Supporting evolution in the aged care industry

Aged care providers are being required to change and evolve at the same time the aged care sector is undergoing transformation. Providers need to respond to the new landscape as well as the needs and desires of modern-day clients to be able to continue to deliver services, grow sustainably and survive in an increasingly competitive environment.

SUPPORTING EVOLUTION IN THE AGED CARE INDUSTRY

WHITEPAPER

THE QUALITY OF YOUR NETWORKS WILL DETERMINE YOUR SUCCESS

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Harnessing technology and using it effectively gives providers the ability to offer sustainable aged care services more efficiently and cost-effectively, as well as to develop new and innovative ways to engage both clients and staff.

WHITEPAPER: Supporting evolution in the aged care industry. The quality of your networks will determine your success.

Australia’s aged care system is world class, yet faces the common global challenge of more and more people in need of specialised care in the future. Meanwhile, the aged care sector is in the midst of a 10-year period of major reform including the adoption of the Consumer Directed Care (CDC) model that offers clients greater control, choice and flexibility in aged care services.

Implications for providers are many. With government efforts to ensure the aged care system is sustainable and affordable, the sector is under pressure to cut costs or provide services at less remuneration.1 At the same time, reform designed to give clients more control and choice, as well as easier access to a full range of aged care services, intensifies competition between providers. This risks untested and untried providers moving into areas of care with which they have little experience and other providers dropping prices while lowering the quality of care provided.2

The focus on clients means they will have greater expectations than ever before. Not only are aged care recipients demanding high-quality care services, but they are also actively looking at how to maintain or improve lives through the use of technology, such as using social networks to actively communicate with family and avoid

social isolation. In essence, they expect an excellent customer experience and a personalised level of care that will give them a better quality of life.

What this means is that to survive in a multifaceted, competitive marketplace, aged care providers will need to continuously improve existing services and offer new ones that appeal to clients. Technology offers endless possibilities to do this, yet will require a strong foundation of a reliable network infrastructure to support improvements, change and evolution, whether the latest development in wearable technology or access to streaming entertainment for clients.

In this paper, we explore the role of a network environment in supporting the many changes taking place in the aged care sector; and why and how a flexible, stable and scalable network is essential.

1 For example, in 2016 the Department of Health limited the fees that can be charged to aged care residents. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/companies/aged-care-sector-under-fresh-funding-pressure-as-government-updates-fee-guidelines/news-story/ce70240d4e3e2f7564299da6dd019a04

2 Hammond Care, ‘Change, choice and competition in aged care presents opportunity and risk’ (27 Feb 2017)

The pressures on the aged care sector are significant. Demand for aged care services is growing as more Australians live longer. There are other challenges in providing sustainable and quality care services such as financial pressures, and how to retain and develop the workforce.

To address these challenges, aged care providers need to not fall behind in adopting the latest technology and providing innovative services and technologies to stay ahead of the competition.

Aged care providers can use technology to:

• Improve responsiveness, flexibility and the capacity to meet current and future care recipients’ needs.

• Drive efficiency as well as service innovation to deliver sustainable and higher quality care and services.

• Build financial sustainability and resilience through optimising capital and funds.

To support the use of innovative technology such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality and emerging applications, aged care providers can expect to quickly face an increased need for bandwidth to support applications and services. A highly robust and scalable network will be the foundation for addressing the revolution in customer service and new technologies to deliver new opportunities for the organisation, and at the same time, improve end-user productivity.


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THE NEEDTO KEEP UP THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

REVOLUTION

Today’s clients are demanding more control and information – and a superior customer experience with an emotional connection. Aged care providers faced with competition from other providers need to stand out from the pack to attract new clients who are empowered to choose their service providers. Providing excellent customer service is a competitive advantage, and will drive engagement and loyalty. Technology can support this experience, and clients will expect that providers are using the latest technology to meet their needs.

Consumer Directed Care means that clients are not only choosing their providers but particular kinds of services and experiences. They are demanding a highly personalised experience, and to have their individual needs met. Technology can help identify, analyse and record those needs, and help provide a personalised experience, whether by remembering specific dietary requirements and preferences or preferred leisure activities and ways of communicating.

Data on the recipients of care is an invaluable asset for any aged care provider, and is the basis on which exceptional customer experience is built and maintained. Data enables aged care providers to define, understand and continue to engage on a highly personalised level with clients, and supports insightful decisions on the delivery of care service.

Clients will also want to interact and manage this and other information securely online – including billing and financial information and personal preferences. So, the collection, analysis and protection of this data, as supported by technology, is crucial – and is only possible through a robust network with fast, available and secure connectivity to upload data for safe storage and use. In fact, there’s the greater potential to upload that data to the cloud and analyse it using applications to pick up trends – so clients’ behaviour can be predicted and their needs better met.

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A BRAND NEW WORLD OF SERVICES AND TECHNOLOGY

Aged care providers are exploring new services to better serve clients and empower staff. New applications are providing clients with better services and more autonomy and choice. All of these need to be underpinned by a high-performance network to function effectively.

One of the biggest technology developments is the Internet of Things (IoT) that combines connectivity with physical objects. For aged care providers, an example would be to use IoT in care centres for building and facility maintenance: for more effective or comfortable heating and cooling, saving electricity by turning off lights in rooms not in use, and even security and locks.

Another of the biggest revolutions is wearable technology.

Wearable technology that counts your steps and measures your heartbeat is an amazing example of how health care is being revolutionised through technology. Some people use applications on their smartphone while others have devices that attach to their wrist, are worn around the neck or can be placed in a pocket.

At the most basic, devices count your steps and encourage you to move and keep active during the day. But new technology is offering more than that, including measuring your heart rate. New wearable technology and sensors are being specially designed and trialed to advise aged care residents when they should eat, drink, take medication and other tasks. If successful, this could translate to residents having more autonomy in facilities with fewer checks needed by nurses as the wearables report on their vital statistics.

Nurse call technology is also evolving, aided by wireless networks, mobile applications and even real-time locating systems. Wearable technology can help nurses or staff pinpoint the location of residents at any time, or vice versa.

Various health-related data from wearables can be gathered, analysed and reported by smartphones. All of these developments offer aged care providers opportunities to improve data, personalisation and services, but all will require network support, a local area network to allow wearables to connect to Wi-Fi facilities, while a wide area network takes care of uploading that data for safe storage and analysis.

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Other exciting developments include:

• Video conferences can be used to connect staff at different locations, care teams, and carers with clients and their families.

• Digital whiteboards are now being used instead of physical whiteboards, which can improve the workflow of nurse stations and more effectively provide information about clients, improving their satisfaction.

• Telehealth is being seen as an efficient and effective way to connect health care professionals and staff with each other and with their clients.

• Diagnostic kits are now less expensive and can be used in the home. Weight scales are enabled by Wi-Fi. The personal health data collected can be used to improve care.

• The collection of information is being made more effective for managers and staff as they use notebooks, notepads and smartphones to record information, including by using built-in cameras or taking voice notes on recording applications.

Another major area of change is in access to information. The new government electronic health records are meant to provide clients with better access to personal information, and provide health care professionals with better information, reducing duplication and misinformation. In the meantime, clients can access their electronic health records with greater ease.

In order to remain competitive and sustainable, aged care service providers will need to embrace and facilitate this new landscape where care recipients and families are expecting on-demand access to health data. This may mean new ways of gathering and sharing data such as blood pressure, heart rate, sugar levels and pathology results. It could mean finding ways to better facilitate this access to personal information, including through self-service access, and at the same time, ensuring the security and confidentiality of this information.

Who would have predicted the way that people of all ages have adopted social networking? Facebook used to be a place of the young. Seniors have adopted easy-to-use tablets and are actively Skyping their grandchildren and playing bridge and Scrabble through the internet.

And who could have predicted the way clients are consuming entertainment, whether on Netflix or other on-demand movie and television services, and choosing how to watch favourite shows on a smart-phone, laptop or desktop, or through smart TVs and entertainment systems?

Aged care residents are actively using end-point devices for entertainment, and in the meantime, using tablets and smartphones to keep connected with family, community and resources like never before.

The new ease of communication, through email, SMS, Skype and social networking means that clients share information with each other, and decisions about health care. The choice of service providers may be taken by families or influenced by other larger social groups, so providers need to excel in the services they are providing, such as the ones that rely on a high-quality network.

However, it is unlikely that aged care facilities have factored in the need for their networks to provide the required bandwidth, and how many and how often residents would be using the internet. Aged care facilities must facilitate residents to social network and be entertained; and the higher the quality of the services, the better competitive advantage this presents.

This also provides advice for the future. Who knows what new trends will emerge? Aged care providers need to establish strong and adaptable network architecture now, so that it can be scaled up according to needs without having to replace it.

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THE UNSEEN FACTOR BEHIND YOUR SUCCESS

This section elaborates and focuses on how decisions and deployment of a network can affect business initiatives, and ultimately, the success of aged care provision.

The network is the foundation for supporting and enabling strategic business goals and providing innovative service offerings. In fact, before an organisation can even consider rolling out new technology and services, it is highly recommended that the network environment be assessed to ensure that it can meet business requirements.

The new aged care landscape is using applications with high bandwidth while businesses are collecting an enormous repository of data: these could push current networks to their breaking point. And whatever the value of new applications and data collection, it is useless if it is not available or its performance is network constrained.

YOUR NETWORK NEEDS

What are your network needs? Here are examples of potential needs of different aged care providers:

• A scalable and agile network solution that can be programmatically reconfigured to meet the requirements of new services.

• A converged network infrastructure to support centralised management and alerting that incorporates voice, video, nurse call, fire alarm, lighting, building security, lifts and air handling systems.

• The ability to prioritise network traffic to enable applications to perform effectively all the time – locally, across facilities and into the cloud.

• Infrastructure that can be managed centrally across multiple sites or a campus to consistently deliver services.

• The ability to handle new functionality such as VOIP, data archiving and rich-media and image transfers resulting from Big Data and technology trends such as cloud services, mobile devices and IoT.

Requirements for network connectivity will vary. Any provider with multiple facilities will need redundant, flexible, centrally managed connectivity between sites as well as to cloud services to ensure services are always on.

At each individual facility, local, fixed and wireless networks are needed to support business applications, IoT devices, end user devices and mobility solutions.

Local Wi-Fi networks will provide the connectivity for records, applications, printers and telephony. But wireless networks may be outdated and need updating to support contemporary network standards with centralised management. They’ll need to be able to provide a separation between the secure operational data that keeps your organisation running and understand your clients, and the less-essential non-secure data that residents may use for entertainment and other uses.

HOW DO YOU CHOOSE?

How do you choose the right network to suit your business model as an aged care provider? You need to consider what bandwidth you need and the size of your workloads. Here are some considerations:

• Do you have enough capacity to introduce new business applications?

• Have you considered how aggregated data from different sources can put a strain on your network?

• Will you implement collaborative applications that are bandwidth-intensive such as videoconferencing, unified communications and video streaming?

• How you evaluated your network to ensure there are no potential bottlenecks or single points of failure that can interrupt data processing and movement for applications?

• Have you considered redundancy to support better performance and failover capability to compensate for faulty links?

• Can you centralise data centres, voice, video and internet to provide gains in performance and efficiency?

• What are the best elements of different network architectures to suit your requirements? Borderless networks architecture? Data centre and virtualisation architecture? Collaboration architecture? What different design architectures will enable network architects to create the best solutions for your needs?

YOURNETWORK:

Ensure you have the reliable data systems, care resources and competitive advantage required for success.

Drive productivity by supporting your administration and management to work at its most effective, providing fixed network points for the efficient operation of bigger devices, and wireless for the use of mobile staff and residents, and internet-dependent applications. Improve the handling of information and reduce paperwork. All of this improves the quality of care and more effectively supports the work of mobile staff.

Improve end-user productivity and enable faster decision-making through faster access to information, including the capacity to scale up during the peak times your organisation needs it the most.

Attract new clients and engage and keep current ones by extending existing applications and deploying new ones, along with excellent data management to provide personalised service.

Provide residents of aged care homes with additional services ranging from on-demand video to reduced costs for local and international calls.

Enable more accurate and sustainable record keeping – a vital benefit as regulations and reporting guidelines become more stringent and funding is dependent on specific documentation of an individual’s needs.

Give care recipients a sense of security in knowing their privacy and confidentiality is protected while using cloud-based software and applications. Network visibility allows the capture of data that provides insight into network performance, see security threats and respond to them and protect the network from breaches.

Save on fixed costs as well as ongoing maintenance through integrating multiple data, voice and video services and centralising connections to remote offices. Better manage the costs of services such as disaster recovery. Allocate resources more efficiently, allowing IT resources to focus on growth instead of maintenance.


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THE BENEFITS OF AN AGILE NETWORK INFRASTRUCTURE

An effective network provides the foundation for the current and future work of aged care organisations and delivers crucial benefits. Here are some examples:

FINANCIAL SURVIVALAn agile network infrastructure

PRODUCTIVITYA software-defined network solution

EFFICIENCYA fast network

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENTA robust network

ADDITIONAL REVENUE STREAMSA converged network

COMPLIANCEA single, converged technical infrastructure

SECURITYNetwork visibility

COST AND EFFICIENCY SAVINGSA centralised single high-capacity network

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To find out more about our network solutions, call us at 1300 800 000, email us at [email protected] or visit nexon.com.au/aged-care-solutions

In this whitepaper, we’ve described the changing landscape of aged care provision in Australia, why technology can be used as a competitive advantage, and how networks provide the underlying support for more efficient and cost-effective, sustainable aged care services and new innovative applications and services to deliver benefits to clients and staff.

The modern-day client is demanding a higher level of customer service, and new services and products require a robust, stable and powerful network infrastructure. This paper summarises the varied network needs of aged care providers, considerations for choosing a network, and the benefits of an agile network structure.

Whether you need to upgrade your current network or move to a new one, Nexon and Cisco represent a partnership that will provide the solution you need, backed by outstanding customer service, long technical experience and security standards compliance.

Let us work with you to identify the right network solution for you.

WHY NEXON?Make Nexon your partner to support you in providing aged care services throughout the continuum of care. We provide the right combination of technology, experience and people to support your business to thrive. Nexon has a long history in networking, as well as in deploying networks, cloud and infrastructure services. We partner with leading technology providers such as Cisco to deliver best-in-class solutions to enhance your ICT environment in line with your changing needs.