Complete features
The whole feature list, grouped by work type. Barnaby Hub is maintained in compliance with hlc-g guidelines, and specific references are noted below.
Nothing here is a roadmap. Every entry below is built and in use.
Last updated October 16, 2026
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If something your committee needs is not here, that is worth knowing too — most of what is above exists because a committee asked for it.
From the first call through to a closed record.
Every patient situation is logged as a case — who they are, their doctor, hospital and preferred language, and what kind of help they need. A case can be a full HLC case, with the medical and spiritual detail that entails, or a simpler PVG Case for tracking visits only. Cases move through a clear lifecycle: open, put on hold while a decision is pending without cluttering the active list, and eventually closed.
Opening a case leads with a summary card — status and urgency, when it started, the patient, the facility and room, who carries it on the HLC side and who is visiting, the doctor, and when it last changed — so most questions are answered without scrolling. One row of buttons above it does what comes next: edit, transfer, put on hold, close, or send a doctor’s details. The history of facilities and assignments sits directly beneath, a bar of section names stays at the top as you scroll, and fields with nothing in them stay out of the way until asked for. The case list filters by status, type, zone, facility, congregation or HLC member in a tap or two.
Every case gets a primary and, optionally, a secondary HLC member responsible for it, and records which facility the patient is at — required for every case except one still at home, where there is nowhere yet to route visits to. Cases are routed to the right visitation team based on that facility, and every member sees their own workload on their home screen.
Once a case is routed to a hospital, the assigned PVG members — up to two on a case at once — log their visits and see the visit history, along with the patient details needed to make the visit — name, age, language, congregation and where to find them. Notes are required to log a visit: a record that says only that somebody went tells the next volunteer nothing. The moment a visit is logged the responsible HLC member is notified. If 48 hours pass with no visit logged at all, a reminder goes out and repeats daily until one is. A visit that cannot be saved says so rather than appearing to save. The Active Visits list only ever shows visits currently in progress; when visits end at a facility the case drops off it quietly, and its full history stays on the case. Volunteers are put on a case by HLC or by the coordinator responsible for that facility — and a volunteer who sees a case with an open place can put themselves on it in one tap, which tells the coordinators and the HLC members carrying it.
A case carries a lot of phone numbers, in one contacts panel split into two groups: the patient's own circle and the place they are in — the patient, the caller, the elder, both healthcare agents, the facility and room — and separately the committee people working it, which includes the assigned HLC members, every PVG volunteer on it, and the coordinators who cover whichever facility the patient is at right now. Each is labeled with who it belongs to, with a call and a text button beside it. Visiting volunteers get the same two groups on the visit screen, with the patient's circle necessarily thinner: the caller, the elder and the healthcare agents are not theirs to read. Members are listed by name, so you pick a person rather than a number. The same buttons are on every card in the member directory. Tapping one hands the number to the phone's own dialer or messaging app: nothing is routed through the service, nothing is billed, and it works with no signal.
Medical updates on a case are attributed to whoever wrote them, and only that person can change or remove what they wrote — an administrator can as a correction backstop, and every edit and deletion is recorded. Nobody quietly rewrites somebody else's account of a patient's situation.
Sometimes a case has to exist before anyone has spoken to the patient — a hospital chaplain mentions a Witness patient in their facility, and nothing has confirmed yet that the committee should be involved. Whoever creates the case switches on a flag, and a plain warning follows it onto the visit screen and the visit list, so the volunteer walking in knows to check first. It warns rather than blocks: stopping the visit from being recorded would only mean it happened and went unrecorded. Anyone who can see the visit clears it once contact has been made.
A volunteer creating a case often knows something HLC does not: that the patient's own congregation elders have not been told about the hospital stay. One box on the form says so. The PVG Coordinator and the zone's HLC members are told, and the case stays flagged — on its page and on the home dashboard — until an HLC member marks the elders as informed.
Volunteers are usually the first to know the visits are over — the patient went home, moved away, passed away or declined visits — but closing a case is HLC's decision. So on any case they visit, a volunteer uses Request Close and says which it was, and when. It goes straight to the HLC members on the case, or with none assigned, to the PVG Coordinator and the zone's HLC members, and repeats daily until someone closes the case, ends the visits only, or dismisses the request with a reason. Whatever the answer, the volunteer who asked sees it. On a PVG Case they can also ask for it to be promoted to a full HLC case. Either request shows on the visit page, as a badge on the case list and as its own count on the HLC dashboard, so a case waiting on a decision is never only in one person's inbox.
If a patient moves, a coordinator uses a dedicated transfer step — the new facility, whether the same doctor is continuing care, and any notes — rather than editing the old details in place. Every transfer is permanently recorded, so a case's full facility history, and every change in who is responsible for it, stays visible as one combined timeline. Volunteers are often the first to know a patient is moving, so they can report one — either already happened, or expected on a given date, which stays silent until the day before — and it repeats daily until somebody confirms or withdraws it.
A case generates a ready-to-send, filled-in copy of the official hlc-7 Medical Emergency Worksheet in one click, with nothing retyped onto a paper form by hand. The reverse works too: an hlc-7 received from another committee is uploaded, its fields matched against a new case automatically, and anything uncertain flagged for a person to confirm before the case is created. A flattened form is read as well as a fillable one — including one produced by a different committee's software, which labels and arranges the same fields its own way.
The home screen opens with a dashboard built from the member's own role. An HLC member sees the committee's whole position, the same figures narrowed to their zone, and their own assigned cases — including two separate counts for the two different gaps: a case with no HLC member carrying it, and a case where visits have started with no PVG volunteer on it. A PVG member sees their facility, what is assigned to them, what needs a visit, and what they have logged this month. Every figure is a link to exactly the records behind it, not to a list that has to be filtered again, and one tap shows a line under each figure saying exactly what it counts. It stays collapsed until it is wanted, showing only a headline and a count of whatever needs attention.
One box at the top of the home screen searches cases, members, doctors, facilities and congregations at once, and each result opens where its own list shows it. A volunteer's home screen also lists the patients they are visiting — facility, room, language and their own last visit — with Log a Visit on each card, and a short Get Set Up checklist walks every new member through the few things worth doing once.
At the top of the home screen, one card answers what the day holds, with the dashboard along its bottom edge: the events on it, any task due or overdue, and for a visiting volunteer how many patients are still waiting on a visit from them. Turn it over and it shows tomorrow. On a quiet day it says so, and names the next thing coming up.
Hospitals are where coverage dies, so the app is built to work offline. A volunteer with no signal can still open a case, log a visit or add notes; everything saves on the device and syncs the moment a connection comes back. A small marble beside each list shows whether everything is synced, still connecting, or waiting on a connection, and a short notice confirms each save.
Closing a case is a decision, not a status change. The committee chooses to archive it — identifying details removed automatically, with the free-text notes held for a person to read and edit before the redaction is finalized — or to delete it outright, which keeps a 30-day window in which it can still be recovered. Both are press-and-hold, so neither happens by a stray tap. Either way the case is then locked: nobody edits it, logs a visit to it or rewrites its updates, the volunteers assigned to it are released, and the HLC members carrying it are told who closed it and how. A deleted case also leaves members’ phones at their next sync rather than lingering there.
hlc-gCh. 9 §11 — reducing a closed record to non-identifying detail rather than discarding its training value
What happens before your first case, and what happens if you leave.
Upload the ZIP codes your committee covers and Barnaby builds the rest: every hospital and physician from the national provider register, and every congregation with its address, phone and meeting times. What would otherwise be thousands of entries manually entered one at a time is built automatically from a single upload.
Members and past cases come in from a spreadsheet in bulk. Each row is matched on whatever reference number you already use, so correcting something and uploading the file again fixes what is there instead of creating a second copy of everyone. Before anything is saved, a full trial run shows every row as new, updated (with each change, old to new) or skipped (with the reason), and a row that would fail is skipped rather than holding up the rest.
Your committee gets its own web address and its own private space. Members go there and sign in; there is nothing to download from an app store, though it can be added to a phone's home screen so it behaves like any other app.
A complete copy of the app, filled with an invented committee, its members, doctors and cases, is open to anyone with no sign-up — as an HLC member or as a PVG volunteer. It is entirely separate from every real committee, nothing typed there is a visitor's own words, and it resets every night, so a committee can show its members what they are agreeing to before anyone's real records are in it.
Every list — cases, members, doctors, facilities, congregations — exports to a spreadsheet at any time, without asking anyone. If a committee stops using the platform, its space is removed and its records go with it.
The lists a committee is judged by keeping current.
Each doctor carries the committee's own judgment — cooperation status, who last verified it and when, and the notes that go with it. Those notes are the committee's own and are never visible to another committee. Beneath the CDL sits a directory of doctors and facilities kept up to date from a free, official U.S. government provider registry, so nobody retypes names, addresses or phone numbers.
hlc-gCh. 4 and Appendix A — the Cooperative Doctors List
When a case names a facility or a doctor, it can only be chosen from the verified list, and the facility list is narrowed to the places the committee has assigned to a zone — a few dozen rather than several thousand. For a patient at a facility not on it, an Other option opens a plain text field, notes the zone so the case still routes correctly, and offers the real facility if we already hold it: choosing it files that hospital under the zone, so the list grows as it is used rather than only when an admin tends it.
When someone asks for a cooperative doctor, the details go out from the app in a couple of taps — by text, by email, or copied to paste anywhere — either from the doctors list or straight from a case, where it can send to the patient, caller, elder or anyone else whose number is on the case. Only six fields travel: name, specialty, sub-specialty, medical group, address and office phone. The committee’s own judgment about that doctor — their status, the notes, who verified them — never leaves the app. The sender sees exactly what the recipient will get first, and the phone’s own messaging app does the sending, so it works with no signal and nothing is billed.
The list filters by facility, by specialty, and by which committee member is the contact for that doctor — including a filter for the doctors nobody is currently liaising with, which is usually the more useful question. Each status group opens on demand rather than all at once.
A dedicated view shows how many cooperative or consulting doctors are on file for every specialty and flags the ones running thin; tap one to see exactly who counts toward it. A companion view lists every doctor added since the last completed quarterly meeting, so nothing new goes unreviewed.
The work the guidelines describe, in the app rather than in a drawer.
Scheduling a quarterly HLC meeting creates the real, standard seven-item agenda automatically, and three of those seven — doctor review, specialty coverage, and presentations made or upcoming — arrive already filled in from the app's own current data rather than as a blank template. A standing meeting can be set to repeat weekly, monthly, quarterly or yearly, appearing on everyone's calendar as one proper repeating entry rather than a wall of copies. A date only becomes a real meeting when someone opens it, which is what keeps those figures current instead of months stale.
hlc-gCh. 9 — the quarterly meeting agenda
Any HLC member can put a presentation forward, not only the coordinator. A submission waits for the Presentations Coordinator to approve it, and can be revised, withdrawn or declined with a reason in the meantime. Planning, scheduling and the report afterward all live in one place, and continuing-education presentations are marked as such, with the members qualified to deliver them flagged on the roster.
hlc-gCh. 4, 8 and 9 — the recurring presentation report, which also feeds the quarterly agenda
Alongside the history, a summary view reports what the committee has actually done: for a chosen year or across all of them, how many presentations were completed, how many people attended, how many carried continuing-education credit, and how many distinct facilities were reached — then the year-by-year trend, what is still in the pipeline, and breakdowns by facility, by presenter and by type. It exports to a spreadsheet or a printable PDF.
hlc-gCh. 4 and 9 — the presentation record the quarterly agenda draws on
The yearly hlc-30 — HLC and PVG member counts, a full doctor count by specialty, and a place to record the year's significant difficulties — generates in one click from live data instead of being compiled by hand every December. Each year's report is saved permanently, so past years stay exactly as they were when generated.
Who is who, who may do what, and how that is delegated.
Each side manages its own standing structure from its own admin page. For PVG: which zone each Zone Coordinator covers, which facilities each Hospital Coordinator is responsible for, and each member's home facility, with anyone missing one flagged so the gap is easy to spot. For HLC: which role, and which zone, each member holds. Both are laid out zone by zone so the whole structure is visible at once, and the zones themselves are editable as coverage needs change. A coverage map marks every facility with a Hospital Coordinator, every one without, and every one with open cases, so the gaps that matter are visible at a glance.
Every automatic message can be reworded by the committee that receives it. Open a notification, edit the text, and the parts filled in at send time — the patient, the facility, who is assigned, the date a reported transfer is due — stay as placeholders. The same wording is used for texts, emails and app notifications alike, and resetting restores the original. There is also a log of what was actually sent: who was told, by which method, when, and about which case, so "was he told?" is a question with an answer rather than an assumption.
Beyond the standard roles, individual abilities — creating a case, closing one, correcting a patient's details, confirming a reported transfer, posting an announcement, editing either organizational chart, managing notifications, and others — are each grantable to a specific person by an Admin without changing their overall role, and revocable the same way. A whole role can be granted at once instead, limited to what each of those people actually covers: their assigned facilities, or their zone if they are assigned none. Grants are laid out as one grid of members against permissions, and every change can be undone for a few seconds afterward. The committee delegates exactly the responsibility it means to delegate, to exactly the people and places it means.
Elders and ministerial servants who help the committee without being appointed members have their own role. They can be given exactly the tasks the committee wants them to carry — technical support for presentations, scheduling with medical professionals, keeping the doctors list current — one permission at a time. They see what a member sees, because the work brings them into contact with it, but they cannot open or change a case, and cannot be made responsible for a patient.
What the app tells people, and how they tell you something back.
Every automatic message the app sends — a visit logged, a case needing a PVG assignment, 48 hours passing with no visit — has its own page listing exactly who can receive it, with a separate choice of app notification, text message or email for each person. Recipients are described by their connection to the case (“the assigned primary HLC member”, “the Zone Coordinator covering that facility”) rather than by a list of names to maintain, so the rules keep working as people change roles. An entire role, or one named person, can be added to any notification. Because text messages cost real money per message, the page shows how many people a change would actually text before you confirm it. A log shows, day by day, what was actually sent, to whom and how, and anything still being tried.
Each recipient of each notification is set independently to an app notification, a text message, an email, or any combination. Every method chosen is sent on its own, so one failing never stops another, and one that fails is retried for a day before it is given up on. Text is the one that costs money per message, which is why the page shows how many people a change would text before it is confirmed.
An open case with an HLC member on it but no medical update and no logged visit for a set number of days can raise a reminder, repeating weekly until something is logged. It goes to the members carrying the case, to the zone’s named oversight contact, and to anyone else the committee adds. The number of days is the committee’s own setting, and the page shows how many open cases currently meet it before anyone switches it on — which matters most in the first weeks after a committee brings its history across, when much of that history is genuinely old.
Each zone can name one HLC member as its point of oversight, separately from who is assigned to any particular case. That person is one of the audiences a quiet-case reminder can reach, so a case that slips past the members carrying it still surfaces to someone.
Designated coordinators post an announcement that appears as a banner across the app for HLC, PVG or both — optionally limited to specific zones, and set to stop showing automatically after an expiry date.
Built to the standard a medical record system is held to, whether or not the law requires it.
A member signs in by entering their email and clicking a one-time link sent to their inbox — or, using the app from a phone's home screen, by typing the 6-digit code from the same email, which works only on the device that asked for it. A sign-in lasts about three months. There is no password to remember, to reuse somewhere else, or to turn up in somebody else's leak — and no password database that could ever be stolen. Sign-in attempts are rate-limited and screened by an invisible check for automated traffic.
hlc-gAppendix B — cybersecurity guidance; no standing password exists anywhere to leak or reuse
Because signing in is a link rather than a password, a fake login page has nothing to steal — the real risk is persuading a member to forward a genuine link. So the email greets the member by name, which someone working from a harvested address list cannot do, shows the full web address the link points to so a lookalike can be spotted, and states one rule plainly: nobody from the committee, and nobody from Barnaby Hub, will ever ask a member to share or forward a sign-in link.
What a member can see and do follows their role — not as a matter of which buttons are hidden, but as a hard rule the database itself enforces. A member simply cannot retrieve data they are not authorized to see, even asking for it directly. HLC and PVG see different things because they need different things: a PVG member gets where, when and which room, and the clinical and insurance detail is never sent to their device at all.
hlc-gAppendix B §5 — grant only the minimum level of access required, implemented as a database rule rather than a policy someone must remember
As other committees join the platform, each is a separate tenant. Every table carrying committee information is stamped with its owning committee and the database refuses to return or accept a row belonging to anyone else, so a mistake in the application cannot put one committee's records in front of another. Two committees may each hold a record for the same hospital; the notes each writes about it stay entirely private to that committee.
hlc-gCh. 9 — the quarterly agenda's own specialty-gap and recently-added items
An interactive map shows where HLC and PVG members, cooperative doctors and hospitals are, color-coded by service zone, so coordinators can see coverage across the whole territory at a glance. Thousands of pins stay quick to move around: nearby ones merge into numbered bubbles that split apart as you zoom in.
hlc-gAppendix A — the local hospital list, PVG list and territory map, as one always-current view
Cooperative doctors, congregations, facilities and the full member roster each have their own directory, built the same way: cards, filters for the details that matter, a sort by distance from where you are, and a map view of the same results. On a phone, swiping a card offers Call and Directions, and a letter rail jumps through a long list. A doctor's card shows how long since anyone verified them; a congregation's shows its meeting days for the week; a facility's shows its open cases, its Hospital Coordinator and whether anyone has visited lately, so a facility with cases and nobody covering it stands out. A facility shows the open cases at it, by name, so “who do we have in there right now” is answered from the facility rather than by filtering the case list. The roster filters by language spoken — matching both a member's primary language and any others they list — which is what you want when a patient needs someone who speaks theirs. A doctor can be linked to as many facilities as they practice at, and the directories link to each other — a doctor to their facilities, a facility to its doctors, a congregation to its members — with Back retracing each step. Any list exports to a spreadsheet or a printable PDF with whatever filter is currently applied.
hlc-gCh. 9 — the annual report due to the branch office each December
When a patient traveling for treatment needs lodging help, the request ties directly to their case and tracks whether they and their family qualify for special accommodation rates. A roster of available local lodging — hotels, and private homes willing to host — is there to match against, and a private home offered up goes through an approval step before it becomes usable.
hlc-gCh. 7 — the Special Medical Needs room request and accommodation roster
Meetings, trainings and events are created in the app and subscribed to from anyone's own phone or computer calendar — Apple, Google or Android — so they appear alongside everything else in a member's life. A scheduled meeting or an upcoming presentation appears there automatically the moment it is scheduled, and the subscription carries the committee's own name so it is obvious which one it is. Inside the app the home screen lists what is coming up, with a month view that marks every date carrying something and opens that day's events when tapped.
Training materials, presentation resources and other reference documents are uploaded and organized in the app's own Knowledge Base, so members always have the current version of anything they need — no separate binder or shared drive to keep in sync.
hlc-gCh. 10 and Appendix A — clinical strategies documents, presentation folders and training materials, kept current in one place
A plain-language guide to every major feature, built into the app itself, so there is no separate document to find or to keep updated by hand. Short training videos sit beside it, each with its steps listed underneath — tap a step to jump the video there — and a link to the article it belongs to.
The manual's What's New tab lists what has changed in the app, newest first, each with a link to the article or video about it, and each member sees only the changes that apply to them. When a new version goes live while someone has the app open, a bar at the top of their screen says so, with one tap to reload — never on its own, so nothing half-typed is lost.
Each kind of record is kept for the period the guidelines set for it, and no longer. Meeting and presentation records age out on their own schedule — the app applies it rather than anyone having to remember to. A closed case has its identifying details removed, or is deleted, when the committee closes it.
hlc-gCh. 9 §15 — records retention; nothing is kept indefinitely by default
hlc-gThe branch office's supplementary letter on assistance by younger elders and ministerial servants
Every few months a member is shown their own email, phone, address and congregation and asked whether they are still right — one button if they are, a link to the form if they are not. Nothing is blocked either way. It prevents the familiar problem of a committee discovering a number is three years old at the moment it needs to use it.
Tracked per member rather than remembered, so the committee can see at a glance who has confirmed and who has not.
Anyone can submit a bug report or an idea directly in the app, with screenshots, PDFs or notes attached, and a built-in forum lets members ask questions and get help from each other and from admins. Anyone who can see a report can add their own screenshot to it, so a second person seeing the same problem adds to it rather than filing a duplicate. Completed and withdrawn requests move to their own collapsed section, and the list can be searched and filtered by status, by group or by member. Whoever maintains the platform is emailed on every new request and every note, including notes on ones already closed.
Every change to a sensitive record — created, edited or deleted — is logged automatically, field by field: who did it, when, and exactly what changed. The full before-and-after detail is held for a limited window; after that the values are stripped while the record of who changed what, and when, is retained for the period the guidelines set. The accountability trail outlasts the sensitive content rather than preserving it indefinitely.
hlc-gCh. 9 §15(3) — patient records, after redaction
An admin sees every device a member is signed in on — what kind of phone or computer, which browser, and whether it is in use right now — and can sign out one device, or every device belonging to a member, the moment a phone goes missing or access needs to be revoked.
Anything that cannot be undone — deleting a case, finalizing a redaction, removing a member or a document — takes a deliberate press and hold, and a quick tap only explains what it would do. Everyday admin changes, like a permission or a member's role, save at once and offer Undo for a few seconds instead of asking whether you are sure. A deleted document or attachment, or a replaced photo, is kept for 30 days in case it was a mistake, then removed for good.
Information is encrypted both where it is stored and while it travels between a device and the app — the same protection a bank's site uses. Backups are encrypted before they leave the server, so the company storing them cannot read what they hold.
hlc-gAppendix B §4 — data storage and sharing; records and backups secured with encryption
The whole database is backed up automatically every night to a separate, encrypted, off-site location. More to the point, restoring from a real one is rehearsed rather than assumed — automatically every month, checking that the restored copy is complete, recent, and matches the live records. Backups are not kept forever — they age out on a set schedule, so a properly deleted record does not quietly live on in one.
hlc-gAppendix B §4 — separate, off-site backups, and Ch. 9 §15's retention principle
To make offline use possible, a copy of a member's own relevant records is kept on their phone or computer and syncs back once they reconnect. It is removed from the device when they sign out, and when a different member signs in on the same browser.
Who can see what, the separation between committees, and single-use sign-in links are tested automatically whenever anything in the app changes, so a mistake there is caught before it reaches a committee. A weekly check confirms the things that would otherwise fail silently — that the backups really ran, that scheduled jobs are still going.