Background
The AAC system is an IT solution developed by CVWO for our partner agencies to more effectively carry out their daily operations. Our system that we built is an evolution that dates all the way back to 2007, when CVWO built an IT system for Geylang East Home for the Aged (GEHA) to support their daily operations and simplify the process of generating reports.
As of 2023, it is being actively used by 11 eldercare centres from GEHA, Care Corner and Sheng Hong Active Ageing Hub. Three additional centres from FaithActs and Jia Ying also onboarded our system over the course of the summer.
The eldercare centres serve as a key point of contact for all social-health matters, provide opportunities for volunteering among seniors in their community, and offer the following four main services:
Key Contributions
Admin Dashboard
The admin dashboard project is a multi-year project that consists of two different types of dashboards serving different purposes. The system dashboard is for us as IT administrators to manage an application for the centre’s instances, such as creating a new tenant for new centres. The agency dashboard is catered for larger agencies that need to manage multiple centres at once. As part of CVWO’s long term vision to support larger agencies in the future, we built on previous batches’ work to complete the admin dashboard, allowing both VWO staff and CVWO admins to have a high-level view of the systems under their care.
This task proved to be highly complex because it requires work with two very different paridigms: between isolation and integration. The multi-tenanted archtecture of our system required data of each centre to be isolated from one another for the purposes of data security. However, for the purpose of centralising management, the admin dashboard needs to not only to retrieve data from centres, but also updating them.
Our team went through extensive discussion sessions to go through the goals of this large task as well as the considerations that were brought up by the previous batches of CVWO members. keeping these considerations in mind, we carefully overhauled parts of the codebase in order to support the objectives required. This required strategic planning to ensure the tasks were divided optimally and worked on in parallel by developers while avoiding project tasking dependencies.
After much determination and collaboration, eventually, our team managed to pull through and complete what we set out to do.
Onboarding new centres
This year, the AAC team had a unique opportunity after two VWOs reached out to CVWO for collaboration. To begin, our team visited the centres to gain a better understanding of their background of each agency and their existing painpoints. The objective of understanding the existing workflows at each centre.
Though various meetings with both new and existing centres, we understand the workflows that staff are using on the ground, and ensure that our system is capable of supporting operations efficiently. For example, unlike our existing centres, the newly onboarded FaithActs centre is still in the process of transitioning to the new eldercare service model under AIC. Hence, we added new workflows into our system by creating new pages to allow adding of befriendees.
To help migrate the data that the centres currently have, our members wrote scripts to automate the process of cleaning, parsing, and verifying the correctness of the data provided by the agencies. As CVWO expects to more centres in the future, we make our scripts extensible so that in the future, part of can be reused by other centres even with different data formats.
To smoothen our the transition process for the staff, our team visited the centres after data migration was done to facilitate and introduce staff to the features of our system and the individual workflows, as well as smoothening out other workflow issues.
Custom Reports
When it comes to VWO requirements, each agency can have different reporting processes which necessitate different report formats. To create or update reports with the previous development flow, developers will need to make changes to the frontend and backend codebases. The new Custom Reports enhancement is an internal tooling that allows us to generate a report without directly modifying the codebase, making it effectively a low-code solution.
Using the system dashboard as shown on the left, we can insert a specially crafted query code into our system. By doing so, this report with the desired layout will be shown to the users, as seen in the picture on the right. Previously, building a new report based on agency specifications can take a week. With this new enhancement, it is now possible for a new report to be coded out in half a day or less by a single developer. As a result, CVWO is able to keep up with the evolving requirements of our clients.
Module enhancements
Apart from new clients, our team also conducted site visits to our existing clients such as Care Corner and Sheng Hong, with the objective of gaining feedback of our existing system.
One common issue raise up was that for certain activities that are conducted regularly, the staff found it tedious to have to do repeated data entry. After realising this is a common issue for multiple centres, we aimed to prioritise enhancing the Activities Module. We revamped the Activities Module by adding new features, notably adding the ability to create scheduled activities in advanced with recurring seniors specified. This effort significantly reduces the administrative workload of the staff, as they no longer have to key in the same names on a weekly basis. While doing so, we revamped the user interface to make Activities Module more intuitive to use.
The Befriending and Referral Modules also saw many improvements made in response to feedback to improve end-user experience. We enabled the upload and attach multiple files of varying formats to referral cases, making the workflow more streamlined as staff no longer need to keep track of documents using a seperate system. In response to changes in technical definitions by AIC, we also worked to better display information.
Project Team
- Tiang Hui Zheng (Project Lead, Year 2)
- Immanuel Chia Qi Xiang (Developer, Year 1)
- Jeffrey Jian Yu Jie (Developer, Year 1)
- Nathaniel Angelo Prince Blanco Calimag (Developer, Year 1)
- Nguyen Cao Duy (Developer, Year 1)
- Puri Virakarin (Developer, Year 1)
- Vanessa Mae (Developer, Year 1)
Afterthoughts
This summer has been a challenging but definitely rewarding experience. Glad to be back again to serve through CVWO!
– Hui Zheng
Walls are meant to be broken!
– Immanuel
CVWO has been a valuable learning experience! I’ve improved my technical skills, better understand Software Engineering principles, teamwork and communication abilities, all thanks to the exceptional and supportive mentor, tech leads and teammates.
– Jeffrey
CVWO gave me the opportunity to not only hone my skills but to also make genuine difference in people’s lives. I am grateful to work with my dedicated and talented team, through which our collective efforts bring meaningful solutions to our community.
– Nathaniel
CVWO was a challenging yet rewarding summer experience that allowed me to enhance my software engineering skills while making a meaningful impact on society. It was inspiring to see how technology can be leveraged to benefit voluntary welfare organizations and the communities they serve.
– Duy
This summer at CVWO, my team and I made things easier for eldercare centers with our coding skills. Every line of code wasn’t just fixing a problem on a screen, but making a real difference for people in our community.
– Puri
CVWO is like a crucible for software engineers, where the heat of challenge and collaboration refines our skills and forges lasting connections. It’s not just an internship; it’s a journey of growth, gratitude, and giving back.
– Vanessa
We would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to the following people who have been influential and supportive during our project:
- Prof Ben Leong (NUS) for his advice and guidance
- GIC for their generous support of the CVWO programme
- Our partners and clients for their co-operation and support for the programme:
- GEHA: Jay Au, Janice Tan
- Care Corner: Sharon Tang, Daniel Lam, Samuel Chan, Jun Liang Cheong, Angie Poh, Sharleen Lau
- Sheng Hong: Lee Soo How, Gary Cheng
- FaithActs: Jolene Lau
- Jia Ying: Brian Chan, Jason Chia, Kenneth Toh