Aged care provider saves an average of 10 hours per day with CareKeeper

St Anna’s Residential Aged Care Facility is a not-for-profit, 60-bed facility in the heart of Adelaide, with cultural ties to the Croatian, Ukrainian, Belarussian communities.

With an eye on innovation, St Anna’s became one of Telstra Health’s first clients to utilise CareKeeper, an award-winning mobile application that enables care staff to use their phone to view and record resident care information in real time.

St Anna’s CEO, Amanda Birkin, and Manager of Allied Health Services, Athin Christou, shared how CareKeeper has benefited their residents, workforce and broader organisation.

Bringing together personalised care and on-the-spot documentation

With CareKeeper, St Anna’s Care Workers are able to view a resident’s profile, summary care plans and progress notes on the phone while interacting with the resident. They can then document any care delivered into progress notes and charts in real-time.

“The fact that our workers can sit in the loungeroom next to a resident and document care while spending quality time with them is invaluable”, said Mr. Christou.

“Previously, our Care Workers would need to document away from everyone at a computer at the Nurses’ station, but now they can capture information while still engaging and supervising our residents”, said Mr Christou.

Being able to use CareKeeper while at the residents’ side has also led to an increase in overall care documented, with staff at St Anna’s completing over 3,500 tasks and over 218,000 charts for their 60 residents since joining the beta program in January 2021.

St Anna’s have also experienced more engagement from residents’ family members and friends since implementing CareKeeper.

“Our residents’ families are appreciative that staff are more visible with CareKeeper, so they have more opportunities to ask questions or see our workers interacting with their loved ones – rather than out of sight typing up their notes,” said Ms Birkin.

Saving St Anna’s over 10 hours per day on documentation

To help minimise the time spent on documentation, CareKeeper features illustrative icons to help workers quickly identify their care tasks, such as a knife and fork icon to indicate a Food Intake observation.

“The icons make the app very easy to use and navigate, which has meant new staff and student Care Workers can pick it up with minimal training – even for staff with limited technical knowledge,” said Mr Christou.

“CareKeeper also specifies what data needs to be captured, which means staff are less likely to miss key information, such as the time care was delivered. It makes the data captured much more consistent”, said Ms Birkin.

“It’s great that our workers now have the source of truth in their pocket, so if they need to check something about a resident, they can quickly pull out their phone and find the information they need then and there”, said Ms Birkin.

The time saved by using CareKeeper has been the biggest benefit for St Anna’s, with a survey revealing that the facility saves an overall average of 10.6 hours across their staff base per day on documentation compared to pre-implementation.

Giving management greater oversight of care delivery

For the management team at St Anna’s, CareKeeper has provided an added level of transparency, as information captured via the app flows through to Telstra Health’s Clinical Manager software for reporting purposes.

“With CareKeeper, our Nurses and Clinical Managers can easily check what tasks have been completed without having to look through a paper folder trying to find someone’s notes”, said Ms Birkin. “This has significantly improved and streamlined our handover process between shifts as no information is missed or lost.”

“It’s given us a lot of confidence that any care and assistance that a resident requires will be completed, as staff can see their list and tick tasks off as they go,” said Ms Birkin.

CareKeeper has also increased the overall usage of charts, with the types of charts used doubling post implementation. This increase in chart types and new ability to complete charts quickly and easily saw an increase in chart completion of 168% for the month following the introduction of the new chart types, compared to the three-month average chart completion pre-implementation.

The process of managing ad-hoc tasks, such as weighing a resident who has been off their food, has also improved following implementation.

“Before CareKeeper, our managers would have to look for the right staff member and ask them to complete a new task that had come up. If they were busy in that moment, it would be easy for them to forget as there was nothing documented,” said Mr Christou. “Now we can simply add the new task in Clinical Manager and it will flow through to CareKeeper for the Care Worker to complete.”

“CareKeeper has revolutionised the way we capture resident documentation. The app has given us the time back to allow our staff to provide truly personalised care,” said Ms Birkin.