Aged carers could get cut-rate mobile e-health
Silver Chain will offer its enterprise in-house built e-health smartphone application for cost-price to hundreds of aged care facilities.
The platform means nurses can build detailed patient records on medical treatments, symptoms, and pain, fatigue and nausea levels. Aged care providers can use the application for reporting and finance services.
The system, dubbed ComCare, is used by more than 1,000 Silver Chain mobile nurses using Ericsson smartphones.
The West Australian health care provider has up to 700 nurses using the system at any given time who service more than 40,000 patients a year.
Chief information officer, Allan Turner, said he is in talks with cloud hosting providers to make the system available to small aged care facilities “as cheaply as possible”.
“We want to structure it where all smaller organisations that don’t have enterprise capability can access it for cheaply,” Mr Turner said.
The Java-based system was developed on the Symbian platform by a team of seven internal software developers – five on. Net and two on Java and tested by a further five support staff.
“Staff can take photos of wounds to build a profile of care for patients,” Mr Turner said.
“But the benefits aren’t about wound management on devices of timesheets, it’s about having a connected workforce.”
He said the system could eventually accept electronic data from pharmacies, general practitioners, or hospitals, and provide the industry with updated benchmarks on clinical treatments.
