At the heart of dala.care is a powerful scheduling engine.
Ensuring that care recipients receive the planned care and someone shows up at the right place at the right time with the knowledge of what needs to happen is critical to providing quality care.
The schedule is implemented using the iCalendar standard which is familiar to most people who have used Google or Microsoft calendar products.
We chose to schedule visits rather than shifts. We think it's a more human way of defining times where care is being provided.
Visits can be one-off or recurring. We expect most schedules to be made up of recurring visit definitions where an agreed pattern of visits with duration and activities takes place until a set date or the care needs change.
dala.care supports recurring visit definitions into infinity, if you leave out the end date, the pattern will repeat until you cancel the recurrence or delete the visit.
In some cases, based on the number of caregivers taking on the work or complications in configuring the pattern, you might configure multiple recurrences that make up the whole schedule for a care recipient. For example, you might have caregivers that take turns covering weekend visits. Then you might have two recurring visit definitions for weekends that repeats every two weeks. One recurrence for each caregiver. The custom recurrence settings for visits are your friend when you have learn't to master them.
Caregivers are assigned to visits and the system takes away the hassle of matching available caregivers to a single visit or the whole recurrence. You can only assign available caregivers to a visit definition.
Visits have a start and end time.
You may associate Activities of Daily Living to visit definitions. Those become the activities that caregivers are presented with on the App during a visit and need to mark as completed or not.
You can view the schedule timeline for all your care recipients and focus in on a single care recipient schedule on their profile. The same applies for viewing the other side of the coin where you view the combined schedule of all your caregivers on a timeline or dive into a single caregiver schedule.
Dealing with changes in schedule is one of the largest headaches in managing home care. We have made the management of absences as simple as possible so that automatic updates eliminate multiple updates in many areas of the platform.
You can mark a care recipient or caregiver as absent for a period of time within a day or for a period of whole days. When a caregiver calls off and is marked as absent on the platform, they are automatically taken of their visits for that time and those visits take on the Open state. This will highlight the fact that visits need staffing to the scheduling and success managers.
If a care recipient is marked as absent for a period of time, their visits are marked as canceled both in the Team and mobile Apps.
Every visit can be in the following states:
Open - Scheduled but no caregiver assigned
Scheduled - Scheduled with a caregiver assigned
Active - Caregiver has started care through the app
Late clock-in - Visit time is started but caregiver has not started care through the App.
Late clock-out - Visit time has ended but caregiver has ended care through the App.
Missed - Visit end time is reached with no caregiver interaction through the App.
Canceled - Visit was canceled by care recipient or Care team.
When a visit starts, a Visit Log is created and all the data relevant to the visit is stored in it. This includes scheduled and reported times, activity status, visit note and a version history of all updates to the log. This is the data that makes up the billing and salary reports. Care team members can review and update past visit logs.