Ryman’s inhouse approach to technology

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Picture: Staff at Ryman Healthcare compare information using the app, which is improving handover and providing useful data about resident care

eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth

Ryman Healthcare says its myRyman app has eliminated paperwork and improved quality of life for residents. eHealthNews.nz editor Rebecca McBeth reports.

Aged-care provider Ryman Healthcare has a tradition of doing things for itself. The organisation builds all its own villages through its construction arm Ryman Construction, employing everyone from architects to quantity surveyors and builders.

So when chief operations officer Barbara Reynen-Rose went looking for an off-the-shelf electronic system for care in the United States in 2015 and couldn’t find one she liked, the organisation decided to build one itself.

Three years later, myRyman was deployed and the electronic care planning system is now live on 3,500 tablet devices in residents’ rooms across its care facilities.

A clinically led project

Clinical nurse specialist Victoria Brevoort is the subject matter expert for the development. She says staff used to struggle with a 20-page paper care plan for patients kept in a cupboard, which was not easy to refer to, find information in or update.

Development of myRyman involved mapping out a staff member’s day and thinking about different ways to present information to them.

“It’s about making information easily accessible for our staff,” she says.

“It’s really important to have that clinical input because our nurses and our caregivers are the ones using the programme to be able to deliver care.”

The project started with the development of an electronic rostering system, which now links to the care system to ensure the same staff are always assigned to the same group of patients, providing continuity of care.

Creating paper rosters was a huge job for assistant managers, who now use Microsoft Surface Pros to populate a shift and can text or email staff from directly within the system. The app also links directly to payroll, making the whole process more seamless, Brevoort explains.

Ryman’s corporate affairs manager David King has a personal insight into the impact of the technology project, as his mother suffers from dementia and lives in a Ryman home.

He says knowing the same staff are looking after her week on week helps his mother get to know her carers and ensures the family know who to speak to if there is an issue.

The project

MyRyman has been built as an application on top of VCare retirement village software.

Reynen-Rose says the team did a great job at making the app easy and intuitive to use, and having tablets in each resident’s room means care staff no longer have to go to nurses’ stations to enter information.

“It’s all about people – improving care for our residents and making the job more satisfying for our care staff. No one signs up to sit behind a desk,” she explains.

With more than $20 million spent on the project so far, it has been a major investment for the organisation.

Before going paperless, wi-fi was deployed across all Ryman’s villages and an internal team provides IT support across the network, 24/7.

“Every resident has a tablet in their room and the care we deliver is 24 hours, so we had to make sure our IT support team was 24 hours,” says Brevoort.

The next step in the project is to integrate myRyman with the medication system OneChart and allow information transfer with primary care providers.

A data goldmine

A huge amount of information about the care residents receive and their emotional and clinical health is now being entered electronically into myRyman. This has resulted in a swathe of data the aged-care organisation previously did not have access to.

King says older people are the most under-researched group in health, and Ryman has a public health specialist researching the data to gain insights into things such as the use of statins in the older population.

“All the data is there at your fingertips, rather than stuck in a file somewhere,” he says.

In the future, Ryman hopes to be able to use the data to build risk scores for its residents, to predict those at greater of risk of things like falls and put in supports before they happen.

A positive impact

King says responses to staff, family and resident surveys have improved since the roll-out and the organisation now has four-year accreditation for more than 80 per cent of its villages.

Jacky Fitzsimon was seconded to the myRyman team for the development and is now clinical manager at Ryman’s Nellie Melba village in Melbourne.

“I think it is most amazing for caregivers, it is there, at the bedside all the time, with the information they need,” she says.

“It makes creating tasks and doing handovers easy. It means residents get the care they need, nothing is missed.”

Ryman operations clinical and quality manager Karen Lake is speaking about the myRyman project at the HiNZ Conference 2019 during Digital Health Week NZ in Hamilton this November.

If you would like to provide feedback on the above feature article please contact the editor

Rebecca McBeth.

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