As an aged care provider, IRT has a primary focus on better service delivery and customer experience, says executive general manager of IT, John Vohradsky.

“We are always on the lookout for innovative and disruptive technologies to enable the customers of today and prepare for the customers of the future while also supporting the internal business units to operate more efficiently”.

Vohradsky and his team have rolled out three innovations over the past year. Firstly, to address social isolation and limited mobility of aged care residents, they partnered with French driverless car company, EasyMile, to develop and trial the world’s first fully-automated resident shuttle service in aged care at IRT’s Kangara Waters site in the ACT.

Residents at this site who were socially isolated or immobile and had not left their home in months, became frequent sippers at the nearby coffee shop.

Secondly, IRT worked with Melbourne company iottag to co-develop a bespoke resident location/tracking device which will be available to aged care providers worldwide after its implementation at IRT facilities.

The team also built an extensive centralised data analysis and business intelligence capability that allows integration and consolidation of data from multiple internal and external systems. This has dramatically increased efficiencies and delivery of care to IRT residents and customers.

Thirdly, to allow self-service and make dealing with the IRT group easier, the organisation partnered with Sydney-based Check In Care to develop a full telehealth-enabled mobile app for residents and their families to stay in contact.

“This app also provides direct access into the multiple core IT systems behind the scenes to unlock and present financial, clinical and transaction services,” Vohradsky says.

Competitive aged care

Vohradsky says IRT has transformed dramatically over the past five years and is recognised as a leader within the aged care sector. With the splitting of the business into three individual streams (aged care facilities, RV accommodation and home care services) IRT can be more agile and make faster business decisions while constantly seeking approval and alignment across the whole business.

“As a CIO, I have built on my multi-year IT strategy with rolling IT roadmaps generated annually for each business unit,” he says.

“To address the less mature legacy computer systems found in aged care, we also have a very mature enterprise service bus that connects all core systems together to provide ‘ERP-like’ connectivity, unlocks data from discrete silos and feeds our real-time data warehouse that provides PowerBI dashboards across the entire business.

“From project reports, through to MIS reporting, right to board reporting, this is one source-of-truth with real time explorable data at each decision or reporting point,” he says.

Meanwhile, as part of the transformation, Vohradsky and this team have created a ‘c-zone’ collaboration space. This purpose-built area allows multiple teams to drive change through conversation, collaboration, design sessions, and agile methods of development.

“As a trusted partner to the IRT business units, I am able to influence not only the adoption of technological change but the making technology an enabler to generate real competitive advantage over other aged care providers,” he says.

Byron Connolly