Helping Hands Orillia provides quality care for seniors with Jotform Enterprise

Located in Orillia, Ontario, Helping Hands Orillia is a nonprofit that provides support to senior citizens in its community, offering services like meal delivery, transportation, safety checks, and personal care.

Coordinating care for more than 1,400 seniors can quickly get complex. Luckily, tools from Jotform Enterprise have helped the organization transform its internal operations.

Helping Hands Orillia case study results at a glance

# of forms

155

Vehicle inspections conducted with digital forms

4,400+

Service quality checks conducted

1,800+

Transforming into a “tech-smart” organization with Jotform Enterprise

According to Doug Rawson, executive director of Helping Hands Orillia, the organization’s processes used to be entirely manual and paper-based.

“Everything we did was paper,” Rawson says. “Our client intake forms [were] a piece of paper, a pen, and a clipboard. We had reams of paper in filing cabinets and folders and thousands upon thousands of paper charts.”

Of course, this needed to change. Searching through endless pieces of paper to find a specific client’s form is both time-consuming and frustrating — and takes staff away from mission-focused work.

So when Helping Hands Orillia staff strategized about improving operations, Rawson says they focused on becoming more “tech smart” and digitizing operations. This approach involved modernizing processes with digital tools to improve responsiveness, accountability, and service quality.

When Rawson started using Jotform, its form-building and data-management software tools, in his words, “tremendously transformed how we do what we do.”

Keeping data secure with Jotform Enterprise single sign-on (SSO)

Helping Hands Orillia keeps sensitive data about its senior residents, which means it needs a platform with strong digital security features. The organization enabled single sign-on (SSO) with Jotform Enterprise to centralize access and add an extra layer of security.

With SSO enabled, staff can use their existing email login credentials to access Jotform Enterprise, so they don’t need a separate password. Having fewer passwords to remember makes logging in easier for employees. It also means employees are less likely to reuse passwords to access multiple systems, which can make those systems more vulnerable to hacking attempts.

According to Rawson, security is a core part of the organization’s new infrastructure and systems, and attributing actions to specific users, in part through SSO, is “as important as the data you’re putting in there.”

In fact, when Helping Hands Orillia pursued accreditation in September 2024, staff found that it was much easier to achieve because it now had digital paper trails. Helping Hands Orillia now holds accreditation from Accreditation Canada, which provides assessments of health and social service organizations nationwide to make sure they are offering quality care to residents.

Rawson credits Jotform Enterprise with helping the organization achieve accreditation because staff could extensively document their work through digital forms.

“It’s helped to improve our due diligence for the work that we do,” Rawson says.

Maintaining accountability with conditional logic and workflows

The first form Helping Hands Orillia built with Jotform was a daily vehicle inspection form. The organization has 14 vehicles to provide accessible transportation to seniors. In the past, staff conducted vehicle inspections using paper forms and clipboards.

The issue with this method, according to Rawson, was that it was hard to know for sure if a vehicle needed service, or if it had even been inspected at all, until he went through multiple pieces of paper. The process made it difficult to understand the status of their vehicles and keep frontline workers accountable for conducting inspections.

Using Jotform Enterprise, Rawson built a digital version of the inspection form. He customized it using conditional logic and connected it to an automated Jotform workflow. The workflow notifies a manager when a vehicle needs further inspection according to form responses.

Now, staff carry tablets with icons that link to various forms, including the daily inspection form, so they can take the devices on the go and conduct inspections more quickly and efficiently.

Helping Hands Orillia staff have now conducted over 4,400 daily inspections.

“That helped leverage what we’re trying to do from an accountability lens,” Rawson says.

Helping Hands Orillia also uses forms to collect feedback from community members about staff and the quality of the service they provide. The organization used to rely on an annual survey sent to community members to evaluate service, but now staff can get more accurate feedback in real time.

Using a visit satisfaction survey form for clients, the organization can determine its Net Promoter Score (NPS) and understand how it can do better. And with regular surveys, community members don’t have to remember and summarize a year’s worth of experiences.

It has tremendously improved the quality of our reporting.

Doug Rawson, Executive Director, Helping Hands Orillia

Nowadays, Helping Hands Orillia can perform daily quality control checks for different services. It has now conducted over 7,750 checks using NPS surveys, thanks to Jotform’s help.

Rawson also notes that the survey form has conditional logic to address staff members who receive a lower rating. If a staff member receives a low score, the system notifies a manager, who can get in touch with the client to learn more and work on what needs improvement.

Since the visit survey went live in February, Helping Hands Orillia has collected 1,827 submissions, which Rawson says are quality control checks that were never done before.

Ultimately, Jotform’s customizable conditional logic has played a large role in Helping Hands Orillia’s accountability efforts, ensuring that people are getting the best care possible.

Incident reports become easier to track with digital forms

Helping Hands Orillia also often handles health and safety incidents that require follow-up or need to be filed for future reference. For instance, if someone has an accident in their home and needs to go to the hospital, the organization creates an incident report.

However, writing up incidents on paper made it hard to find individual reports, because it meant going through piles of paper.

“We didn’t have a systematic way of recording those and saving that data,” says Rawson. “Three years later, five years later, let’s say there’s a legal matter, and we need to pull that case. It’s hard to actually retrieve that data.”

Staff members working off-site in the community would also have to come into the office to fill out incident reports, which was inconvenient. Since frontline workers have started to use tablets to access Jotform digital forms, they can fill out forms wherever they are.

Thanks to digital incident report forms, Rawson can now identify incident trends, such as age demographics or scenarios with the highest risk of falls. Staff members also have an easier time finding information from its incident report submissions with the help of Jotform’s integration with Microsoft OneDrive.

Making data consistent through form requirements

By customizing form fields and adding conditional logic, Helping Hands Orillia can collect more consistent data. For example, it can now require certain fields or data formats on incident report forms.

According to Rawson, paper reports sometimes left out crucial information, such as full names. In other cases, information like birth dates and addresses would be formatted inconsistently.

Now, the incident report form uses conditional logic and required fields to ensure that submissions can’t be completed unless these fields are filled out correctly and completely. As a result, Rawson and his staff can group demographic data like age or neighborhood instantly for trend analysis.

“It has tremendously improved the quality of our reporting,” Rawson says.

Smoother internal operations with digital tools

Helping Hands Orillia also now uses Jotform Enterprise to make its internal operations more efficient and easy to navigate. Staff created online versions of a staff support ticket form, a vehicle mileage and expense reimbursement form, and a payroll adjustment form to facilitate schedule changes, among others. A personal protective equipment order form also helps staff track orders and manage inventory.

These forms, along with built-in conditional logic and automations, have been instrumental in streamlining the organization’s internal workings.

For instance, to be reimbursed for expenses, staff would have to bring in a paper receipt, write their name on it, hand it in, and wait for payment.

With Jotform, staff can instead take a picture of their receipt and submit it through the reimbursement form, which is connected to an approval workflow. The process is now quicker and more seamless.

Conclusion

With the help of Jotform Enterprise, Helping Hands Orillia has transformed its overall operations, reduced hurdles, improved accountability, kept data secure, and most importantly, ensured that Orillia’s seniors are getting the best care possible.

As Rawson puts it, “It has transformed how we do things and how we’re accountable. I would argue it’s made us way more efficient.”