The Department of Health and Aged Care is piloting a new platform to streamline staff hire and management in the elderly care sector.
The department’s Digital Business and Sector Engagement division built the pilot using ServiceNow to improve the “extremely convoluted” process of hiring staff and delivering services.
The project, alongside others within Digital Business and Sector Engagement, aims to help meet 148 recommendations for improvements to Australia’s aged care system made by a Royal Commission in 2022.
Speaking at ServiceNow’s Federal Forum in Canberra, Janine Bennett, the division’s assistant secretary, said the process was previously “time-consuming” and had “lots of players in the mix”.
“We weren’t able to get the people that we needed in the workforce to actually deliver our commitment, so we needed to make that timeframe much faster,” she said.
“So, we delivered a pilot service in ServiceNow which sought to do just that. It automated the workflow for all the right people and it really reduced the time from: ‘I need a person’ to having them arrive.”
According to Bennett, the business unit has been “building digital solutions that will enable aged care reform” and provide “frictionless access to services”.
Having completed the ServiceNow pilot, the unit is now looking to build other solutions using the vendor’s capabilities.
“[The pilot] went quite well in terms of advertising for us the capability to ServiceNow,” Bennett said.
“We’ve moved from the pilot to building a couple of other prototype services [for] different use cases so that we can prove the concept across the types of services that we have within corporate.”
AI for an ageing society
Since the Royal Commission, the federal government has committed $312.6 million over four years to be spent on IT modernisation in 2022.
In this year’s budget, it pledged $174.5 million over two years to the “Support at Home Program and Single Assessment System” and $4.1 million for IT preparation work for the Australian National Aged Care Classification funding model for providers.
According to Bennett, the Digital Business and Sector Engagement division is now “building a lot of systems across Aged Care reform”, including artificial intelligence for “small-scale” projects.
“We’re using AI for internal code-checking, which was previously done by our technical staff. It’s now done by our system, with a person checking as an overlay.
“We’re living in an ageing society. The demand on the system is growing exponentially all the time,” she added. “It’s going to double in the next 10 years. We need a system that is better and more efficient, and AI is potentially part of that solution.
“Already we’re using embedded devices; wearable devices for monitoring for declines in or risk factors around ailing health. I think as we start to see more people ageing independently, those sorts of things will be embedded in homes.”