need constant updating by an experienced user (job security? ). You could eventually create a GUI for the DB so the front office could input appts into the DB, but again thats altering the way they already do business. In my experience you want to provide a solution that has the least amount of impact on the way the user of this new system operate, while still providing the tools for them to work more efficiently.

 

[FLATcura]

thanks for the replies

firstly the problems i found with the various php web calendars i found online were that they couldn't support multiple calendars (one for each resident) and with that i couldn't schedule two things for the same day/time

privacy is an absolute concern, i was hoping to keep it all on the internal network and locked down pretty tight

unfortunately for us, i am the IT support among other things, and we do use outlook but we have our hosting done elsewhere (rogers hosting) and we do not have MS exchange

we do have a apache server with mysql and ive got some friends who are quite linux savvy who could help me implementing anything over my head,

would it be possible to use ms outlook hosted by rogers but also build an exchange server just for the calendars?

and as for training the front line staff, i would absolutely give them good training once i myself figured it out

sorry to be so long winded and needy but i really appreciate the information you are all proving me

thanks

 

[J-Will]

If you have access to a webserver and MySQL, then a DB would probably be your next cheapest solution. Though this might not be a good solution if the webserver and DB is connected to the outside world as opposed to it just being on the internal network. If its internal only then this would work, otherwise you would need to implement a login screen as well.

I do not know what email server your hosting company offers, so I couldnt tell you the details. The problem with creating another (Exchange) server is that your users would have to login into another domain. This could be done easier if they used OWA (webmail), but still not a very good solution.

 

[Niartov]

You might try looking for an Event Planning type of software. It might not be exactly what you are looking for but, I would not think it is to far off.

Or the other solution is looking into a nursing home management software. I am guessing it would not be cheap.