With the focus moving from traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ residential care to delivering care across the ageing journey, diversified Calvary Health Care is leading the way on providing virtual care at home – and its customers are driving the demand.
Following the November 2021 purchase of Japara, which delivered Calvary 4,500 aged care beds, the Catholic Not For Profit now operates a national network of 14 public and private hospitals, more than 70 residential aged care homes and retirement villages, 19 community care service centres and two virtual care services, with over 18,000 staff and volunteers.
Key to its strategy is its virtual care program, which is helping to keep older Australians – including aged care residents – out of the hospital system.
The provider – which turned over $1.8 billion in 2022 and has around $2 billion in land and holdings – currently delivers two programs as part of its virtual hospital joint venture with Medibank.
The My Home Hospital (MHH) service is a South Australian Health program delivered by the Calvary Medibank partnership that operates a virtual care centre where patients are provided with a technology kit of devices and a tablet to enable remote monitoring.
The second program is Calvary’s Covid Care at Home (CCAH) service, which was introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic across NSW, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia and has also seen widespread uptake on the back of new public acceptance of telehealth.
“We are expanding the use of wearables and AI to drive algorithms that tell us, ‘this is a patient that is deteriorating,’” according to its National Director Strategy & Service Development, Vanessa Janissen.
Read the full story in this week’s issue of SATURDAY – subscribe here.
