SE Health expands MySE Life app to include community rehabilitation

BY SARAH QUADRI

Melissa Tambeau is taking her day planner digital home, and it’s making a big difference. Tambeau, a Waterloo-Wellington, Ontario area Registered Dietitian, is thankful to her employer, SE Health – a not-for-profit, social enterprise and one of Canada’s largest health care organizations – for expanding its MySE Life app earlier this year to include home and community care rehab professionals like herself.

“The MySE Life app is amazing. It’s exactly what we need to keep organized and it gives us client information at our fingertips,” said Tambeau, who is part of a champion group that brings together SE community rehab professionals from many disciplines across the organization to work with the MySE Life app digital team.

“SE Health is doing a great job listening to our needs and giving us a chance to participate in customizing the app so we can enhance care for our communities,” she added.

In 2021, with the help of its nurses, SE Health co-designed and implemented the MySE Life app – a one-of-a-kind mobile application and digital platform for direct care providers.

Since then, SE Health extended the app to include personal support staff, whose insights continue to drive the app’s features and design. And the most recent expansion to include the needs of rehab professionals marks a third expansion of the solution.

“It’s truly about ensuring the best user experience for everyone,” said Candace Moore, SE Health’s digital product lead, who meets and interacts regularly with staff from all disciplines to ensure she and her team are receiving the latest feedback on the app.

As Moore explained, with three different groups of direct care staff, “there are unique needs for each group.”

“We continue to make significant enhancements to our digital platform – building an ecosystem of capabilities to help provide a next generation experience to our direct care providers and the care teams,” said Imtiaz Ahmed, vice president, Digital Experience and Enablement at SE Health. “Our flexible architecture enables us to personalize the experience for the various roles while using the same application.”

When it comes to community rehabilitation, Moore noted, it’s such a “diverse group with many sub-disciplines” and there are varying requirements within the actual rehab service offerings.

Unlike nursing and personal support, rehab has large administrative loads without the support of coordinators. In her experience, Moore also noted that rehab professionals learn and absorb information differently than what she’s seen from nurses and personal support care staff.

“They have more of a ‘peer-to-peer’ ap- proach and because of this, we adapted app training materials to maximize their learning and engagement.”

The SE digital team developed an immersive training environment they call “MySE Life Sandbox.” This tool helps everyone (including managers) familiarize themselves with the MySE Life app’s interface, learn its capabilities, and utilize them effectively.

Guided tours provide a step-by-step walkthrough of key features of the app,