5/08/2016
In its purest sense, I associate mobility with making people’s lives easier. However, when we use the term mobility in the aged care industry, it is safe to suggest most people immediately think of power wheelchairs, walking aids, and electric scooters. In the aged care software space, mobility is still about making people’s lives easier, but in a very different way.
Mobile technology has changed the way we all live and work. Whether it is sending emails while waiting in line for your morning coffee, or having a video call with your interstate family, it is hard to imagine how we ever lived without these technological advances.
As illustrated in the Deloitte Mobile Consumer Survey 2015, there are approximately fifteen million smartphones in use in Australia. With a resident population a little over 24 million there is no argument we are a mobile country, which is why every business needs to plan for how they can adapt to this changing landscape.
Mobility: adapt or be left behind
The aged care industry is approaching a period of significant change. With a growing market, increased competition will be likely, which is why it is important to adopt a best practice approach in everything you do.
One way aged care organizations can improve their performance is through enabling their workforce to be productive in ways they previously may not have perceived possible.
This is what effective mobile solutions allow you to do.
In perhaps its most obvious form, mobility allows your employees to work off-site. Today, employees are looking for flexible working arrangements and many businesses facilitate for it. Therefore, if you offer such a working arrangement, it is important to have the right systems in place to make sure it is a success.
{Breakout Box: 84% of organizations that have more than 20 staff, have employees that—excluding working from home—do their job away from an office of fixed location.}
However, deeper than allowing your staff to work from home, consider how you can empower your employees to be productive whenever they aren’t at their regular workstation. For example, providing your staff with the ability to update client records via a tablet at a point of action is a much more effective business practice than handwriting notes. Expecting accuracy in such a paper based process is a tall order as it relies on the information not being lost, forgotten about, or inaccurately interpreted.
This illustrates the importance of thinking differently about your business operations. This attitudinal shift starts with senior management, but when mobile functionality is in place, it can have a positive ripple effect through the entire organization.
You can start by considering what manual processes can be re-configured and where current instances of downtime can be replaced with instances of productivity.
The positive benefits of mobility
Aberdeen research found that organizations with mobile solutions are 2.7 times as likely to have real-time visibility into the status of all processes. This allows them to capitalise on opportunity before it passes and can also correct deficiencies before they cause significant risk to the organization.
This same research found that organizations with mobile business process management experienced a nineteen percent improvement in their business process cycle time. This level of productivity gain is likely to also drive substantial benefits to the bottom line. 
Moreover, when an organization adopts progressive mobile working business practices, it can have a positive impact on the workplace culture. When productivity, innovation and technology best practice are part and parcel of everyday operations, these traits can influence the efforts of your team to a level where problem solving and ingenuity become self-propelling.
In a competitive marketplace if you are going to attract and retain the best talent, you need to provide an effective operating environment. This is not only for employee job satisfaction, but to illustrate to your staff that they are working for a progressive company that has aspirations to reach its full potential.
Mobility doesn’t need to cost a fortune either. Cloud deployment options allow you to achieve excellent results through using relatively inexpensive handheld technologies.
Therefore, if you can equip your team with handheld devices which allow them to respond quicker to client and internal correspondence, improve data entry processes, and generally increase their productivity, all without blowing your budget, then it’s hard to see a reason why any business wouldn’t.
If your organization hasn’t fully embraced mobility, then the time to act is now. Your clients, suppliers, and staff are all users of these abovementioned fifteen million smartphones, so if you want to grow, then you need aged care software that has suitable mobile functionality.
Posted by Lee Robbins, Senior Product Manager, Senior Living Solutions, Epicor Software