At Five Good Friends, one of our core values is leveraging technology to make us more human. Every piece of home care technology we use for our Members, is to improve the care we provide.
Key takeaways
- Five Good Friends uses home care technology to enhance, not replace, the human element of care, ensuring Members receive more personalised and connected support.
- The Lookout app enables remote monitoring by analysing visit notes and automatically flagging potential risks for timely intervention by Care Managers.
- Member and carer surveys provide valuable data that helps tailor care plans, track wellbeing, and deliver more responsive, goal-driven support.
Home care technology to make us more human
Five Good Friends' Head of Care Management and Quality, Will Garton, explains how technological advances in home health care have helped him and his team improve outcomes for our Members.
How does home care technology make us more human?
My role at Five Good Friends is all about leading and supporting our teams to provide the best quality care we can.
Using technology to improve quality of care is vital. We are Australia’s first technology-enabled home care provider, but we don’t use technology for the sake of it. We use the technology in our Lookout app to improve outcomes and customer experience for our Members.
Our remote care monitoring technology
Our Lookout app offers advanced home care technology. The sophisticated algorithm uses matching technology to help us pair the right Helpers to Members. We use it for rostering, to keep track of accounts and to help Members get better recommendations for services.
A feature that really improves our Members’ lives is the remote care monitoring capabilities. Every time a Helper visits one of our Members, they will write a checkout note about the visit. They might write about the activities they enjoyed together, provide a health or wellbeing update on the Member and any other relevant information they feel is important.
As soon as the Helper submits their report, our remote care monitoring algorithm analyses it. The algorithm is so sophisticated that if it identifies any actual or potential risk based on the words in the report, or even how the words are being used, it will flag that note on a dashboard for our Care Managers to review.
This means that we're not asking our Helpers to be anything other than a great Helper, and to write accurate notes at the end of their shift. They can focus entirely on being a good Helper to the Member, while the technology provides the benefit of an extra layer of monitoring in the home.
Checking in with our Members and their loved ones
Another important feature of Lookout is our Member surveys. Our surveys help us understand the needs of a Member - and their loved one, if they have someone supporting them - so we can set goals and plan strategies to respond to that.
For example, one of our surveys is called the Health and Wellbeing survey. When a new Member signs up, we offer them the opportunity to complete the survey. We ask them how they’re going in the areas of:
- Mobility
- Self-care
- Usual activity
- Pain and discomfort
- Anxiety or depression
The Member then has an opportunity to make a comment and give a general health rating scale. For each question, they can rank their answer on a scale of one to five.
Depending on their answer, it will trigger an action. For example, if a person says they have severe problems walking, it will trigger an alert for the Care Manager to investigate this and see if there's anything else we can do to support the issue. We can create a new goal in their help plan, refer them to a physiotherapist or exercise physiologist, and build a strategy to support them.
The hope is that when we survey them again down the track, their mobility has improved as a result.
We also use other surveys, including our Member Experience Survey and Carer Survey. The Carer Survey is important for us as it measures the impact of the carer role and helps us to identify if the loved one caring for them is struggling and if we need to target any support specifically for them.
Communicating with our Members and Helpers through our easy-to-use app
We also use our Lookout app to communicate with our Members and their families. Our smart and easy-to-use app is designed to help Members, and their loved ones, view their digital help plan, have oversight of their schedule and stay connected to their support network.
Members who choose to self-manage their home care can use the app to coordinate their budget and schedule. A digital marketplace of vetted and verified care workers, allied health professionals, pre-prepared meals and other important services – can all be accessed through the app by our self-managed Members, so they can book their own services.
This home care technology can also help us collaborate internally and provide better care. For example – if a Member were to phone their Care Coordinator and report an issue - by using our ticket functionality we can collaborate with any person within the Five Good Friends care team.
Using Lookout, we document the team and Member collaboration in the Member’s record. This technology enables us to achieve anything from solving a one-off complex problem to conducting a Member's annual review.
Underneath it all, with the right technology, we have more time to concentrate on providing better care to our Members.