Challenge and opportunity
Brightwater has been providing aged care and disability support to the WA community for over 100 years, caring for people of all ages including those living with dementia, Huntington’s disease, and acquired brain injury. They operate 27 locations between Joondalup and Mandurah with services including residential aged care, retirement living, in-home aged care assistance, disability accommodation, and community disability services.
Across all their business areas, Brightwater must meet strict compliance obligations. The Aged Care Royal Commission, which ran from 2018 to 2021, has also put quality management processes in the spotlight for the broader industry. In particular, incident follow-up and improvement, along with establishing and monitoring quality action plans, are now under much greater scrutiny.
Without a dedicated single system to manage, monitor and report on these requirements, Brightwater was having to maintain data across multiple spreadsheets in shared drives, supported by manual processes based on paper and emails.
Working together
Brightwater recognised the risks with the current processes and realised that having a solution for key compliance obligations was critical to the functioning of the organisation. Seeking an option that was both innovative and integrated, they engaged Diversus to develop and implement their new Quality Management Solution (QMS).
As well as capturing quality and compliance data, the new solution would automate many processes that were previously manual and streamline the capture of incident reports, quality improvement plans, audits, and self-assessments. Business stakeholders would also be provided with better visibility of critical compliance indicators.
Brightwater Care Group
Solution and benefits
Diversus have developed Brightwater’s new QMS using the Dynamics 365 platform. The cloud-based platform extends the benefits of their Microsoft license and has full integration with other Microsoft products such as Office 365, Outlook, Power BI, and SharePoint. More importantly, it helped to fast track the delivery of their new solution, providing a pre-built baseline of functionality that could be quickly extended and customised.
The new solution includes modules for internal and external compliance, incident management, and self-assessment processing. It has integration with the clinical management software to receiving resident records and push incident related progress notes to the clinical records. Process optimisation has been provided through a staff-facing portal for completing incident forms alongside workflow automation for the different stages of review, investigation, and approval.
Some of the main benefits to Brightwater in using their new QMS include:
- Having a single system and source of truth for recording and monitoring compliance activities
- Improved process optimisation for compliance operations, including more automated workflows with email notifications, as well as support for mobile and other devices
- Improved tracking and visibility of key site compliance metrics across all levels of the organisation
- Easier access to data for reporting to external regulatory agencies
- The cloud-based Dynamics 365 platform has significantly less administration overhead than any alternatives that would require management of servers or data centres.
Bec Vincent, Senior Consultant