The aged care sector in Australia is at a critical moment in time, owing to both recent Royal Commission findings and COVID-19. This, coupled with the prospect of people living longer and the statistic that baby boomers comprise 21.5% of the Australian population in 2021, demonstrates an ever-increasing demand for aged care services.
The Royal Commission into aged care has found a need for immediate improvement to efficiencies that lead to a long-term digital transformation of the entire sector. Outlined in several recommendations of the Aged Care Royal Commission Final Report is a need to invest in technology and information and communications systems to support the new aged care system of tomorrow.
So how can technology shape the reform of the aged care sector?
In the future, it is imperative that aged care providers continue to evolve to meet the new standard in healthcare and continue to deliver the optimal level of care.
FUJIFILM Business Innovation Australia works with care providers of all types, delivering technology solutions that enable better control of data, improved task management across all functions and enabling better care experiences through improved processes.
In the aged care industry, there is a significant opportunity to let automation take the burden of repetitive tasks away from humans:
Improve Data Management
With a view to recommendation 27 from the Royal Commission report (focused on being able to provide records in a standardised manner to ensure faster decisions), this type of solution is tailor-made for Aged Care providers to help improve the quality-of-care experiences for patients and their families through more efficient data management, and extended capabilities for care personalisation through integrated data management. Better content management has any number of use cases, but the most prevalent examples come in the following areas:
- Resident or patient record management
- Integrated care plans and service delivery management
- Complaint and case management
- Quality assurance and compliance management
- Resident of patient records scanning service
Process Automation
Process Automation has the ability to take a wide array of existing high-volume, simple and complex processes and dramatically improve them by reducing time demands of staff and making errors less likely to occur. Providers can start by moving data away from paper to enable digital solutions for data management.
These benefits touch large areas of business, such as improving digital communications to ensure patients and their families are getting the right information when they need it. And where this change is implemented, data can then be more effectively managed and the value from it extracted to enable better care and enhanced experiences.
Typical examples of how to deliver these benefits lie in a few common areas of support:
- Residents or staff onboarding
- Digitised documents reducing storage issues across all areas of a provider’s business
- Claims, orders and accounts payable / receivable processing
- Visitor screening and management
Outsourcing
Look for where work doesn’t need to be done in-house, reducing the time and resource burden for services that could also be completed faster by specialists. From our perspective, we have a long history in managed services that are either delivered on our customers’ premises or from our own offices — meaning providers get what they need and how they need it. This may be in support of improved communications with residents or optimised hardware usage within a provider’s infrastructure. You can reduce the IT burden by removing administrative tasks and a redundant IT Infrastructure. Typical examples include:
- Managed IT & Print Services (MPS)
- Marketing & Communication Services
