A web platform and mobile app for a home health social work company
ESWS provides medical social work services for home health care, with its office, partner agencies and field social workers working from one system. VLO Labs built and maintains the web platform, the iOS and Android app, and the cloud setup behind them.
- Industry
- Home health medical social services
- Project type
- Client project
- Status
- Live
- Platforms
- Web, iOS, Android
The challenge
ESWS provides social work services for home health care, working with agencies that refer patients to it. A business like this has three groups who need the same information in different forms: office administrators who run the operation, agencies who send the work and pay for it, and social workers who are out visiting people.
The social workers' situation shaped the mobile app. They complete their documentation during home visits, where a phone may have no connection, and a visit record is only useful once it reaches the office. The software had to let them finish their work offline and make sure that work was not lost on the way back.
Our approach
VLO Labs treated the web platform and the mobile app as one product. The web application holds the shared records and serves the office and the agencies, and it also provides the service the mobile app connects to. Each kind of user signs in to a view limited to their role.
The mobile app was built offline-first. Work is saved on the phone first and uploaded as a batch when the social worker chooses to send it, so a dead zone does not interrupt a visit.
The engagement has continued past the first release. Recent work includes a major upgrade of the mobile app's underlying framework, new features on both platforms, and writing down the production cloud setup as code.
What we built
Web platform for office staff and agencies
A role-based web application for managing referrals, social worker assignments, agency relationships and documentation, with separate experiences for administrators, agencies and social workers.
Mobile app for social workers
An iOS and Android app for completing visit documentation in the field, including on-screen signature capture, with or without a connection.
Clinical documentation forms
Six types of digital forms with draft saving, a submission workflow, digital signatures and PDF generation.
Invoicing
Invoices and payment tracking inside the platform.
Automated reminders
Scheduled jobs that send notices about items such as missing documentation, expiring credentials and past-due invoices.
Admin AI assistant
A chat tool, available only to administrators, that answers questions about how the system works and looks up operational information in plain English.
Engineering highlights
Offline work that survives restarts
Work saved in the field stays on the device across app restarts until it is uploaded.
Uploads that are safe to repeat
The app re-sends recent work on each upload so nothing is missed, and the server recognizes records it already has instead of overwriting them. That protects corrections made in the office. A single record that cannot be saved no longer blocks the rest of the upload.
Visibility into work still on the phone
The server cannot see a record until it is uploaded, so the app reports how many signed records are still waiting. Administrators can see that count for each social worker, and the app shows a nightly reminder on the phone.
Checks at the point of entry
The app asks the user to confirm before starting a new record, shows a review step before a signature is saved, and warns about unusual entries without blocking legitimate exceptions.
An AI tool limited to reading
The admin assistant can read data but not change it, and the results of its lookups are not sent to the outside AI service.
Production infrastructure written as code
The existing cloud environment was inventoried and brought under Terraform, so the setup is documented and changes can be reviewed before they are applied.
Where it stands
- iOS app on the App Store
- Live, version 3.4.1 released October 2026
- Agency access on the public website
- Agency login linked from esws-inc.com
- Documentation form types with PDF output
- 6
Technology
Links
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