Elder Care Coordinator

Overview

Someone's mother lives alone 400 km away. Three siblings, two spouses, one niece, and a neighbor all help — coordination happens in a WhatsApp group with 200 messages a week, and critical things fall through: nobody confirmed Tuesday's rheumatology follow-up, two people bought insulin refills the same day, and when she fell at 6AM nobody knew where her DNR preference document was.

This skill is the antidote: a single structured source of truth for a family care circle, kept in plain files the family owns, that generates:

1. Care circle roster — who exists, roles, contact, timezone, what they reliably do (driving, pharmacy runs, insurance calls) and their limits.
2. Task & appointment roster — recurring and one-off, with owners and due dates; today prints the day's coverage and any unassigned critical items.
3. Medication check-calls — the schedule of who calls about what, pill-tray fill dates, refill radar (x days left → task generated), and interaction notes from the pharmacist (free-text, not a database).
4. Doctor-visit packets — one command generates the briefing: current med list with doses, recent events, questions to ask, changes since last visit, plus a visit-report template to fill in the waiting room.
5. Event log — falls, confusion episodes, hospitalizations, "seemed off" observations with dates; the trend section makes gradual decline discussable at family meetings instead of arguable.
6. Emergency card — one printable page: conditions, meds, allergies, doctors, insurance, code status, lockbox code, who to call first. The thing you want to already exist at 3AM.

The design rule: nothing here is medical advice or a medical record system. It's the family's shared notebook with structure — the difference between "I thought you called the neurologist" and a printed roster.

When to Use

• Setting up coordination after a diagnosis, a fall, a hospital discharge, or when a parent starts "needing a little help"
• Running the weekly/monthly care meeting from a printed agenda (meeting command)
• Preparing for any doctor visit (visit-brief)
• Checking today's coverage (today) — who's doing what, what's unassigned
• After any incident: log it, and regenerate the emergency card if anything changed
• Onboarding a new helper (paid caregiver, neighbor, relative): print the handoff, not a 40-message chat scrollback
• Refill radar and appointment countdowns without anyone keeping it in their head

Don't use for: medication dosing decisions (pharmacist/physician), diagnosing symptoms, replacing the patient portal or official care plans, or emergencies in progress (call emergency services). This is family logistics, not medicine.

How It Works — Numbered Workflow

1. Set up the care circle — person add for every helper: name, role, phone, timezone, strengths/limits (free text). Then the care recipient's profile: conditions, allergies, doctors, pharmacy, insurance, code status, key locations (spare key, med list on fridge).
2. Build the recurring schedule — task add --recur weekly for the load-bearing routines: Sunday pill-tray fill, Monday check-call, Wednesday grocery run, monthly bill review. Every recurring task needs exactly one owner (or an explicit rotation).
3. Log events as they happen — event log "seemed confused at dinner, asked about Aunt Lena twice" with date and severity. Events feed visit briefs and the trend view.
4. Each morning or before shifts: today — the day sheet: appointments, tasks due, who's on check-call, refill countdowns, flagged follow-ups.
5. Before each appointment: visit-brief <doctor> — prints the packet (meds, events since last visit, questions list) and a blank visit-report template. After: visit-report fills the record back in.
6. Monthly: meeting — printed agenda: open tasks, overdue items, event trends, weight/appointment adjournments, "what's wearing us out" rotation review. The skill tracks task load per person and flags imbalance.
7. Quarterly or on change: emergency-card — regenerate and reprint; the old copies in wallets and on the fridge get replaced.
8. Handoffs — handoff <person> prints everything a new/substituting helper needs: recipient profile, today + upcoming week, key contacts, routine explanations, "don't do" notes (e.g., "don't mention the driving conversation — Elin handles it").

Quick Start

python3 scripts/elder_care.py person add --name "Maria" --role daughter --phone +7... --tz +3 --notes "pharmacy runs, Russian-speaking doctor visits"
python3 scripts/elder_care.py profile set --conditions "hypertension, AFib" --allergies "penicillin" --code-status "DNR in file, discussed 2026-03"
python3 scripts/elder_care.py task add --title "pill tray fill" --recur weekly --owner Maria --dow sun
python3 scripts/elder_care.py task add --title "check call" --recur daily --rotation "Maria,Jon,Anna"
python3 scripts/elder_care.py med add --name "warfarin" --dose "5mg" --refill-left 12 --refill-note "Pharmacy: Apteka 47, needs Rx"
python3 scripts/elder_care.py today
python3 scripts/elder_care.py visit-brief "Dr. Okafor cardiology"
python3 scripts/elder_care.py meeting
python3 scripts/elder_care.py emergency-card > card.txt

State: care_state.json beside the script. Pure stdlib, no network, no accounts. Print outputs; the family group chat gets photos of pages, not exports.

Output Examples

today (excerpt):

TODAY Tue 2026-09-29 — coverage: Maria (call), Jon (pharmacy)
  09:00  rheumatology follow-up (Dr. Weiss)      [owner: Anna]  — BRIEF READY: visit-brief "Dr. Weiss"
  check call (daily)                              [rotation: Maria]
  refill radar: warfarin 12 days left -> generate pharmacy task at 7
  FLAG: 2 tasks unassigned (transport Thu, insurance call) — assign or drop

meeting (excerpt):

MONTHLY CARE MEETING — 2026-09-29
1. Overdue: neurologist visit report (Anna, 9 days)
2. Event trend: 3 "confusion episodes" logged in 30 days (1/month before) -> raise at Oct 14 visit
3. Load: Maria 11 tasks/mo, Jon 9, Anna 3  <- ANNA UNDERLOADED, ask before adding to Maria
4. Upcoming: flu shot (Oct), furnace filter (Jon), eyewear check (unassigned)

Common Pitfalls

1. The group chat as the source of truth. Chats are where commitments go to die: no owner, no due date, buried in 40 messages about grandkids. Every commitment in chat that matters gets one line here (task add), even if it feels bureaucratic.
2. Rotation without a backup rule. "We take turns calling" fails the first week someone travels. Every rotation entry needs a swap rule (notify the group + find replacement OR the task defaults to the next person — pick one, state it).
3. Recording sensitive data in a shared cloud doc. Health details leak through shared links and abandoned accounts. This skill keeps data in one local file the family controls; if you sync it (family git repo, encrypted share), say so explicitly in the family and note who has access.
4. The emergency card that's out of date. A card generated once and photocopied five times is worse than none — new med added in March, card in wallets still shows April's list. Regenerate quarterly and on every med change; the footer shows the generation date.
5. One person becoming the invisible coordinator. The default failure of family care: one sibling does everything, burns out, resents. The meeting output shows task-load per person — use it to rebalance before the resentment, not after.
6. Ambiguous code status / documents. "We think there's a DNR somewhere" is a 3AM catastrophe. profile set --code-status plus where the document physically is. Same for POA (power of attorney) — healthcare and financial, who holds them, where the originals live.
7. Med list drift. After every visit that changes anything: update meds the same day (the visit-report template ends with "did meds change? y/n — if y, run med update now"). An out-of-date med list in a visit brief is actively dangerous.
8. Using the skill as a diagnosis log. Record observations ("asked the same question twice"), never interpretations ("early dementia"). Observations are shareable with doctors; interpretations start family wars.

Verification Checklist

• person add + profile set + task add (one recurring, one one-off) all wrote to care_state.json
• today shows the recurring items on the right days and flags unassigned tasks
• med add with --refill-left shows in the refill radar of today at the threshold
• visit-brief prints the packet: meds, events since last visit of that doctor, question list
• event log then meeting shows the event trend section
• emergency-card output is one page and includes the generation date
• handoff includes profile + schedule + contacts
• No network imports (grep requests/urllib/socket — empty)

One-Shot Recipes

New helper onboarding (paid caregiver starts Monday):

python3 scripts/elder_care.py handoff "NewCaregiver"   # print + hand over
python3 scripts/elder_care.py emergency-card            # fresh card for their binder

Post-hospital discharge chaos:

python3 scripts/elder_care.py event log "discharged Community Hosp, hip pinning, PT 2x/wk starts Thu" --severity 3
python3 scripts/elder_care.py med update warfarin --refill-left 20 --note "dose changed 5->4mg per discharge"
python3 scripts/elder_care.py task add --title "PT transport Thu" --owner Jon --due 2026-10-01
python3 scripts/elder_care.py emergency-card > card.txt   # reprint; meds changed

The monthly meeting:

python3 scripts/elder_care.py meeting | lp   # or print to PDF; run the meeting from paper

License & Disclaimer

MIT. Family-coordination tooling, not a medical device or medical record system: no clinical advice, no dosing decisions, no diagnosis. Medication data is a family-maintained list; the pharmacist and physicians own the truth. In an emergency call local emergency services first.