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By: Aaron Mullins
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The Aged Care industry has been put under the microscope in recent years, and the findings point to the need to create robust processes to ensure the quality of care to all customers using any form of Aged Care services. One of the paths which many organisations are going down to provide quality care is through harnessing the power of software solutions. The ability and benefits of utilising software are compelling: improve processes and productivity, deliver better customer and employee experiences, manage risks, and control costs.
It would be easy to assume the proliferation of digital technology has made this process of pairing business-focused philosophies with software development models par for the course – but some industries have been quicker on the uptake than others. The Aged Care industry, for example, has traditionally been behind the curve when it comes to adopting digital technologies that streamline processes, reduce the burden of paperwork, and ultimately improve the quality of care.
The industry began to embrace digital technology in 2005 when the Commonwealth introduced infrastructure funding for upgrades to Aged Care facilities. This encouraged many facilities to replace antiquated paper-based processes with software systems that delivered efficient and accurate data management. Since then, however, the adoption and upgrade of technology has moved slower than other industries – until now.
This continued reliance on inefficient and unreliable methods of managing vital information can have a detrimental impact on Aged Care customers, whose right to access safe and quality care and to live without abuse or neglect is compromised – and the consequences can be severe: from a lack of visibility on incident investigation, actions and follow-up to a siloed approach between governance and other systems. Increasingly aware of this, the Australian Government intervened.
Aged Care Quality Standards
In 2019, the Aged Care Quality Standards came into effect. These apply to all Australian Government-subsidised Aged Care services and clearly define what good care should look like – making it easier to check that people are receiving the care they deserve.
Determined to avoid a box-ticking exercise, the government introduced a system that focuses on caring for the individual's needs. Each of the eight standards addresses an aspect of care that contributes to safety, health and well-being:
- Consumer dignity and choice
- Ongoing assessment and planning with consumers
- Personal care and clinical care
- Services and supports for daily living
- Organisation's service environment
- Feedback and complaints
- Human resources
- Organisational governance
How Camms is helping in the Aged Care industry
Camms' integrated cloud-based solutions are assisting many Aged Care providers in improving their service quality, ensuring the safety of their customers, and bringing them in line with the Aged Care Quality Standards.
- Personal care and clinical care: incident, hazard and near-miss management solutions ensure that customers receive safe and effective personal care. Our risk management solution helps Aged Care organisations provide effective remedies for all high impact or high prevalence risks while creating transparent reporting using configurable reporting tools.
- Feedback and complaints: capture, triage, investigate and action feedback and complaints from customers and their families using our digital workflow tool and easily report on trends and emerging issues using our self-service reporting tool.
- Human resources: our talent management solution monitors and reviews the performance of each member of the workforce, ensuring they’re meeting the minimum standard of training and giving them the opportunity to discuss further training opportunities and upskilling.
- Organisational governance: our suite of integrated solutions combines to power organisational governance of any Aged Care organisation.
- Our strategy solution assists in aligning organisational plans, KPIs and scorecard and the setting and tracking of organisational performance.
- Our risk management solution reports on organisational and clinical risks, controls and treatment actions.
- Our incident management solution facilitates the capture of clinical and organisational incidents.
- Our compliance management solution provides oversight and accountability for changes in regulation and internal policies.
The Australian Aged Care industry has all the ingredients required to finally embrace digitisation to the full: government standards that make it easier to check that people receive good care; government arrangements that require facilities to implement effective incident management systems that enable them to meet those standards; and access to integrated software platforms to make this possible.
With integrated solutions in risk, strategy, projects and people, Camms software is helping many Australian Aged Care organisations make the right decisions, manage risks, capture and investigate incidents, align talent, and focus on what matters.
Aaron Mullins
Principal Consultant
