The Hui family have learnt much from their experiences in getting on top of coordinating their son’s disability care. From this they are passionate about helping other families cope with the same issues, and have put their skills into developing an innovative solution for care coordination.

The Hui family’s journey to discover their son Monty’s disability started from the day he was born. Jess: “Following the result from the newborn hearing test, we started down a path of many tests and consultations, with doctors, audiologists, geneticists, neurologists, and surgeons.”While it was originally thought to be only a hearing loss issue, it was discovered that Monty has Ponto-Cerebella Hypoplasia, which affects his muscle tone and control globally and also requires a brain shunt to manage his brain fluid. Danny: “Monty’s condition is rare so the diagnosis about his abilities has never been clear. What we have learnt though is that Monty has been able to conquer every milestone set for him, but to do that each requires significant therapy and work for Monty’s brain to figure out its own way to do something we may take for granted.”Monty’s support team consists of about 20 people, and includes medical specialists, health professionals, educators, support workers, and their nanny. For every goal the family is working towards, Jess and Danny have to manage and coordinate all the relevant members on their team individually. The amount of collaboration between professionals is very limited.

Jess: “There is a high workload with coordinating the team so that we are all working together towards the same goal. Because all the work is on us to do this, there is a lot of stress involved and sometimes we make mistakes because we forget things and opportunities are missed.“Danny: “It is the worst feeling when you forget about an exercise you were meant to do, or even an x-ray you were meant to get taken but it’s now buried under other bits of paper on the fridge.”As the Hui’s became more confident in coordinating Monty’s care, they came up with and idea about how the process could work much better.

Danny: “Jess and I are engineers so solving problems is something we love, my own experience is also in emergency management and from that we were able to transfer some of those techniques and principles to disability coordination. We’ve developed that solution into an app and that’s when Sameview was born.

Sameview’s website (www.sameview.com.au) launched recently and they are currently looking for families or providers that want to help them shape their app and are also keen to be early adopters. Their app is currently in development and Sameview is aiming for a release in the second half of 2017. Once released the app will operate on an annual membership with pricing to be announced closer to time of release.Danny: “With our app families will be able to track some of the most stressful parts of regular appointments against their goals and milestones. Best of all, support team members will have the same view, and with the ability to communicate and collaborate with each other.”

Danny: “Our mission is very simple – we just want to help other families like ours cope. The app is one solution we have now and we hope that in the future we can add further solutions to this space. We’re still in the early days of managing Monty’s disability but while we feel that we have the capacity, we’re going to try our best to help others. ”  Readers can visit sameview website here (www.sameview.com.au) and also register their interest for the app here (https://www.sameview.com.au/register1/)