This exclusive event for WA Aged Care providers focused on how the effective use of technology can help your organisation become efficient.
By Rushad Billimoria, Information Systems Manager: Not-for-Profits and Aged Care
On Friday 15/11/19, we hosted the Aged Care TechFest: How to manage and use data for efficient operations.
We had a full house with many different organisations getting together to explore how to get the most out of their Office 365 subscription and how to use IT to achieve more.
The goal of the event was to present the main features within the Intranet and Document Management components of SharePoint by using real Aged Care examples in a demo, to deep dive into Bluefroce’s camera offerings and to cover business intelligence and data analytics by running a demo of Power BI and SSRS.
If you missed out or it was a lot to take in, it’s OK! We’ll dig into the main points covered today.
SharePoint is not a single application that performs a primary function, like Outlook or Word. It is a powerful platform, providing many different and complex functions in a similar way that Google does. Some organisations use it for their website, for intranet, for their document management system, for their business knowledge base and so on.
At its heart, SharePoint is a website, or portal. It could be a single site with a homepage that links to different areas for documents, news or communications. It may be a site collection with several child sites underneath a parent site for separating the different areas of an organisation. In our experience, SharePoint works best when it reflects how your Aged Care operation works now or intends to work in their planned future.
SharePoint can store many different and complex types of information, such as office documents, images, audio, videos and links that are stored elsewhere on the web.
You can also store SharePoint is lists, so pieces of information that are not attached to a document file.
A more powerful way to use SharePoint is through metadata. By taking your files out of folders, you can label each document with extra information (metadata) to classify them instead of only having folder and file names. This approach gives you a lot of flexibility in seeing your information, whereas folders is a set configuration.
Besides making documents easier to find, the real value of metadata comes from combining different data to improve the overall experience for users and making document search a more intuitive task.
SharePoint can help your business with governance and document compliance.
SharePoint permissions can be set up so that the staff are able to view all public information, while any sensitive data can be organised and locked to specific groups of people. For example, you might want to provide access only to members of your team, or you might want to provide access to everyone, but restrict editing for some.
SharePoint will by default keep versions of your files. This allows you to track the history of a version knowing when a file has been changed and by whom; restore a previous version if you made a mistake or prefer what you had before; or simply view a previous version without overwriting your current version.
This is done in SharePoint through Microsoft Flow which automates workflows across different apps, such as automatically copy folders added to Dropbox to OneDrive, Save your Tweets with specific hashtags to a SharePoint list, approve a document with your manager and so on.
In SharePoint, co-authoring enables multiple users to work on a document, at any time, without interfering with each other’s changes.
With co-authoring, you speed up that process, minimise room for errors and the risk of duplication.
Technology is evolving at a rapid pace, with more and more tools becoming available for aged care providers to develop safer and more efficient spaces for staff, management and customers. Providers are increasingly harnessing the power of smart analytics and business intelligence to improve governance and care provision.
Through a solid partnership, Blueforce and Bremmar can combine the data from CCTV with Power BI and feed the data to care providers via a centralised and user-friendly platform. Management can at a glance obtain a snapshot of what is happening within their facilities and tailor dashboards according to your operation needs. This solution improves and streamlines patient care and can also alert staff of unusual or concerning patterns of behaviour.
Business intelligence is the concept of informed decision making based on evidence from past data analysis whereas data analytics is the concept of analysing past and present data to try and predict future scenarios.
But before you jump into BI or data anlaytics, remember: Without context, content and connection data is meaningless!
Some of the main differences between dashboards and reports are:
So how do you determine which one you need?
The first major area where each offers a different advantage is in scope.
Dashboards are best employed when they focus on specific aspects of an organisation, such as tracking customer satisfaction or number of incidents. Reports have the benefit of a broader scope, offering a better-detailed view of an organisation.
The second key difference in each is data timeliness. Reports tend to be broader and feature historic data. Dashboards, on the other hand, are built to visualise and organise data in real-time.
Microsoft PowerBI is a great tool for creating rich personalised dashboards. There is a desktop version which is free, a professional version which has a monthly cost, and a premium version for large enterprise organisations.
Microsoft Power BI is used to find insights within an organisation’s data. It can help connect disparate data sets, transform and clean the data into a data model and create charts or graphs to provide visuals of the data. It integrates seamlessly into existing applications such as SharePoint and is viewable on mobile devices. It is a simple, user-friendly tool which has been developed for a range of BI users, from novice to professionals.
Here’s an image of the demo Power BI dashboard we presented at the event which shows expiring certifications for staff based on date and location.
SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) is a server-based report generating software system made by Microsoft and used as a solution for companies who need to build custom reports from a variety of data sources.
Here’s an image of our demo showing a report with the underlying data from the Power BI dashboard (mentioned above).
If you are on Office 365, you probably already have access to some of the features mentioned above. Everything covered in the event was only the foundation for future cloud opportunities, as we haven’t yet touched on, PowerApps, Dynamics 365 or even the many other features in the SharePoint space itself.
If you would like a more personalised introduction to SharePoint, Security, Power BI or any of the Office 365 suite, here some of the areas we can help with:
If you would like to discuss any of the topics above, please call us in for a chat on 1300 991 351 or fill in the form below and our consultants will get in touch with you!
By Rushad Billimoria, Information Systems Manager: Not-for-Profits and Aged Care
As a Client Information Systems Manager, I’m the go-to person for Bremmar’s NFP and Aged Care customers. I help charities, non-profit and Aged Care partners of all sizes transform their digital capabilities and modernise their workplaces, using a targeted and industry-specific approach.
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