Strong Care

The world’s population is ageing, resulting in heavier expectations to provide better quality of care. Despite technological advancements, the Australian aged care sector is still dogged by incidents of inadequate treatment and negligence. Current digital drug management platforms lack the ability to address this growing issue. Not only do they fail to support end-to-end medical workflows, but are often designed poorly, with little consideration of empathetic design principles. These shortcomings cause high levels of inefficiency in the sector, reducing care workers’ ability to focus on service provision, increasing the risk of errors, oversights, adverse drug events and otherwise preventable hospitalisations.

Strong Care offers an efficient and easy to use platform for doctors and nurses to perform everyday tasks such as managing resident prescriptions, drug dispensing, resident drug administration, alert automation, and drug management compliance report generation. Most importantly the platform allows doctors, nurses and pharmacists to securely monitor their residents in real-time. Intensive communication and interviews with an inclusive team of medical advisors provided a co-design environment allowing for consistent feedback and design development. In order to understand the needs of all our users we used experience based design methods and case studies to harness distinctive user insights.

An Australian study from 2018 suggested that 81 of every 100 aged care residents has been exposed to a potentially inappropriate use of medicine. Additionally the Royal Commission report (2021) found that 1,132 permanent aged care residents in 2018/2019 had a hospitalisation or emergency department presentation as a result of an adverse medication event. It is estimated that Strong Care delivers an 80% time saving per facility; time that would be redirected towards care service provision. Due to the platforms end-to-end workflow, facilities no longer require use of multiple operating systems and messy paper based solutions.

Digital disruption is needed to improve our healthcare sector, however it is an area stringent to change. Medical staff lack time to complete their work and don’t have the capacity to learn a completely new operating system. Developing a design to suit all user needs while being extremely applicable was the utmost challenge. To overcome this we spent extensive time collating information from as many users as possible; utilising their feedback on a consistent basis. Intensive communication and interviews with a team of medical advisors (doctors, nurses, pharmacists, clinical professionals and digital health experts) provided a co-design environment allowing for consistent feedback and design development. Furthermore we used design methods such as user journey mapping, case studies on current competitors and experience based design approaches to harness distinctive and differing user insights. Strong Care is the only 100% digital medication management platform on the market that consolidates three major aged care modules; a controlled drugs register, electronic prescribing and administration functionality, and a unique customisable medical reporting suite. The platform has been designed with the flexibility to integrate with emerging programs, including MyHealthRecord and eNRMC, and has inbuilt compliance to ensure facilities are meeting all industry requirements.