The (Software) Pathway Forward To Better Aged Care

A resident’s family members should be actively involved with their loved one. Allied health practitioners should have ready access to their patient’s care data. Both should have real time access to all relevant alerts and alert resolution. The number of family member complaints should be reduced accordingly.

All carers and managers should electronically acknowledge their acceptance of shift hand over data at the commencement of every shift.

All care plan activities should be scheduled and have delivery time tolerances with real time alerts for early or late delivery. All care plan activities should be customised specifically for each resident.

Resident assessments should be scheduled for re-assessment based on two criteria:

(a) There has been an apparent change in the resident’s care needs;

(b) The assessment validity period has expired.

All residents should be constantly surveyed as part of general conversation, regarding their level of satisfaction with recent care plan activities, by carers who were not the giver of the service. Manual audits and data sampling become redundant.

(a) Residents

All carers, nurses, managers, cleaning staff and kitchen staff, be they internal or external agency, must have full knowledge of each resident’s specific requirements, idiosyncracies, culture and life style choices at their fingertips when administering care.

(b) Financials

Each aged care bed should be treated as an individual cost centre.

The onus of carers remembering the current individual care needs of each resident should be removed completely. It is an encumbrance destined to fail and is completely unnecessary.

Reduce carer charting and documentation time. Allow real time capture, and allow the system to flag alerts based on individual resident parameters.

Eliminate the maintenance book by automating the notification via an integrated maintenance application.

Automate the three items above and negate the carer’s need to leave a room for documentation. Every five minutes saved equates to 5 more minutes of care or around $30,000.00 per annum saved for an average facility (90 beds).

Optimise daily activities to spread carer workloads, where acceptable to residents, even across shifts.

Funding

It would appear most providers apply annually for increased funding per resident, only if the documentation can be found to support a claim.

A system should automatically report, in real time, changes in levels of care needs for each resident, based on the fund cycle. (ACFI = 7 days)

Biannual funding increases instead of annual could result in increased funding in excess of $300,000 p.a. for an average facility.

Mandatory Audits

Mandatory auditing should become an integral component of daily care, with discrete, polite and appropriate enquiries prompted of carers regarding recent daily activities, and the resident answers recorded in real time. Therefore, any dissatisfaction may be actioned in a timely manor.

Shift Handover

Shift handover data, relevant to a carer’s role, should be available in real time, and not dependant upon verbal transmission and the availability of supervisors.

Incidents

Incidents (such as falls) requiring immediate additional care, should not rely on the availability of an RN, but should automatically inject clinical pathway activities (based on world’s best practice) into a resident’s schedule, pending further investigation.

Alerts

Any clinical alert (high or low blood pressure, high or low BGLs, skin integrity deterioration, pain, weight loss or gain, urine colour, et al.) should automatically inject clinical pathway activities, based on world’s best practice in the absence of specific MDs directives, pending further investigation.

Imagine reducing the cost of obtaining funding and performing mandatory audits down to one employee, irrespective of the number of residents or facilities. The result would be a saving of over $20,000.00 p.a. for an average facility.