Digitising Data Improves Aged Care

Successful Data Digitisation for Ward Medical Management

Executive Summary

Ward Medical Management (Ward MM) is a clinical pharmacy company aiming to reduce medication-related harm in aged care communities. Ward MM partnered with cubesys to digitise the process of recording the use of psychotropic medication in aged care homes and therefore increase efficiency and accuracy. To meet these requirements, we developed an application running in Azure.

The Client

Ward MM was founded in 1997 by clinical pharmacist Sue Ward. Now, Ward MM boasts as being the largest provider in Australia of clinical pharmaceutical services to aged care, with over 27,000 senior citizens currently under their care.

Ward MM seeks to reduce medication-related harm by providing support to general practitioners in clinical pharmacy decision-making and investing in the research and development of enhanced medication management systems. In addition to this, they provide medication training to health care professionals via Ward MM Institute to maximise precision and reduce medication-related harm.

The Problem

To meet their legislative reporting requirements, Ward MM’s existing reporting and documentation process tracks and collects data on the medications provided to residents of aged care facilities. The data is used to inform staff at these facilities of the potential health risks of medications and the status of their residents, this then assists with making informed decisions on care. Ward MM uses this data to observe staff’s decisions and then flow on effects on residents in that facility.

The current process was very manual and was required monthly for every resident at each facility. This became more and more complex when Ward MM began to take on hundreds of facilities, with hundreds of residents in each facility. It resulted in an extremely slow procedure that was vulnerable to errors. They needed a new solution that was able to be adopted in a very limited time frame and within a tight budgetary constraint.

The Solution

To help them manage their reporting requirements more efficiently, Ward MM partnered with cubesys to develop an Azure-powered serverless webapp. This application can be accessed securely from any modern computer/tablet device in Australia. Using Azure’s security resources and groups, we built a custom security model to protect resident data and allow only authorized users to access the app.

To allow Ward MM to scale and reach more aged care facilities, we also ensured the webapp could be used on tablet for easier accessibility. This enabled more staff at the aged care facilities to complete their reports. The app requires individuals to sign in using their account, select the facility they are working with and then the residents they are completing their report on.

This application is extremely intuitive and easy-to-use and contains several controls to minimise errors in data entry. The application aims to enforce and maintain consistency across the different facilities.

The Outcome

The new application is now providing aged care staff with a much simpler experience, with several manual processes now completely automated. As Ward MM digitises their data, staff will receive immediate feedback about a resident as well as any recommendations on care. Ward MM will be able to collect more data across the country concurrently using their new application ecosystem. Because the data is in real-time, Ward MM will be able to respond more quickly to patient needs.

But these wonderful outcomes weren’t the only major achievement for the project. Timeline was key, working in a close collaboration the joint team of Ward MM & cubesys delivered these outcomes in an amazingly short timeframe. Some key dates include:

• From the time the requirements were identified to when the first functional version of the application was built from scratch – 3 weeks
• Once the first functional version was deployed in their environment, testing started the next day
• The application was rollout to approx. 30 unique sites within 1 week of the final version being published.
• Overall, the lifecycle of the development, testing, handover, and support during their demos was – 8 weeks.

I’m extremely proud of the teams here.  To deliver this level of impact, in such a short timeframe speaks volumes for the collaboration between Ward MM & cubesys teams.  Fantastic result!

Paul Heaton CEO, cubesys

Software and Services

Bespoke built serverless webapp hosted on Microsoft Azure.