According to the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety and other recent research, digital transformation in the aged care sector is fragmented, and “well behind” that of other sectors. Although some providers have begun to make their way down the digital transformation pathway, there are still some glaring gaps.

This article will highlight some digital transformation gaps in the risk and compliance domain and suggest that, without digital transformation, risk and compliance activities will be limited in scope, inefficient and fail to deliver real value to aged care providers.

What Is Digital Transformation?

McKinsey & Company explain that digital transformation is “the process of developing organisational and technology-based capabilities that allow a company to continuously improve its customer experience and lower its unit costs and over time sustain a competitive advantage”.

We would add to this that digital transformation also helps aged care providers improve the way that they manage risk and ensure compliance, particularly as the legal and regulatory obligations for providers become more complex and demanding.

A key question for aged care providers is therefore: “What are the risk and compliance systems and processes that could be enhanced and made more effective through digital transformation?” We set out a snapshot below of four areas where digital transformation can lead to positive outcomes for aged care providers in risk and compliance.

How Can Digital Transformation Help Aged Care Providers with Risk and Compliance?

1. Issue Reporting and Management

Digital platforms can allow providers to report, manage and capture incidents, accidents, near misses and compliance breaches, from anywhere and at any time, usually with a customisable single form. The benefits of such platforms include the ability to:

• create and customise forms, checklists and workflows
• assign checklists and forms to staff to validate that key areas of compliance are in fact being managed effectively
• manage multiple business units or facilities using a single platform
• conveniently and securely maintain records
• capture more issues/incidents due to ease of use
• access aggregated issue/incident data to identify patterns and trends and which serve as an early warning for emerging risk and compliance issues.

These platforms are therefore an improvement on paper-based reporting procedures which are onerous, don’t easily facilitate consolidation and are difficult to maintain.

2. Risk Management

Managing risk in a regulatory dynamic environment such as aged care is incredibly difficult. The use of specialised software solutions enables providers to develop an integrated risk management system that allows everyone in the organisation to use a common framework, terminology and methodology for risk management. This prevents risk silos from developing and allows for visibility of how risk is being managed across the organisation by the management team and the governing body.

3. Policy Management

Policy management systems ensure that policies and procedures are accessible to workers so that they always know what to do. The features of these systems usually also allow for linking of related policies, providing a single source and repository for all policies and preventing policy silos or unofficial and out-of-date policies having currency in some departments or locations but not others.

4. Staff Training

Policies and procedures are important because they help providers effectively manage risk, fulfill their compliance obligations and operate with integrity. However, they are only useful when they are understood and being used correctly by staff. Therefore, ensuring that staff are trained in organisational policies and procedures is critical.

Unfortunately, regulatory requirements are becoming increasingly onerous and complex, as we’ve seen with the recent introduction of mandatory 200 care minutes per resident per day and the requirement to have a registered nurse on-site at all times. This increases the demand for appropriately qualified and trained staff in aged care facilities and makes training staff members increasingly harder. Online learning systems help with this by providing a single access point for inductions, ongoing training and professional development so that providers can quickly and comprehensively train staff. These systems usually also allow organisations to create their own targeted courses and then assign, track and report on staff learning.

Conclusion

Almost all organisations are on the digital transformation journey with risk and compliance systems, with some much further in their journey than others. Accordingly, if organisations don’t already, they will soon come to realise the significant benefits that digital transformation will have on the effectiveness of their risk and compliance systems. Importantly though, digital transformation requires iterative improvements over the long term to the way an organisation operates. So even those organisations that are further along in their journey than others will need to continue to leverage technology to increase the effectiveness of business operations and support continuous improvement to benefit the organisation, their customers and other stakeholders.