VNA Boston began in 1886, when Amelia Hodgkiss visited a poor immigrant in Boston's West End who could not afford to visit a "regular nurse. "Today VNA Boston is probably the leading, and certainly the largest, home health care provider in the Northeast. Last year it supplied 24/7 home care by nurses, rehab therapists, social workers, home health aides, mental health staff and nutritionists, to over 17,000 patients, regardless of income, illness, or insurance—over 506,000 visits, of which nearly half (225,000) were free or subsidized. Half of VNA's patients rely on Medicare, and one-third on Medicaid. Over 40% live in the Mattapan, Dorchester and Roxbury neighborhoods of Boston. Sixty percent are over the age of 60, but patients are of all ages.

The bureaucratic paperwork attending subsidized health care is overwhelming efficiency and productivity, never mind personal warmth and attention. About 60% of a visiting nurse or therapist's time is spent filling out government-mandated forms—over 45 of which are required merely to admit one patient into the system! Computerization and philanthropy can do something about this. VNA is developing the nation's first comprehensive mobile technology program for the home health care industry. This could equip every home aide with a laptop, programmed to automate the paperwork to the greatest degree possible, both for homecare and in the back office—significantly reducing costs and augmenting the central mission and highest priority of this agency: providing home health care. But guess what? The government, which demands the paperwork, does not provide the funds to produce it; only philanthropy can do that.

This giant step forward will cost $1.5 million—heavy-lifting, but high-leverage, philanthropy, for solid and strategically significant gains that will permanently transform an entire field of activity, not only here but nationwide as this system is replicated. Your help is needed to put together a package of in-kind and dollar donations to get this job done. You know we shall all probably benefit.