CIO Summit 2012: Mirus Australia injects BI into aged cared sector

Aged care services firm, Mirus Australia, has developed an aged care metrics (ACM) system which utilises business intelligence (BI) to provide better patient data to care providers.

Speaking at the CIO Summit 2012 in Sydney, Mirus Australia director, James Price, told delegates that the aged care sector in Australia is fragmented with 1100 different providers around the country. However, only a few of these providers have the IT budget to afford BI.

“We had a vision to create a mobile BI offering and provide that to the market without the need for large IT budgets,” Price said.

He said mobility is important for care givers when accessing aged cared data.

“We wanted to push it out to mobile devices such as iPads as most people who deal with that type of data are mobile themselves and don’t have access to a desktop,” he said.

ACM metrics can also be accessed on smartphones by care givers.

“The good thing about ACM metrics is that it’s a paid solution for all providers with read-only reporting,” he said. “It’s got some note taking ability but basically aged care staff can’t break the data.”

Prior to developing ACM, Price said the aged care industry had a number of challenges when it came to analysing data.

“Staff who are given the responsibly to look at the data may not have IT expertise,” he said.

Another problem was that the industry in general did not have a high level of IT investment or IT resources available.

“Only one of the aged care accreditation standards refers to IT and this states ‘effective information management systems are in place’,” Price said.

Also, information was not readily available to staff as it was kept in paper form.

The aged care industry needed reporting that was consistent and used the same data sets so both staff and management could access it.

After being trialled by some aged care facilities in December 2011, ACM went live on 1 February this year after six months of testing and development including data security.

Price gave recognition to IT partners MicroStrategy and AstuteGroup for their help in developing the ACM offering.

“We recognised that MicroStrategy helped us day in and day out, we could ask them questions and draw on the experience they had working on BI projects with many other organisations,” he said.

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

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