Maximizing Budget Efficiency with CareMeda

By Holly Foreman

Last year’s Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety shined a spotlight into the condition of aged care in Australia. We learned that two-thirds of aged care happens in home, with seniors receiving an average of just 24 hours per week of care. The other one-third of care happens in residential facilities, who receive the majority of funding. This funding imbalance means caregivers have been doing more with less for a long time — potentially to the detriment of our seniors.

We also learned that the issues that affect senior care providers are almost universal. Staffing and training lead the list, with the current shortage of qualified workers expected to last well into the future. Long-term staffing issues contribute to a whole host of other concerns, such as the potential for neglect and the tendency for staff to focus on the tasks of their workload instead of their residents. When that happens, the social and emotional needs of residents may suffer. Unfortunately, the concerns that affect residential facilities extend into at-home care for those seniors who are aging in place.

With the understanding that so many of the Royal Commission’s findings require funding to improve, the Actuaries Institute released a green paper helping us understand how we can change the future of aged care. The Institute states clearly that the costs of aged care are expected to increase from 1.6% to 2.9% of Australia’s annual GDP. They state that: 

“Changes are urgently needed given that projections show this is a present problem that will continue to intensify over the next 20 years.”

In May 2021, the commonwealth’s budget announcement included $17.7 billion of increased funding over four years. The majority of the budgeting increase relates to residential facilities and home care providers, along with an increase of 18% in the basic per day funding for services like meals, cleaning and laundry support. Alongside the budget changes is a new legislated minimum of 200 minutes per day for in-home care support.

We’ve known for some time that more funding is needed to take proper care of our seniors. Now that it is coming, are you prepared to maximize its usefulness and take better care of your patients and residents? When planning budgets, CareMeda must be part of the conversation to get the most out of your funding.

With a streamlined approach to the minutiae of caring, we optimize the efforts of your hard-working team. We save them time by providing easy access to a full range of information so they can quickly and seamlessly evaluate the patients in their care. We enable continual remote vitals recordings so they can spend less time on the routine tasks of care and focus more on the human aspects of their patients. Those vitals measurements are automatically stored so that historic trends can be viewed on an easy to interpret dashboard that removes all the “noise” of traditional software. By shifting away from task-based care, we make it possible for staff to focus on the personal connections and emotional care that are so important to the long-term health of seniors.

CareMeda makes it possible for providers to have rapid access to all residents through app-based solutions like video calls. Our dashboard is the hub of care and serves not only as the clearinghouse for all health-related information, but is also the starting place for remote visits, health surveys, appointments, and care notes. Residents and patients use it too: it serves as a simple way for them to connect to family and health partners, and include them in their care journey.

Likewise, in-home care providers are able to maximize their effectiveness by partnering with CareMeda. Remote vitals monitoring provides a full picture of health for their patients even outside the hours they are on-site. Care providers can connect remotely to seniors, initiate health surveys, access vitals trends and even consult with the senior’s family to support their supplemental efforts. Essentially, ALL task-based items of care can be handled before the carer arrives to the patient’s home, allowing them to focus on the personal connections that are vital to the health and happiness of seniors.

With new financing on the horizon, no budget changes should be made until a facility’s leadership team understands how they can be more productive and reduce time wasters. It’s tempting to hire more staff to lighten a team’s workload. But in the current staffing climate, that’s not practical, or even possible for most. The best way to improve staffing efficiencies is to provide the tools that streamline routine tasks and make it easier to absorb information and make decisions.

CareMeda should be a core part of budgeting discussion, as we can maximize your current efforts so that funding goes further. Not only can we help you deliver better care to your current patients, we will help you realize the efficiencies that make it possible for your facility to increase capacity at the same time as delivering a better quality of care.

For more information on how CareMeda can improve they way you deliver care, use our contact form or phone us on +1 813 469 9632