E-Health initiatives are often hamstrung by the difficulties associated with bringing various interest groups together and developing a coordinated and compatible approach, often on a shoestring budget. So I'm really proud to be a part of an initiative that is proving successful in demonstrating that it's worth the effort to harness technology to provide better services to residents in aged care facilities.

ConnectCare is supported by funding from the Australian Government under the Clever Networks program and includes a consortium of leading industry partners, who have matched federal funding dollar for dollar.

All project partners are deeply passionate about harnessing technology to make a positive difference to the lives of older Australians.  Each organisation has extensive experience and a proven track record in delivering advanced aged care applications and services.

• Church Resources - initiated and is leading the ConnectCare project
• Consult Point - provides project and change management
• KPMG - provides project governance
• Ethan Group - provides infrastructure and data centre management
• Epicor - provides financial management applications
• iCare - provides clinical care applications
• Telstra - provides broadband network, video conferencing and hosting

The project will initially roll out the suite of applications and associated infrastructure in four pilot sites located in regional New South Wales, Central and South West Queensland. Four Church Resources member organisations will take part in the ConnectCare pilot. They are:

• Nambucca Valley Care Ltd., Maxwell, NSW; 80 bed facility
• Catholic Care of the Aged, Sawtell NSW; 70 beds
• Churches of Christ Care, Toowoomba and Cunnamulla QLD; 100 beds/12 beds
• Caloundra Catholic Community Homes Ltd. - Caloundra QLD 35 bed facility

They are all not-for-profit facilities which have the potential to demonstrate significant benefits by harnessing technology to improve their level of care and efficiency.

The main aim of the project is providing small to medium sized not-for-profit aged-care facilities with a level of IT and communications infrastructure that would be otherwise out of reach.  This is partly because of cost, but also because of the skills needed to understand, roll-out and support these types of applications.

That's why Church Resources' role is really important.  We are facilitating a level of collaboration between first class industry partners that can provide enterprise-grade solutions that are flexible, affordable and of high value to smaller facilities.

We're packaging up the solution for them, supporting the implementation and importantly, providing 24 x 7 monitoring and helpdesk support. 

One exciting element of the project is that we will make tangible progress on the sharing of patient records across aged care and medical providers. 

Traditionally, a major obstacle in the compilation of correct and complete resident records has been that after visiting a resident in an aged care facility GPs have typically taken their notes away with them. Hopefully through this project we will have the ability to capture that information and ensure it remains within the clinical record of the resident. This will assist in future medication management and future diagnosis.

It's a big task that wouldn't be possible for any of the pilot facilities if they had to invest in all the necessary resources individually.

Other services on offer through ConnectCare are:

• Business grade broadband
• Clinical management
• Advanced financial management
• Video/audio conferencing
• Microsoft Exchange and Office
• Data and application backup and recovery service
• Firewall, virus protection, email security, spam filtering
• 24/7 help desk support for application and infrastructure
• Wireless resource and asset tracking

Initially ConnectCare is focusing on four pilot sites, but ultimately the platform and set of capabilities we are building can be accessed by any aged care facility.  The platform can also be expanded, most obviously for community care, probably with a strong mobile communications element utilising laptops, PDAs and mobile phone technologies.

Once the program is fully operational there will be an opportunity to leverage it commercially, but the focus of the solution will remain mostly within the small to medium not-for-profit and church based facilities.

When we began we didn't encounter any "eHealth" scepticism, in fact initial responses were delight at the offer of help. At this stage, the feedback we've received so far has been fantastic, which is very gratifying. But then, we've never spoken about this as "eHealth" project, it's an aged care project.

The most challenging part of the process has been bringing seven partners together and securing government funding to enable this to happen.  Providing a greater level of care for all Australian aged care residents has been the common motivating force which has made it happen. Communication, education and shared knowledge have helped all the parties cooperate well.

Church Resources has been well-positioned to provide insight and understanding because the religious congregation represents approximately 70% of the not-for-profit aged care market.

From the residents' perspective, the increased influence of technology on their care will be barely perceptible. What they will notice are a couple of really simple but important benefits: reduced the risk of being incorrectly prescribed, and increased contact between residents and carers as their time is freed up through a reduction in the time required to fulfil their administrative duties. 

That's what "eHealth" should be about, taking the pain out of the administrative side of things and providing better care.

Con Koulouris has 20 years experience driving marketing, sales and product strategies across both corporate and not-for-profit organisations, including 13 years within the ICT sector. For the past two years Con has been Director of Telecommunications and ICT at Church Resources, where he is responsible for bottom line commercial outcomes as well as facilitating collaboration, partnerships and solutions between the Church and not-for-profit sector, industry and government. In this time he has led a number of substantial transformation projects across the Church, Aged Care and Community sectors and has forged strong relationships with government and industry to assist in achieving substantial outcomes. Con's experience also includes almost a decade at Telstra, where he held a variety of senior roles including General Manager, Sales for Telstra's emerging technologies as well as Senior Product Manager for Telstra Multimedia.