Navigating Life 
It was a frigid, snowy and rather unsettling February day for soon to be President and CEO, Dan Harrison of NuPath and his team back in 2013 – all of the Organization’s ‘Day’ programs had closed and transportation routes had been completed… so they thought.
It was late that afternoon when program managers and direct care professionals realized that a newly formed community group was not only late in returning to their home base, but were essentially missing and may potentially be stranded in severe weather conditions. Panic had set in and the search was on!
Unsettling was an understatement for Harrison, as his soon-to-be appointment to key leader of the Organization left him trying to understand how something like this could happen in such a transparent and technologically-advanced world – it was unacceptable in his eyes, avoidable by all accounts and it was his mission to never see it happen again.
The missing community group was ultimately found later that afternoon, their vehicle had suffered significant damage and was snow bound in a local parking lot, and the program participants on board were all in a dangerous and compromised location, outside of their vehicle, with no contingency plans in place for safety or protection.
It was virtually immediate that the idea to use technology to minimize risk and liability was born from this unfortunate but inevitable situation. It was NuPath’s responsibility to institute a multi-tiered technology platforms to track and monitor community-based groups in an attempt to minimize organizational risk, but this technology also provided real-time transparency for families, care givers and staff – a virtual ‘safe and private’ social platform that allowed a window into the daily lives of a loved one! Interestingly enough, this platform not only provided the Organization with a window into programs that minimized exposure and risk, but also gave them a tool for continued staff development, training and clinical data tracking.
Navigating Life®, became the rule at NuPath and dozens of teams were now on-line, up and running and users were abundant – so much so that in 2016 the development team behind the original tiered software embarked on a journey to combine the technologies currently driving the NL platform and create a formal ‘App’ that would literally change the face of community programming in the Human Services organizational space.