Reshaping the Future of Social Care Delivery with Zoho Creator

For the latest installment of #JustLowCodeIt, we've got ThoughtLogik, a partner based out of UK, sharing how they solved their customer's problem using Zoho Creator.

This blog was written by Yuvaraj Ramamoorthy, founder and principal consultant at ThoughtLogik, as part of the Creator Developers' Month initiative. Thank you for sharing your story with us!

ThoughtLogik is a UK-based technology consultancy that was founded in 2021 to help companies across the globe with business transformation, bespoke business applications, and business advisory services.

The solutions we develop at ThoughtLogik are a combination of optimized business processes and the power of the Zoho ecosystem. ThoughtLogik's expertise includes building bespoke business applications on the Zoho Creator platform, customization and implementation of Zoho applications, highly customized implementation of Zoho CRM by creating new modules, functions, and schedules, blueprint setup, and much more. We also specialize in integration between Zoho products like Creator, CRM, Books, and third-party applications.

About the application

Home care (also known as domiciliary care) is the front line of social care delivery in the UK. The term "home care" covers a wide range of activities, including provision of personal care to people with long-term care needs, and reablement services for people leaving hospital or receiving crisis interventions to avoid hospital attendance. This is publicly funded home care by local authorities/NHS for older people as well as younger people with learning disabilities, physical disabilities, or mental health problems.

HomeCareDirect is a Chesterfield-based managed domiciliary care provider operating nationally. Care worker numbers are likely to need to increase significantly in the coming years to cater to growing needs, yet the sector struggles to recruit even the number of staff it currently requires. HomeCareDirect used to use Excel spreadsheets, whiteboards, and pen and paper to manage their enquiries and recruitment process—but this came with many challenges:

• Inefficient enquiry management
• Time-consuming communication and activity management
• Lack of coordinated care planning
• Laborious manual data sharing 
• Lack of real-time reporting

This is when we came in to collaborate with HomeCareDirect on a mission to digitize and revamp their systems and modernize their processes to address the various challenges faced in provisioning care on time.

ThoughtLogik and HCD evaluated various platforms and systems to build cost-effective and efficient bespoke applications. Finally, we narrowed it down to Zoho Creator—an industry-leading low-code platform—as it combines application development, integrations, process automation, business intelligence, and analytics into a single platform, while simultaneously enabling IT teams to effortlessly manage security, compliance, and governance challenges.

Modules in the app

We developed multiple applications, including an enquiry manager and recruitment process management system on Creator.

The enquiry manager app has an enquiries module to store and track enquiry details. Each enquiry has to progress to various stages and states before any care can be provisioned. Zoho Creator's process automation blueprint feature is used extensively to manage the enquiry management process to ensure it can scale to growing care needs—and that the same level of attention is given to every single enquiry.

The activities module efficiently organizes and manages email communications, tasks, calls, events, and notes. Automated email notifications are sent to clients about enquiry status, nurses on task allocations, and more. Dashboards provide intuitive analytics on enquiries in various stages, recruitment forecasts, enquiry trends, and client locations. The enquiry manager is even integrated with a recruitment process management app to ensure on-time recruitment of care workers.

How Zoho Creator solved the client's problem?

HomeCareDirect is still in the early days of its adoption of the bespoke enquiry and recruitment management application built on Zoho Creator. The platform has helped them scale their operations with growing demand, their data is now able to be shared with relevant stakeholders, and different apps have been integrated to streamline operations.

They also now have access to business data on the go and can respond to enquiries on time. Zoho Creator's fast application development lifecycle has helped them roll out new features and new applications at a much lower cost of ownership.

Message to budding Creator developers

Zoho Creator is the world's leading low-code platform, with integration, environment management, process automation, business intelligence, and analytics—all on a single platform. It enables developers to build business apps 10x faster than traditional development methodology, which helps them scale and monetize their business.

Zoho Creator also supports widgets in addition to standard forms, reports, and pages. So developers can develop custom UI and functionality using HTML, CSS, and JS—leveraging the platform's robust capabilities, like security controls, integrations, data management, sharing, and backup. As demand for custom applications is constantly increasing, the demand for Zoho Creator Certified Developers is as well—and it has become one of the most rewarding development tool kits, in my experience.

Throughout this month, we'll be bringing you more interesting stories, so keep checking back and help celebrate International Programmers' Day with us!