Connecting aged care, spirituality, and technology: Suri Ramanathan’s quest

It’s unusual, perhaps even unfashionable, to talk about spirituality these days. But in the context of aged care, attending to spiritual needs is as important as delivering positive healthcare outcomes using the latest information technology, said Aged Care Industry Information Technology Council (ACIITC) chair, Suri Ramanathan.

Mr Ramanathan is, by birth, a Hindu. “We’re all aging,” Mr Ramanathan told eHealthspace.org. “And as I get older, I’ve developed a greater appreciation for spirituality. As you get older, you seek oneness with God.”

Mr Ramanathan isn’t prescriptive about which God people should seek. He’s content to leave that particular aspect to the individual and their personal journey.

“Aging is a process of atonement,” he said. “It’s a sacred journey, and aged care is all about helping [people in] the final part of that journey.”

So where, you may ask, does technology come into it? After all, Mr Ramanathan is a technologist, not a guru.

The answer comes when you visit a well-run aged care home, said Mr Ramanathan. There you will see nurses doing things which don’t traditionally come under the rubric of clinical care. They hold an elderly person’s hand, or help them brush their hair. They sit and talk. Maybe it’s even just a smile. These are things which don’t require technology, but do need nurses who display tenderness and care.

And who, of course, have the time to go above and beyond doing the basics. That’s where technology has a role to play, said Mr Ramanathan.

“The biggest single issue in the aged care sector is the workforce,” he said. “There are not enough people to address the support needed. No amount of immigration, or new nursing students can satisfy it. And this is where technology can help.”

The trick to efficient service delivery in the aged care sector – and in healthcare overall – is scheduling. On other words, ensuring resources are in the right place, at the right time, with minimum downtown between each job.

“Scheduling is the holy grail,” said Mr Ramanathan. “The vast majority of health consumers are out in the community, and so we need to optimise resources to take care of these people.”

Mr Ramanathan said unpublished studies have shown efficiency gains of greater than 40 percent gained by organisations using modern scheduling and resource allocation tools.

Improvements in aged care will also accrue from the introduction of new decision support tools, and tools designed to predict healthcare incidents before they happen, he added.

“Older people have multiple conditions,” he said, “and as you get older, the focus shifts from prevention to management. Decision support tools, and predictive analysis tools can help with that task, and also assist people in taking ownership of their own health.”

The next decade will also see significant advances in terms of personal monitoring, with machines automatically taking key readings like blood pressure and weight, and then relay that seamlessly to clinicians and analytics software for analysis.

“We’re going to see a lot of activity in these areas,” he concluded.

The idea with technology advances, in the end, is to free up staff to provide the human contact every aged person needs. And with the human contact comes the important things, like addressing the spiritual needs of the aging. At least, that’s how Mr Ramanathan views it.