Handoff gives your family a window into the care record — every entry, timestamped, attributed to the nurse who made it, written in plain language. Not a summary of a phone call. The real picture, whenever you need it.
You are managing care for a parent from across the state, or you are present but overwhelmed. You love your nurse. You trust your nurse. But the phone call summary is a summary — filtered, positive, and limited by what the nurse could remember to say in three minutes.
You don't know what the pain scores were at 4 AM. You don't know if the appetite has been declining for three days or just today. You don't know whether your siblings, who also call and also ask, are getting the same information you are.
This is not anyone's fault. It is what happens when the only handoff tool is a group text message. Handoff gives you a window into the care record — complete, accurate, and written to be understood by someone who is not a nurse.
Family members with read access can open a browser on any phone and view the care record in real time. You see the same record the nurses see — every entry, timestamped, attributed to the caregiver who made it. Vitals, pain scores, medications given, diary notes from the shift.
Your access is read-only. You cannot add or change anything in the record. That boundary protects both the integrity of the care documentation and the nurse's professional accountability.
What you can see: everything. Every entry made by every caregiver since the device was set up.
There is no app to download. If you can open a website on your phone, you can use Handoff.
The admin can export the complete care record as a CSV file at any time — every vital, every ESAS score, every medication log, every diary entry, in a structured format you can open in Excel, print for the doctor, or share with a specialist.
Families use these records to track symptom trends across weeks and bring them to physician appointments, to share documentation with a hospice agency that takes over care, and to have a complete documented history when care transitions to a different team.
The CSV is your data. It belongs to you. It is not held in anyone else's system, and it is never sent anywhere you didn't choose.
When two siblings both call the nurse, they may hear different things. When both of them can see the same care record, the conversation changes. The question becomes "what does the record say?" not "what did the nurse tell you?"
This is not about distrust. It is about the fact that verbal summaries are filtered and imperfect — not because nurses are careless, but because that is how verbal communication works. A shared written record removes ambiguity.
If there is a family disagreement about the quality of care — and in hospice, these disagreements happen — the record is the answer. What was documented, when, and by whom.
Handoff is a documentation system, not a monitoring device. It does not have a camera. It does not record audio. It does not track nurse movements or time-stamp arrivals and departures.
What it records is what nurses choose to document — their clinical observations, their assessments, their care actions. The record is professional documentation, written by the people providing care.
Family read access is a window into that record. It is not a way to audit or second-guess the care team. Nurses who use Handoff use it because they want their work documented accurately — not because they are being watched.
Handoff is purchased by the family or by the nurse — either way works. Setup takes about 10 minutes and requires no technical knowledge. The lead nurse creates the care team, adds each caregiver with their role, and adds family members with read-only access.
From that point, the record builds itself. Every time a nurse logs in and documents a shift, the record grows — and you can see it.
If you are the one managing the arrangements for your parent's care, ordering Handoff and asking the nursing team to use it is a reasonable and constructive thing to do. Most nurses will welcome it — it protects them as much as it informs you.