Aegis Aged Care Group beefs up resident care with cloud adoption

Perth-based Aegis Aged Care Group is looking to the cloud to improve resident care and safety.

Privately-owned, Aegis is the largest provider of residential aged care services in Western Australia. It employs over 3,000 staff across 28 facilities - with two new facilities actively being built and another two in the next six months.

Aegis has deployed the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform to support a new care system that improves care for its 2,500 residents, said Aegis Aged Care senior ICT services consultant, Sebastian Klaus. The provider plans to grow by 50 per cent over the next five years.

“It’s important that our IT environment can scale with us,” Klaus said. “The modular nature of Nutanix ensures we can scale easily, node by node.

"This – along with the simple one-click management – was a huge selling point for us. We had the whole environment up and running in just 40 minutes.”

As part of the plan, the aged care group has rolled out 400 tablets with the new care system. “It is purely so that our staff can take notes and really look after the resident at the point of care, and have the records all up to date.”

Previously, the organisation relied on computers located at the central nurses stations.

“Staff had to take care of the resident and then walk back to the computer to take notes. . . They get another call from another resident and by the time they actually get back to the computer they had forgotten half of what had happened.”

The organisation has more than doubled the size of its business over the past seven years, driven by a shortage in available aged care beds and the impact of Western Australia’s ageing population.

Klaus told CIO Australia that Aegis has a small IT team of just two, so another key consideration in deploying Nutanix was its ability to run all applications, including its Resident Care management system, with very little input from the team. This has freed them up to focus on more important matters such as implementing electronic systems for other departments.

“It has massively reduced the amount of management that I personally have to do.”

The platform has also given time back to administration staff within Aegis – the increase in performance has sped up the invoicing process considerably, meaning admin staff spend less time dealing with paperwork and more time looking after residents.  

Klaus said his next steps include focusing on disaster recovery. “Within the next month we will have a completely new DR solution in play and I can only see us grow from there.”

Additionally, he said the organisation is looking to upgrade its financial system. “We are also wanting to reduce the amount of paper we are handling in the next 12 months. We are evaluating systems for that currently. Because it is still very much paper-based unfortunately.”  

“The aged care sector has experienced incredible transformation through technology,” according to Nutanix SVP and head of Asia Pacific, Matt Young.

“What started as an advent for going paperless has evolved into wearables, smart sensors and a host of other developments that can improve resident care and safety.”