Health and aged care
Outwards from the resident
Care technology is usually specified inwards from the product: a system is chosen, then people are asked to work around it. Ericom starts at the person being cared for, works out to the staff around them and the organisation accountable for both, and puts the technology in last.
Whose problem is it
A care facility rarely buys one thing. It buys a nurse call system, then a network, then cameras, then whatever the last capital works project left behind. Each came from a different supplier, and each was commissioned and walked away from.
Every one of them works. Nobody owns the joins.
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The call did not reach the handset
Was that the nurse call system, the paging infrastructure or the handset itself? Three suppliers, three answers, and none of them obviously wrong.
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The sensor stopped reporting
The sensor, the network it rides on, or the server that should be recording it. Each will check their own layer, find it healthy, and say so.
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No records for three weeks
Somebody has to notice first. Reporting failures are silent by nature, and silence belongs to whoever is not looking for it.
In an office, working out whose problem it is wastes a morning. In a building where somebody has fallen, it costs more than that. These are IP systems now, running on structured cabling, so one team can install them, monitor them and answer for all of them. Most care buildings have never been set up that way.
Three layers, one design
The same equipment is asked for different things depending on who is looking at it. Designing for one layer and hoping the others cope is how care technology ends up resented.
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The resident
Dignity first. A call answered, a deterioration noticed early, and as little equipment in the room as the job allows. That is why the vital signs sensing is contactless and produces no image at all.
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The care environment
Staff who are already stretched need fewer interruptions, not more data. The measure of a good deployment is how much it raises, not how much it can detect.
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Enterprise oversight
Boards and quality teams need evidence: what happened, when, who attended and how long it took, across every site rather than one. That is a reporting and infrastructure problem before it is a clinical one.
What we bring to a care setting
Each of these is a solution in its own right and is documented as one. What changes here is the question it is asked.
- Nurse Call The call system itself, replaced in stages while the building stays open, then monitored like the rest of your infrastructure. The resident
- Vital Signs Monitoring Contactless radar in the room. No camera, no wearable, and a signal that a resident's condition is changing before it presents. The resident
- Intelligent Video Analytics The cameras you already own, reading falls, door events and after-hours movement as they happen rather than after somebody reports them. The care environment
- Distributed Antenna Systems Mobile coverage that reaches the basements, lifts, wards and plant rooms where staff phones and duress devices currently fail. The care environment
- Managed IT The network, the servers and the service desk underneath all of it, including the cabling, access control and environmental monitoring a care building depends on. Enterprise oversight
- Essential Eight Resident records are health data. The security programme that protects them, measured against the Essential Eight rather than asserted. Enterprise oversight
The alert has to be believed
Every alert that turns out to be nothing spends a little of the credibility of the next one. In a care setting that currency is finite and it is not recoverable. A system nobody trusts by month six is worse than no system, because the building has stopped listening while believing it is covered.
Common questions
Do you work in hospitals as well as aged care?
Both. The scoping differs considerably. Bed numbers, care model, annunciator placement, escalation and after-hours coverage all change between a residential aged care facility and a hospital ward, so the two are quoted differently even where the platform is the same.
Do we have to take all of it?
No, and most organisations do not. Each of these is sold and delivered on its own. They compound because they share the cabling, the network and the team supporting them, which is where the joins usually fail when four suppliers are involved.
Are these products built specifically for healthcare?
Nurse call is. The sensing platforms are not. Contactless vital signs and video analytics are also deployed in custodial and commercial environments. We think that counts in their favour rather than against, and we would rather you heard it here than found out later.
Who makes the clinical decisions?
You do, always. Escalation paths, alert thresholds, response expectations and who carries which device follow your model of care. We build and support what you decide, and we will say so where a configuration looks likely to generate alerts nobody will trust by month six.
Where does the data stay?
Onshore. Ericom supplies, integrates and runs these systems in Australia, which matters more here than in most sectors because the data concerns residents' bodies and their movements.
Start with the building
Care technology is scoped from the floor plan, the existing cable plant and the model of care, not from a brochure. A site survey comes before any number.
Request a site survey