Nowadays, more and more elderly people prefer to live at home rather than move to special facilities where nurses monitor their health. That's why their children should take the responsibility of parents' health. It's not easy. After all, since childhood, we get used to the fact that parents care about our health, and now we need to change roles. Usually parents don't ask us about it, and prefer to stay alone with their problems. However, it is necessary to start figuring out with their health as soon as possible, in order not to reduce the risk of critical situations or at least prepare for them. And that's where the caregiver software like Goopatient can help.
As a rule, caregiver software or home care software usually referes to system for hospice or private duty agencies that provide health care services for elderly individuals. However, unlike Goopatient, these programs don't focus on the medical aspects but help to solve organizational issues: caregiver management, billing, financial calculations and documentation. Goopatient - is originally designed for family health care and helps to improve your parents' health.
Here are 3 basic steps of how to use Goopatient as caregiver software
Create an electronic medical card
In the electronic medical card you can fix the date of birth, blood type, passport data. Find out and write down what medications your parents takes. In case of emergency, your parent may be unable to remember or tell you what medicines he needs for example to relieve the blood pressure and reduce the heart rate. Find out and write down if your parents have insurance policies. In what company? When is the policy deadline? How to contact the insurance company? If the parents don't have the insurance coverage, it's desirable to buy it. Find out or remember and write down what were the main diseases that your parents had. As a rule, health history of elderly person is distributed among several medical institutions, and if you collect everything in one place - it will be very useful for further diagnosis and treatments.
Keep a Health Journal
Register all complaints, symptoms that you notice. Track taken medications and dosage. Describe in detail the critical health cases (later you'll have to describe it to the doctor). After some time, you will be able to form a list of the major health problems of your parents, plan their treatment strategy, life styles, activities, daily regimen and diet. Thus you can prepare for a possible emergency situations. Your parents may also participate in keeping health diary. Goopatient allows you to sync health journal database between two computers or computer and a smartphone via cloud synchronization services.
Create an Emergency Card
This is especially important for elderly people with chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart failure, Alzheimer's disease. Especially if your parents go out of home from time to time. Emergency card can save a life in case of emergency. Having found Emergency card in the pocket or purse, emergency doctor will be able to properly provide first aid and quickly inform you about what happened. Goopatient makes it very easy to print the Emergency card using the data that you have entered in the electronic medical record. Therefore, if the data changes - you can quickly create a new card.