Field, family and coordination apps for home care providers

Families call during the day to ask “did anyone come today, was the medication given?”; the coordinator is trying to reach the carer, and the carer is already at another house. In home care, being able to prove what was done is as much a part of what you sell as the quality of the care itself. The app produces that proof automatically, as visit, medication and care records.

How many separate apps does this need?

  • 01

    Carer/Nurse Field App (iOS + Android)

    Carries the carer's daily visit list, the patient's care plan, medication times and vital-sign forms; saves without an internet connection and verifies visit check-in and check-out using location and a QR scan.

  • 02

    Family App (iOS + Android)

    Families see when a visit starts and ends, the care notes recorded that day, the medication administration log and photo-based wound tracking; they can send payments and requests for extra sessions from the app.

  • 03

    Operations and Scheduling Panel (web)

    Case intake, care plan definition, carer-patient matching, weekly shift and route scheduling, visit verification review, invoicing and the patient file archive are all managed from a single panel.

What the app includes

  • Shift handover screen carrying the previous visit's notes
  • Instant coordinator alert when blood pressure or glucose passes the set threshold
  • Fluid intake/output and nutrition chart kept during the visit itself
  • Logging of consumables (incontinence pads, catheters, dressings) that flows into the invoice line
  • Address-specific access notes: door code, floor, no elevator, key with the neighbour
  • Separate confirmation from the second caregiver on two-person transfer visits
  • On-screen visit sign-off signature from the family member
  • Incident form for falls, missed doses and other adverse events
  • Distinct pricing rules for 8, 16 and 24-hour live-in companion shifts
  • Expiry tracking for caregiver certificates and health reports
  • Contracted weekly visit quota with a remaining-sessions counter
  • Same-day reassignment from a standby caregiver pool when a visit drops

State of the sector

Demand for home care is growing as hospital stays get shorter and older people choose to stay in their own homes, but price is no longer what decides who wins the work: visibility for the family is. Relatives are often in another city, and all they want is an answer to “did someone come today, and what was done?” A company that answers that with a WhatsApp message looks unreliable next to one that shows the visit record live in an app. A business without an app is also shut out of channels that require documented service records, such as corporate contracts, insurance agreements and municipal protocols.

Metrics that matter here

  • Verified visit rate — The percentage of visits where the NFC/QR scan and location match; it directly determines whether carer pay and invoices close without dispute.
  • On-time completion rate for planned visits — Late and dropped visits appear in the panel immediately, so the coordinator can assign a replacement carer the same day.
  • Care continuity (share of visits by the same carer per patient) — Because the scheduling engine weighs a continuity score, family satisfaction and contract renewals both improve.
  • Monthly contract retention per patient — Families who see visit reports and transparent invoicing have fewer reasons to leave, and cancellations become visible early.

Common mistakes in this sector

  • Basing visit verification on GPS alone Phone location drifts inside apartment buildings and can be faked with spoofing apps. When GPS is the only evidence, arguments over carer pay never end. Design location, the NFC/QR scan and the timestamp together as three-part proof.
  • Leaving the family app until later Businesses usually build the field app first and postpone the family side. But it is the family that makes the buying decision and passes on the recommendation. Visit notifications and a daily summary belong in the first phase.
  • Squeezing a clinical form onto one long screen When a twenty-item care form is a single page, the carer cannot complete it in the field and fills it in from memory in the evening, in one batch; you lose the reliability of the data. Spread the form step by step across the visit flow.
  • Designing health data like ordinary data Wound photos, diagnosis notes and medication records are special-category data under KVKK. Role separation, access logging and explicit consent records cannot be bolted on afterwards; if they are not in the data model from the start, the panel gets rewritten.

Regulation and compliance

Home care apps fall under the special-category personal data regime of KVKK (Turkey's data protection law, aligned with GDPR): diagnoses, medication, wound photos and care notes are all covered. You need separate explicit consent records for the patient and the family, role-based access, logging of every view, data hosted in Turkey, and access switched off when consent is withdrawn. Carer working records must be kept consistent with SGK (Turkish social security) obligations, and service fees charged to families must be reported to GİB (the Turkish Revenue Administration) under the e-Arşiv/e-Fatura rules. If you work with public bodies or insurers, document retention periods are planned separately according to the contract.

The real challenges in this sector

  • Proving the visit actually happened

    In home care, the service is delivered at an address the business owner never sees. GPS alone is not enough: phone location can be spoofed, and drift inside an apartment building is significant. An NFC tag or QR code fixed to the patient's door is scanned and recorded together with the device location and the check-in and check-out times. If the three do not line up, the visit is flagged as 'unverified' and goes into a review queue in the panel; carer pay is tied to that record.

  • Working offline in basements and rural areas

    Most care visits take place inside apartment buildings and village houses where the network is weak. The app downloads the day's visit list, care plans and forms in the morning; measurements, notes and photos are queued on the device and sent in order once the network returns. So the same visit is never processed twice, every record is given a unique identifier on the device and the server ignores duplicates.

  • Keeping medication times and doses straight

    A single patient may be on six medications a day, at different times and different doses; when the shift changes, the record of who administered what gets lost. The medication schedule is set per patient, every dose given is locked with who-and-when data, and corrections are logged as amendments rather than deletions. A missed dose triggers a notification to both the carer and the coordinator after a set interval.

  • Making wound and pressure-sore photos comparable

    What matters in wound tracking is not a single photo but a series shot from the same angle. The camera screen overlays a faded outline of the previous photo and a scale card is placed alongside; the capture date and body-area tag are added automatically. Photos open side by side as a timeline in the patient file, so improvement or deterioration is visible at a glance.

  • Balancing routes, timing and carer continuity together

    Care scheduling is not pure distance optimisation the way courier routing is: patients want to see the same carer, medication times are fixed, and some visits require two people. The scheduling engine anchors fixed-time visits, fits flexible ones into the gaps in between, and weighs a continuity score against distance. The coordinator makes the final call with drag and drop, and is warned the moment there is a conflict.

Required integrations

  • e-Fatura/e-Arşiv integrator (GİB, the Turkish Revenue Administration) for issuing monthly care invoices to families
  • Subscription and recurring session billing via iyzico, PayTR or Craftgate (Turkish payment providers)
  • Bank virtual POS plus cash-on-the-door payments recorded in the panel
  • Visit started/finished notifications and appointment reminders over SMS and the WhatsApp Business API
  • Document output compatible with the patient record flows in SGK MEDULA (Turkey's social security claims system) and e-Nabız/e-Devlet (national health and e-government portals)
  • Mapping and navigation services (address validation, building and floor notes, route time estimates)

Who this page is for

  • A newly founded home care company with 3-10 caregivers

    The problem here is not scale but trust — families know the company is new. The Phase 1 core plus family notifications is enough; a scheduling engine and billing module would be needless complexity at this size.

  • An agency that places caregivers rather than employing them directly

    Caregivers are usually contractors, so the real need is certificate and health-report validity, patient-caregiver matching, payout calculation and commission records. Visit verification here is less about care quality than about limiting the agency's liability; deep clinical forms matter less.

  • A post-discharge care unit or a service running under a municipal protocol

    Here documentation is demanded from day one: who went when, what care was given, which consent was taken. Scope leans toward auditable records — access logs, exportable case files, retention rules, consumable line items; the family app can wait for a later phase.

A phased plan that splits the budget

  1. 1

    Phase 1 — Visit, care plan and proof core 5-7 hafta

    Field app plus coordinator panel: patient file, care plan, daily visit list, NFC/QR and location-based check-in/out, offline operation, step-by-step care form. This phase alone is a sellable service — the coordinator leaves paper rosters behind and every visit is provable. Family access and billing come later, but operations already run.

  2. 2

    Phase 2 — Family app and medication tracking 4-5 hafta

    Family app: visit started/ended notifications, daily care summary, medication-given record, role-based visibility and explicit consent logging. Alongside it come per-patient medication schedules, missed-dose alerts and vital-threshold warnings. The order is deliberate — the family screen is only trustworthy once it rests on the verified records Phase 1 produces.

  3. 3

    Phase 3 — Billing, scheduling engine and wound tracking 4-6 hafta

    Turning verified visits into charges: e-Arşiv invoicing (Turkey's electronic archive invoice system), recurring collection, caregiver payout lines and consumable items. Then the scheduling engine that weighs caregiver continuity against fixed medication times, and the wound-photo timeline with a scale card. These come last because each depends on real visit data accumulated in Phases 1-2.

Typical scope and timeline

Typical scope: a field app for carers with visits, care plans and medication tracking; a family app for notifications and reports; a coordinator panel for case intake, scheduling, visit verification and invoicing. Plus NFC/QR visit verification, offline working, KVKK explicit consent and access logging, e-Arşiv invoicing integration, store release and QA.

Estimated timeline: 10-16 weeks

Off-the-shelf or custom build?

Topic Off-the-shelf Custom build
Depth of visit verification Off-the-shelf tools usually give GPS plus a timestamp; for a small team that is often enough and works from day one. A custom build combines NFC tag, location and time into triple proof; mismatched visits enter an audit queue and payout is tied to that record.
Health data and data-protection responsibility With hosted software the provider carries infrastructure security — a real burden lifted for a small team — but their contract decides where data sits and how consent is recorded. A custom system can host data in Turkey with role separation, explicit-consent records and per-view access logs built into the data model from the start — in exchange, full responsibility stays with you.
Flexibility of shift and session pricing Ready-made packages ship hourly and per-session tariffs; for a business running standard rates setup takes minutes. Rules like 24-hour live-in shifts, two-person transfers, weekend differentials and consumable line items usually end up hand-corrected in a package; a custom build encodes them as tariff rules.
Monthly subscription versus one-time ownership A per-caregiver monthly fee is low risk when you start with a handful of staff — a sensible way to test demand before a bigger commitment. As the team grows that fee grows with it, and patient files, visit history and wound-photo archives stay in the provider's format; with a custom build the data and the store accounts are yours and portable.

Sector glossary

Electronic visit verification (EVV)
Device-based proof that the caregiver was at the right address at the right time. In this sector the term is shorthand for what payout and invoices rest on — a visit without proof is not a billable visit.
Activities of daily living (ADL)
Eating, bathing, toileting, dressing, moving in bed. At intake the patient is scored on which of these need support, and that score drives both visit duration and whether one or two caregivers are sent.
Live-in companion shift
Not a short visit but staying with the patient for 8, 16 or 24 hours. Its pricing, break rules and night handover differ entirely from session care; it sits in the roster as one block and closes off other visits that day.
Pressure ulcer staging
Classifying a bedbound patient's wound from stage 1 to 4 by depth. Caregivers note the stage at every visit; if it worsens the coordinator escalates to a nurse and the photo series goes into the file as evidence.
Intake-output charting
Recording the patient's fluid and food intake against urine and stool output through the day. For catheterised or renal patients this is the first chart a physician asks for; a gap in it puts the care company on the spot at the hospital review.

Frequently asked questions

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