Our MySupport App is a centralized communication platform for support workers that assist students in special education.
Check out our website here: MySupport Website
Our MySupport App is a centralized communication platform for support workers that assist students in special education.
Check out our website here: MySupport Website
Our goal is to offer a digital centralized health management platform for special education students. Oftentimes, special education students have a large support network that can include a multitude of personal support workers (PSW) and individuals. For example, special education students can have school teachers, external tutors, speech therapists, physical therapists, and more depending on their needs.
Through our experiences working the public health system (Helena) and working with youths on the autism spectrum (Sophy), we realized there lacked an accessible and centralized platform for parents and PSWs to communicate and collaborate with each other.
Our platform serves to create a centralized space where all the support workers can input data, information, and clinical notes about the child’s progress for the parents and all the other PSWs to access.
MySupport seeks to make the lives of parents and families easier by removing the burden of tracking and organizing feedback and progress between PSWs. Parents, especially in blended or divorced families where guardians are not always together to support the child may benefit from centralized communication. Further, with children that require a high level of support, extended family like grandparents might also be involved. MySupport allows all relevant parties caring for the child to stay updated and aware of their development. Effectively, the platform streamlines communication across all stakeholders and removes the possibility that information will be forgotten, lost, or missed.
All personal support workers would be given access to the child’s profile and each PSW worker would have a respective section where they would be able to upload documents, add updates, and keep track of the child’s progress. Over the period in which they are supporting the child, each PSW would also have access to the other PSWs sections to be able to see their updates as well. Parents would be able to control who has access to each section, for example a parent might not feel comfortable with a tutor seeing the physical therapists updates, so the tutor would only have access to the school teachers updates. The control of visibility would be determined by the parents and the respective PSW. However, each PSW would have a dashboard where all the updates from other PSW would be centralized and organized so that they could stay in the loop with the students’ progress through written documentation.
Further, our platform would include integrated survey and questionnaire methods that allow parents and PSW to keep track of progress being made using assessment methods that could then be extrapolated to find patterns and helpful data.
The centralized platform would mean that all the information and required documents would be added to the platform by individuals. Each individual would need to have a place to store their respective materials as well as one place where all the updates could be easily displayed, preferably in a chronological order. Further, this dashboard would act as a database that allows parents and PSW to search for information if they need to reference anything.
We intend on deploying our product ona cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The benefit of using a CRM platform in a healthcare management setting, is that it includes several automation and integration features that would make catering our product to several PSWs more inclusive. For example, being able to integrate Google Classroom schedules as well as an Outlook calendar into a centralized calendar system ensures that all important dates are automatically populated. Further, contact management and pipeline management are needed to help track and manage progress and internal development.
Salesforce would be an ideal platform, as it is expansive, versatile, and scalable depending on the team’s needs, and the cloud-based portal would make the platform accessible. However, a limitation to using this platform is that the service is not free for small business or individual users. Meaning, it is more cost effective for the development of our prototype to look elsewhere and find a product that is more financially accessible in the time being.
Similar CRM technologies include Hubspot, Zoho, Freshsales, Insightly, etc.
For the demonstration of our tool, we plan to use Hubspot as it is more user-friendly on smaller scales and has more affordable plans. In the Free CRM Plan, the automation function is limited, and requires upgrade and payment. It can also be easily integrated with other external applications for file storage, spreadsheets, emails, databases, etc.
Our main limitation is to ensure that the healthcare management system must comply with HIPPA health regulations and privacy concerns.