Aged-care provider Ryman Healthcare in New Zealand has built its own electronic care planning system that runs on 3,500 tablets deployed in residents’ rooms across its residential aged-care villages.

The myRyman application has removed paperwork for both care planning and rostering and improved staff and resident satisfaction.

The $20+ million project has seen wi-fi deployed across all Ryman’s villages and the organisation’s IT team grow from three to 60 people since 2015, when work first started.

Clinical nurse specialist Victoria Brevoort said myRyman directs the care delivered in a resident’s room.

When a staff member logs into the tablet they are presented with a schedule of tasks that need to be completed that day, as well as information about the resident, such as their interests and family.

“People know much more clearly what they have to do and when they have to do it and it’s more accountable because they have to complete the task in the system,” she said.

“It has freed up our staff to spend more time with the residents, one on one. They can record what they talk about in the system, so we see the resident as a person, rather than a collection of tasks we need to do for them.”

Ryman corporate affairs manager David King said the organisation’s audit results have significantly improved since implementing the system, as 81 per cent of its villages now have four-year accreditation.

The technology project is also generating a wealth of data that is being mined for insights.

“We’ve discovered a whole load of data that we’ve never had before, and it’s a gold mine because it provides a closed loop between tasks and clinical outcomes,” King added.

A central dashboard of information allows Ryman’s business intelligence team to identify any anomalies quickly, such as a spike in falls, which can then be investigated.

Differences in performance between villages can also be interrogated in order to improve performance across the network, he explained.

Chief executive Gordon MacLeod said that “not only has it done what it set out to do – get rid of paperwork – but the data we’re collecting from it means we better understand care outcomes and allow us to lift our standards of care even higher’’.

This article first appeared on eHealthNews.nz.