How Customer-Centric Innovation Can Reshape Aged Care

As a consultant working across industries to enhance customer and employee experiences through human-centred design, I've found aged care to be a sector uniquely poised for transformation. With a new Aged Care Act slated to arrive by mid-2025 that aims to improve the ways services are delivered to older people in their homes, community settings and residential aged care homes (1), the industry is ripe with opportunity to innovate. This article explores how customer-centric innovation can transform this vital sector, improving lives and redefining what it means to age with dignity and joy.

The Current State of Aged Care: A Call for Change

The statistics are compelling. We have an ageing population that will continue to age. From 1993 to 2023, the percentage of Australia’s population aged 65 and over has increased from 12% to 17% (2). Along with the impending Aged Care Act, this demographic shift presents unprecedented challenges to our aged care systems, many of which are already struggling with issues like staff shortages, outdated facilities and care models that don’t always prioritise individual needs and preferences.?

Traditional approaches to aged care often focus on operational efficiency at the expense of personalised care. While well-intentioned, especially in such a heavily regulated industry, these methods can lead to a one-size-fits-all approach that fails to recognise the diverse needs, desires, and capabilities of our older population and individuals.

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Customer-Centric Innovation in Aged Care

Enter customer-centric innovation – rather than adopting solutions simply because they are new or cutting-edge, customer-centric innovation focuses on aligning services with the real needs, preferences, and experiences of residents, families, and care staff. This shift in perspective is crucial for creating services that truly meet the complex and diverse needs of the customer.

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Understanding the Customer

The first and most critical step in this approach is gaining a deep, empathetic understanding of your customers. In aged care, this understanding must encompass multiple perspectives:

• Residents: Often, the move to aged care is not a choice but a necessity driven by declining health or sudden events like falls. This transition can be fraught with emotions such as fear, loss of independence, and uncertainty about the future.
• Family Members: They play a crucial role as decision-makers and advocates for their loved ones. Family members often grapple with guilt, stress, and the emotional burden of choosing the right care while balancing their own lives and responsibilities.
• Care Staff: As the frontline providers of care, their experiences, challenges, and insights are invaluable in shaping a more effective and compassionate care environment.

You can gather these perspectives through a range of design-thinking methods.

Empathic interviews allow you to explore personal stories and emotional insights by deeply listening to residents, family members, and care staff. This approach uncovers not just surface-level needs but also underlying motivations, fears, and desires. Focus groups bring together different stakeholders, encouraging group dialogue that can reveal shared experiences, concerns, and potential solutions. They foster a sense of collective understanding and can highlight common themes across various perspectives. Lastly, observations offer a powerful tool to capture real-time behaviours and interactions in the care environment. By observing daily routines and challenges firsthand, you can identify pain points that may not surface in interviews or group discussions, leading to more practical and meaningful innovations.

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Mapping the Customer Journey

Once you have gathered your insights, to truly understand these diverse perspectives, it's essential to map out the current state customer journey comprehensively. This mapping should include:

1. Emotional Landscape: Document the full range of emotions experienced throughout the journey. For residents, this might include initial resistance, fear of the unknown, grief over lost independence, but also potential relief or desires for improved care. For family members, it could involve guilt, anxiety, frustration with the process, or hope for their loved one's well-being.
2. Expectations: Capture what customers expect at each stage of the journey and compare it with the reality they encounter. This could reveal gaps in communication, service delivery, or understanding of the aged care system.
3. Key Actions: Identify all the key interactions a customer experiences and the steps they take throughout the entire journey, from initial research and home tours to move-in day and ongoing care. Each touchpoint presents an opportunity to either enhance the experience or reveal areas for improvement.
4. Pain Points: Highlight areas of difficulty, confusion, or dissatisfaction. These might include complex paperwork, lack of clear information, confusing jargon, feeling rushed in decision-making, or struggles with adapting to new routines.
5. Business Perspective: Include the journey of care and supporting staff, noting their actions, challenges, systems used and processes they follow.

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Ideating Solutions

Once this comprehensive journey map is created, it becomes a powerful tool for ideating potential solutions.

This process typically involves collaborative workshops that bring together diverse stakeholders that includes care staff, supporting business staff and design experts. These sessions focus on addressing the identified pain points and enhancing positive experiences throughout the journey. Ideas might range from leveraging technology for improved communication and personalised care planning, to redesigning physical spaces for better emotional support and daily living. Service blueprinting can help streamline processes and eliminate friction points, while empathy-based staff training programs can be developed to better meet the emotional needs of residents and families.

The goal is to generate a wide array of potential solutions that directly respond to the real experiences and challenges uncovered in the journey mapping process, ultimately leading to more person-centred, empathetic, and effective aged care services.

For example, in my role at The Strategy Group we collaborated with aged care provider Bolton Clarke, to explore key features for a potential resident-facing app to be used in their retirement living villages by utilising a customer-centric approach. To read more on how we undertook this approach, follow this link: https://www.thestrategygroup.com.au/innovation-experience-aged-care/ ?

The Way Forward

The path to improving aged care experiences through customer-centric innovation is both challenging and promising. By deeply understanding the multifaceted needs of all stakeholders, mapping out comprehensive customer journeys, and collaboratively ideating solutions, we can transform aged care from a system focused on operational efficiency to one that truly enhances the quality of life for seniors. This approach not only addresses the pressing challenges faced by the sector but also paves the way for a future where aging is met with dignity, compassion, and personalised care.

As we move forward, embracing customer-centric innovation in aged care isn't just an option - it's an imperative to ensure that our aging population receives the respect, support, and quality of life they deserve. The journey of innovation in aged care is ongoing, but by putting people at the centre of our efforts, we can create a brighter, more compassionate future for all involved in the aged care experience.

Sources:

(1) Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care, (2024), About the new Aged Care Act, from https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/aged-care-act/about

(2) Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, (2024), Profile of Australia's population. Australia's Health, from https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-health/profile-of-australias-population