Juniper is a value-driven, not-for-profit agency affiliated with the Uniting Church. With a rich history dating back to 1949, Juniper has established itself as a leading provider of care, accommodation, and support services for older Western Australians.
Today, Juniper proudly employs a dedicated team of 1,767 staff members and benefits from the unwavering commitment of 205 volunteers. Its extensive offerings include retirement villages, home care programs, and residential aged care services, collectively serving a remarkable 4,573 individuals across Western Australia. Beyond its strong presence in metropolitan Perth, Juniper has extended its reach to encompass the Great Southern, Southwest, Kimberley, Mid-West, and Wheatbelt regions.
Synopsis
Faced with the challenge of generating accurate and timely reporting across multiple disparate data sources, coupled with time-consuming data processes, Juniper, a leading aged care provider in Western Australia, needed a comprehensive data solution to confidently navigate the complex legislative and regulatory landscape of the aged care sector.
As Juniper’s trusted data partner, Forest Grove was engaged to address these challenges through collaborative end-to-end data consultancy and carefully considered technology. Connected Services was chosen to facilitate the integration and aggregation of diverse data sources into a single source of truth – to be leveraged for automated reporting across departments. With the implementation of dashboards and visualisations, Juniper gained the ability to drill down into specific metrics and gain valuable insights from data they can trust. As a result, Juniper has achieved a streamlined reporting process, enhanced data accuracy, scalability to support future growth, and the data infrastructure to swiftly adapt to regulatory and legislative requirements as they arise.
Background
In line with the aged care sector’s ever-evolving legislative and regulatory landscape, Juniper is required to submit various reports to government authorities to demonstrate its adherence to service quality and resident well-being. These reports serve as a means of transparency, monitoring, and evaluation to ensure that aged care providers meet the necessary standards and expectations.
However, with multiple disparate data sources like spreadsheets, Procura, Humanforce, Epicor, and Chris21, Juniper found itself spending hours attempting to reconcile and match the numbers for reporting purposes. With the introduction of each new reporting standard, Juniper had to manually update templates and add supplementary fields across each data source – spending considerable time on manual consolidation and reporting.
Key Results
With the end goal of enabling Juniper with timely, accurate, scalable, and enhanced analytical capabilities, Forest Grove leveraged its Connected Services for:
Data Integration and Aggregation: With Connected Services, Forest Grove automated data integration and extraction from diverse sources in a central data warehouse. The solution allows automated, scheduled, as well as self-service data pipelines in response to specific business requirements. This integration eliminates data silos and promotes collaboration across the organisation.
Reporting Automation & Compliance: By connecting BI tools to the central data warehouse, Forest Grove enables Juniper to generate meaningful data output with the click of a button, performing reporting, budgeting, and consolidation swiftly and accurately. With in-depth dashboards and visualisations, Juniper effectively reports on key metrics, like:
– Staffing ratios and skills mix: The composition of registered nurses, enrolled nurses, personal care attendants, and support staff to effectively cater to the residents’ requirements while adhering to guidelines and regulations.
– Residents’ Needs: Residents’ care-level assessment to accurately allocate workforce where needed.
– Financial and Administrative Management: Visibility into financials relating to resident fees, budgeting, and administrative tasks to ensure smooth operations.
Outcome
The automation of data collection and reporting has not only saved time, improved data accuracy, and increased collaboration but also empowered Juniper to optimise staff allocation, meet reporting requirements, and deliver personalised and high-quality care services to WA’s aging population.
Operational efficiency from a robust reporting process: Juniper’s current data infrastructure not only allows it to access insights in a pre-defined format that supports current regulatory requirements but also swiftly adapts to future legislative changes as they arise. This has reduced reporting time and improved data accuracy, delivering operational efficiency.
“While the goalposts are constantly shifting, our established structure empowers us to stay ahead, ensuring that no change is too significant for us to adapt”, says ICT Manager Scott Simmons.
Enhanced Data Accuracy and Data Literacy: Knowing that every report pulls data from one source has restored Juniper’s confidence in the accuracy of its reporting process. The ability to drill down to the transaction level offers the team visibility to confidently identify and reconcile any data discrepancies while enabling faster and more informed decisions.
More time to focus on delivering value: With Forest Grove offering a fully managed solution (continuous data monitoring and maintenance) along with dedicated customer support, Juniper is now able to focus on activities that deliver value to its residents and community.
Scalability: Juniper’s current data infrastructure supports scalability to add additional data sources as its systems and processes evolve alongside its organisational growth – facilitating efficient data management and analysis.
“Earlier, we had to individually assess how to get separate systems to talk to each other. But now, with a central data warehouse, we know it’s just a matter of APIs and database connections,” says Troy Green, Data and Integrations Lead.
