Overview
24/7 Edmonton was designed to support the workflow of outreach workers in the field while remaining compatible with the software outreach teams are already using. It consists of an admin dashboard, webservice, and mobile apps available on the Apple App Store and Google Play.
From Problem to Solution
Outreach workers that assist vulnerable people and those experiencing homeless need to track the people they help. The person's status, location, and required assistance used to be written down on paper to be logged into an office system at a later point.
We worked with community outreach organizations to create a set of applications that can be used to log important information while still in the field. This allowed for near real-time tracking of outreach initiatives and more accurate data overall.
Actionable Data
With outreach workers completing cases on-site, useful data can be gathered and acted on than ever before. The admin dashboard of 24/7 Edmonton includes graphs and maps that help administrators better dispatch help. They can see the most at-risk communities in the city, as well as what days/times they might need extra assistance. This information has been invaluable in providing better service and coordinating front-line staff.
Results
Not only was our client blown away with the usefulness of the application, but they have started recruiting other community organizations to use the app. Since our webservice syncs all data to ETO (a case management platform) several organizations have expressed interest in the app as well as the data and insights that can be gained from a better workflow.
Technology Stack
With 24/7 Edmonton we have been able to provide several interconnected application that all work together to assist community organizations, some of the libraries and frameworks that we utilized for this are:
- C# and ASP.NET MVC
- jQuery, Bootstrap, and SCSS
- Ionic and Cordova
- AngularJS
- localForage
- Highcharts
- PhantomJS
Lessons Learned
24/7 Edmonton was created as a Hybrid Mobile App with Ionic and Cordova. While this allowed us to create one application that supports both iOS and Android, it was not without struggles. Early versions of Ionic had several issues with scrolling and keyboard handling that required lots of workarounds. However, the powerful combination of Ionic and AngularJS allowed us to implement complex features such as dynamic form generation, offline storage, notifications, and geolocation.