Aged care digital challenges and how to overcome them

At an aged care industry forum held in Sydney mid-June 2017, the future impact of technological innovations on the sector was dissected and discussed. Involved in this symposium were Carl Rodrigues, CEO of Canadian mobility solutions provider Soti; Adele Beachley, Soti’s APAC MD; Rodney Gedda, senior analyst at Telsyte; self-styled aged care tech health expert Dr George Margelis; and David Robinson, consulting director of third party IT firm Envisian.

These five spoke at length about the tech challenges to be faced by aged care providers in the short-to-medium term, and how myriad digital solutions can be employed to thwart them. Collated below are the key points from these speakers, adapted with light editing into an unnumbered listicle.

• Most important thing for me about technology being used to connect to sensors. The touch-/measurement point used to be when you go to the hospital, visit the doctor and then have tests and diagnostics done. Now there is the ability to stream information in real time when people are moving around without really encumbering them. What that means is that you can diagnose things at the earliest possible point and have the opportunity to provide treatment at the earliest possible time and therefore have the best outcomes. (CR)
• A tsunami of connected devices can really change an industry. Every device people use – all the devices that come into aged care facilities and hospitals – will be connected to the internet, reporting diagnostics and generating a lot of data. It’s a good opportunity to focus on mobility for aged care. Look at the go-to-market model: a lot of devices are being procured personally (a phenomenon referred to as BYOD); and a lot of applications that are coming, whether we like it or not, on our mobile devices. What does that mean for an aged care facility to get the best outcome? They need to engage with the service provider to ensure they are getting something that is useful to them and so they are getting the information they need and can use. (RG)
• I’ve seen several hundred solutions for aged care over the years, and they’ve all been very nice solutions, but the problem is that they have been bespoke solutions designed around a single organisation’s problems at a single point in time. As they tried to roll those solutions out into a broader environment, it usually crashes and fails because they are not built on scalable infrastructure or architecture, they are not built on standardisation. This means information from source A can’t be used by source B. You need to reinvent it again. A classic example: when I was at the hospital, we had 140 different databases inside the hospital and patients could be on 30 or 40 of those, and each time information had to move from one to another we literally had to transcribe data; print out a form from hospital system A, give to a clerk in hospital system B, and ask him or her to type it in. (GM)
• How do we harness incredible innovations and manage the difficulties of change so that we can avoid the chaotic and expensive situations that a lot of large organisations get themselves into during transformations? A lot of existing organisations that try to change often take it on a large scale and unfortunately they have legacy systems; historic information; existing processes, people and a culture that doesn’t keep up with what the technology can do. Their ability to change runs into all these barriers and is limited. Organisations, people and processes don’t change at the same pace as technology. Other constraints, especially in aged care, are around security of information, and legislative and compliance framework. Anyone involved in a health organisation would understand – especially if you are working through transformations and digital revolutions – the restrictions we work under in compliance and regulatory frameworks. Health information is protected under a large number of state and national acts. If you are not aware of those you can run into strife. Organisations need to do their homework before they go on their transformation journey. As it changes across jurisdictions, they need to understand the different rules that apply in different areas. (DR)
• I went online as if I were the person looking for home healthcare, to see how I would go about doing that. I tried to embark on this search through the My Aged Care Portal – it is fantastic that it does exist – and what I found was that there are actually 22 different options for types of home-based care that you can pick and choose from. From there I put in my postcode and what came out was literally hundreds of different types of providers within my single postcode. What struck me was how difficult it is to choose from the myriad options for types of care. There is a searchable database, and it is awesome that it exists, but it is all based on your location. there is no customisation or personalisation based on need or actual information about the person. (AB)
• Data. Every device will generate data. Any device that is checking health or location or diagnostics will result in a lot of data. That’s why the corporate systems need to catch up. The cloud will probably help in terms of enabling these organisations to better digest and get better analytics from the data that is being generated. But the future of aged care, like healthcare in general, is all about analytics and having the best access to the data and making sure that the processes and systems we have in place are meaningful and are helping people. (RG)
• One of the key issues is workforce. It’s all well and good saying we are going to provide a technological solution to workers but we need them to understand how it works and how they can function with it. Is there a robust infrastructure behind it to sort out problems? For example, when visiting a client and an app or device stops working, how do you manage that sort of thing? What’s the requisite workflow to make that work again? You need to build it on infrastructures that work in other industries and that’s why it’s really important that companies develop infrastructures and bring them into healthcare and aged care. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to core things like infrastructure, like financial systems. There are parts of aged care that are very specific to the sector but 80 per cent of the business is run the same; running the kitchen is the same in a restaurant as in an aged care facility. You need to understand and take advantage of those sort of core industry things that are already available today and then finetune for our industry. (GM)
• People are still concerned about the security implications of having so many connected devices in the house. Health and wellbeing data is very important to us and we don’t want it to be compromised,  to be used for drug company marketing and whatnot. There is a lot of concern about how our data might be used. We need to be sure security is top of mind as we transition from legacy analogue and paper-based processes to connected devices, the internet of things and digital aged care. (RG)
• We can learn from the mistakes and successes of others, instead of simply jumping into a cloud or digital solution lock, stock and barrel and trying to catch up. I think the aged care and home care industries is placed in a situation where there is an opportunity to leap ahead. The benefits of mobility and big data and medical technology can be harvested, with constraints. When we look at transformations and health organisations and what they are trying to achieve; you need an effective strategy, to take into account what you are trying to achieve with what you have now – existing systems, history data, capacity of your organisation to change – and you will be much more effective to break down these transformations into a chunk, to get one benefit at a time in a consistent strategy. (DR)
• How do we ensure providers are delivering a customised level of care specific to individuals needs? I think technology is really at the heart of that, and helping to ensure that a level of personal connection and social interaction is maintained. We’ve got to put the user at the center. We’ve got a government that is spruiking digital transformation. If you’ve tried to use the MyGov portal, you know it can be quite confusing and quite overwhelming. So how do you simplify that to ensure the ageing community has access to the services that they actually need? (AB)

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