Mirus Australia creates aged care BI

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

Mirus Australia director, James Price, told delegates at the Gartner BI and Information Management Summit 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.

Price said mobility is important when accessing 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,” Price said.

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. “The typical profile of someone who would receive that data would be a woman in her mid-50s who has trained as a nurse.”

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.

“The end result was a powerful offering which we believe we were the first in bringing to market in Australia,” Price said.

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU

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