About the Client

Caring Village is a content and technology solutions company with a mission of, “improving the overall caregiving experience by empowering families to take control of their loved ones’ care, improve their quality of life, and obtain peace of mind.” Caring Village was established in 2015 to address the unmet needs of those caring for aging loved ones in need of assistance.

The Challenge

To support the needs of caregivers, Caring Village sought to develop a suite of mobile, real-time communication tools, and an informational dashboard for the home care services marketplace. These tools needed to be competitive with those offered by technology startups, as well as fully HIPAA-compliant. Caring Village also needed to optimize UX design and usability features to make adaptation simple and easy for home caregivers and their care recipients.

The Solution

Caring Village turned to Segue Technologies to help develop and launch Caring Village’s core care coordination platform, which consists of a web-based front end dashboard, native mobile iOS and Android client applications, and a secure cloud-based backend. Segue also helped Caring Village establish a web presence to provide their customers with educational and supporting content for caregivers. The Caring Village team leveraged Segue’s:

• experience developing applications for numerous commercial/non-profit and federal customers,
• four-year history providing tech solutions in the healthcare space, and
• collective personal experiences providing care to their own aging loved ones

The Caring Village mobile app and dashboard were designed to serve as a family’s caregiving command center. Users can build an online village for their loved ones and invite family members, friends, neighbors, and professional caregivers to participate in their care. The mobile app and dashboard feature a wellness journal, sharable to do lists with reminders, a centralized calendar, customizable care plans, preparedness checklists, and secure in-app messaging.

Prior to launch, Segue’s in house design team worked with Caring Village to establish the brand’s look and feel, including color scheme and logo. In parallel, Segue’s business analysts worked closely with Caring Village stakeholders to define functional and non-functional requirements, draft user stories, and perform user testing.

Segue worked with a partner organization, Yoko Co., to build the Caring Village Website using a WordPress content management system. Segue’s design team and business analysts provided Yoko with wireframes, high-resolution mockups, functional requirements, and a complete style guide. The result is an easy to manage website with content management features and administrative access control to support the need for daily content updates.

The backend for the entire system was built as a .NET web application. This application provides a consistent interface for the web and mobile client applications to connect securely to the Caring Village data. The application runs in an Azure cloud environment with makes deployments and scaling easy and adaptable. This backend application also coordinates billing and payments for end user subscriptions, affiliate sales, referral tracking, and business user license management.

Segue also worked closely with Caring Village to identify, implement, and enforce data access control policies, data security policies, and many other information security policies. Segue also assisted in high-level risk assessments and audits to ensure compliance with the defined policies and legal requirements.

Segue’s development teams used an Agile methodology to collaborate with Caring Village on the design and development of the mobile applications at the heart of their service. This allows Caring Village to rapidly respond to changing market and customer needs to bring solutions to market quickly.