Innovative processes deliver optimised care for your home care clients

Innovation and efficiency will be a critical influence on how – and where – aged care is managed over the coming years. 

When the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety handed down its final recommendations in 2021, it included ‘Meeting preferences to age in place’ as one of its top priorities. 

That recommendation was echoed by the Aged Care Taskforce just this year as they called for an aged care system that supports older people to live at home for as long as they wish and can safely do so.

Aged care service providers know their clients want to stay at home: the total demand for home care services has grown by one-third since 2020.

But for home care providers themselves, present-day challenges such as staff availability, limited time or resources and administrative burdens can often get in the way of providing truly meaningful care. 

Plenty of aged care workers likely feel as though they’re rushing between jobs and can barely afford the time to complete the task at hand, let alone chat with a resident or provide much-loved company. 

When you’re looking at enabling people to stay at home, efficiency is key. Redmap’s Automated Accounts Payable solution addresses efficiency as it is designed specifically to support home care providers and in turn, their care clients who want to age within their own homes. 

All service providers should operate on the fundamental concept that they can put time, resources and effort into the areas where they can add real value and not into repetitive administrative tasks. 

“There have been a whole host of reports and recommendations around how to improve client care and reduce overwork for aged care providers and they keep coming back to the same thing – we need to leverage technology to improve the sector,” Ben Woolley, Redmap CEO, explained. 

“The purpose of this sector is clear – to take care of those that have come before us. To that end, the sector has a responsibility to remove any manual task that does not add value to the care they provide, like simple, repetitive, low or zero value admin tasks.”

Removing manual tasks embedded in existing processes is difficult to achieve when aged care’s funding and resources for innovative technologies are limited. Just over half of aged care homes are still operating at a loss, according to StewartBrown, and very few have the time to update their systems without absolute certainty it will have a positive impact. 

Aged care cannot afford to ignore innovation. The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety highlighted the need for innovation within the aged care sector, as did the Aged Care Taskforce. 

Yet as the average Australian firm spends 0.4% of its total expenditure on research and development, just $464,953 of aged care’s $2.9 billion expenditure in 2020-21 went to research and development. That’s only 0.016%. In comparison, the beekeeping industry spent $4 million on R&D.

With limited budget to invest in R&D, the sector may need to turn to other industries to identify proven solutions that could be adapted to leverage within aged care. A good example of this is Redmap’s recent product development to integrate its Accounts Payable Automation solution into the AlayaCare system, so it works specifically for aged care.

Redmap has more than 13 years of experience in document and process automation for a variety of industries, including home care, mining, construction and retail. Their automated solutions are tried, tested and refined to deliver cost-effective tools to home care providers.

The benefits here are twofold. Aged care providers are putting their budgets into an efficient system they can rely on and use to reduce the time staff spend on accounts payable processes. This then gives the staff more time to work on the tasks that make an impact on care recipients. 

“In a recent study, we found that more than 50% of the industry has three or more sets of hands on every invoice they receive. In most cases, two sets of those hands have no role in the decision as to whether the invoice is approved or not, they are just entering it into different, unintegrated systems. This is a tremendous waste of time,” Mr Woolley said.  

“It is such a logical switch. I think anyone would agree it is far more beneficial for aged care providers to be directing time towards client care rather than paperwork and repetitive admin.”

If staff don’t have to spend time manually entering data, processing invoices or chasing up information, they can focus on enabling people to age at home for as long as possible. That’s a win-win for home care providers, staff and care recipients. 

Providers interested in learning more about Redmap’s AP Automation solution, and their entire suite of leading products and integrations, can visit redmap.com.

You can also speak to Ben Woolley and the team at Stall #20 during the Aged Care Digital and Technology Transformation Forum on May 28-29 in Sydney.