In aged care, time is precious. Carers and nurses enter the profession to provide comfort, safety, and connection, yet too often they find themselves caught up in reporting requirements, manual checks, and troubleshooting faulty systems.
For Ange Ryan, CEO of RTM Cloud, this imbalance is one of the biggest challenges the industry faces. “Most staff, I mean 90 per cent of staff, don’t dream of going into aged care to sit at a desk and do reporting,” she says. “They want to interact with residents. That is the best time of their day.”
From compliance audits to tracking response times, reporting has become a major time sink for frontline staff. Many facilities still rely on manual processes. “Some of them were manually doing Excel spreadsheets and manipulating the data,” Ange recalls. “It is like, my gosh, you need to be an Excel expert to do this.”
The issue goes beyond inconvenience. Lost hours spent on paperwork mean fewer hours spent face-to-face with residents. For staff already stretched thin, the strain is felt by everyone.
RTM Cloud was built to address this problem head-on. By integrating disparate systems like nurse call, duress alarms, CCTV, and security into one simple dashboard, the technology eliminates duplication and streamlines communication.
Ange explains: “We take the issues of reporting out for them. Our system actually collects all the data, puts it on a dashboard, and they can choose from around 35 different reports or customise their own. It has reduced, I would say, one to two hours a day of reporting for staff.”
Ease of use has been central to the design. “We build our technology on customer usage before technology usage,” Ryan says. “It has to be easy for an average person to use. If our own service desk or accounts team cannot work it out, we do not release it.”
The result is a system designed to be as straightforward as possible. “We have a reporting system called 123. It’s as easy as 1-2-3. Choose a date, choose your wing or your bedroom, print it out. It is just that simple.”
Beyond saving time, smart monitoring improves safety. By standardising alarms and messages, staff are notified instantly when something needs attention. If the first carer cannot respond, alerts escalate automatically to another team member.
“Issues preventing fast responses are addressed quickly,” Ange explains. “When general managers or regional managers get those reports, and notice longer than expected response times in a particular area, they can address issues right away. We’ve had reports that response times have gone down from eight minutes to two minutes in some aged care facilities using RTM.”
Real-time monitoring also extends to critical infrastructure. “We ping assets like CCTV cameras every few minutes,” Ange says. “If one goes offline, we know straight away. It might be a door left open that should not be, which could mean a dementia resident wandering out. We are their eyes and ears without being there.”
Perhaps the greatest benefit is giving staff back what they value most: time with residents. “It is massive,” Ange says. “They can spend more time communicating with residents instead of sitting there doing paperwork. That is what they come into the job for.”
The impact has been measurable. Facilities have reported saving hundreds of thousands of dollars by moving away from manual checks, while also achieving more frequent audits and improved compliance.
But for Ange, the human side matters most. “It is about giving carers confidence and residents peace of mind. Their job is to give care. Our job is to make sure everything is functioning well in the background.”
Ange vision for RTM Cloud is to continue reducing the reporting load and expanding integration with other systems, including care plans and medication records. “We want them to hardly have to touch any reporting whatsoever,” she says. “The future is to interface with more technology so they do not have to worry about whether assets are online and working. That is our responsibility.”
For frontline staff, the promise is clear: less time wrestling with paperwork and broken systems, more time for the work they came into the industry to do – caring for people.
See how RTM Cloud is helping aged care staff focus on what matters most – providing care. Learn more at rtmcloud.com.au
