e-Care Elderly Home Management System is a web-based system runs under Application Service Provider (ASP) model serving elderly centers in Hong Kong. e-Care initially designed to facilitate the routine operations, data centralization, management, statistic and analysis of the nine Caritas elderly centers in early 2005. CITAC found that the functionalities of e-Care fulfill over 85% system requirements of the management system in local elderly centers and found that there was no such web-based system available in Hong Kong. Therefore, with further development on user’s flexibility (user’s parameters), security measure (SSL, VPN), privilege control and data access authorization control, the second version of e-Care was launched to the public for subscription on 1st June 2006. By 31 November 2007, there are totally 35 elderly centers in Hong Kong and one integrated elderly center in Shen Zhen (China) subscribed to e-Care services. e-Care is opened for comments and opinions. CITAC keeps collecting the needs and requirements from the end users, elderly consultants and government departments. Continue development is one of the aims of e-Care development team. Apart from the above achievements, e-Care has been awarded a merit from both the Hong Kong ICT and Asia Pacific ICT Awards in 2006.

Vision: By subscripting to e-Care system, man-power from the elderly homes can be shifted to pay more care to the residents instead of taking care of routine administrative work and procedures. Our vision is to see the residents in the elderly homes in Hong Kong or China can enjoy a healthy, safe and pleasurable life in elderly centers with excellent care and services provided by care givers who do not need to spend their valuable time in handling unnecessary documentations.

It was no doubt that e-Care would not exist without the use of ICT. ICT helps e-Care in the following ways:

1. Eliminated the physical boundary

• Subscribers can access e-Care services basically anywhere with broadband connection
• Share of information become possible in different units of an organization or among organizations which are using e-Care service

2. Centralization and Standardization

• e-Care allows subscribers to centralize their data and knowledge onto one single platform, this will facilitate the centralization of both knowledge and data for statistical analysis or forecasting of issues such as drug usage, infectious dicease analysis etc for the government as all these can be one button away from the platform.
• Standardization becomes possible as all users access the same functions and information from the system. There was an incident of mis-distribution of drug in the elderly centre a couple of years ago in Hong Kong, relevant department in the Hong Kong Government has issued a circular to all elderly centres in Hong Kong to invite them to use one standard drug distribution form for cross checking on issuing of medicine to the elders in the elderly centres. This kind of forms and procedures can be easily implemented in the e-Care system at the back-end so that all subscribers can have access to the new forms or workflow without delay.

3. Cost efficiency and effectiveness

• Low startup cost for subscribers (only computer with internet access)  
• Low maintenance cost due to centralized servers.
• Wireless access such as using HSDPA in laptop can provide mobile access for care takers or visiting doctors to access the system in the elderly centre
• As there is a high mobility of care takers in the elderly industry in Hong Kong. In order provide training to new user of the elderly centres. The system has a self-learning module in order to provide on line self learning to the use of the system.

4. Scalability 

• With the use of ICT, e-Care can be expanded to a much larger scale, serve more people with a relatively low cost
• Services to outside country is possible with the world-wide access of Internet, eCare has crossed over the boarder of Hong Kong and entered the China market in the Pearl Delta Region of China.

To replicate e-Care, the following items are necessary:

The elderly industry is one of the most non-standardized industries in Hong Kong. Different elderly home has their own workflow and procedure in managing the elderly center. With the use of ICT, e-Care helps them to develop, standardize, centralize the workflow procedure and provide more time for the care takers to take care of the elderly in an efficient and effective manner.

We have scheduled to apply more ICT to the system in near future, the technology includes RSS, WEB 2.0, AJax, in order to expand e-Care functionalities like:

• Financial information system
• Electronic roster system
• Electronic diet control system

Besides, we will also re-allocate resource to the research on the mobile device and application to increase the ease of use and mobility of entering data to the system.

Meanwhile, we are looking for the opportunity to develop the Knowledge Management system and embed it into e-Care for the future standardization. We are also planning to build a bench mark certification for the use of the system.