Australian aged care provider improves quality of care with Macquarie SD-WAN

Macquarie Telecom (ASX: MAQ) has announced Hall & Prior Aged Care has deployed SD-WAN services to a number of its residences in Western Australia and New South Wales, enabling new audio and video conferencing services for care providers to communicate more effectively and trial extra services to care recipients.

The family-owned organisation manages 25 residential aged care homes and two home care services across the two states and is committed to ensuring quality aged care is accessible for everyone, no matter what their background and circumstances might be.

Hall & Prior has achieved significant growth over the last three years, largely through the strategic acquisition of six aged and community care residences. This sparked the need for a simpler, more scalable network that would enable the organisation to be more responsive in developing, deploying and helping the business to use new digital services.

“Digital voice and video services are the way of the future in our industry,” said Dan Beeston, ICT Manager (Infrastructure), Hall & Prior Aged Care. “We needed a platform that enabled us to deploy these services in a way that was reliable, secure and benefited our care providers and recipients.”

SD-WAN has enabled Hall & Prior to successfully trial these services, and it is in the midst of equipping care providers and recipients with video and audio conferencing-enabled devices. The organisation is developing a new guest Wi-Fi platform using teleconferencing and social media to help reduce social isolation among care recipients in a digital age.

“We’re now moving towards a fully centralised model for voice and video services across all sites. We were hesitant about doing this under our former MPLS technology as those networks were already constrained. However, the trials with SD-WAN have proven successful and care providers and recipients are reaping benefits from the technology,” added Mr Beeston.

Macquarie’s SD-WAN solution has also reduced the amount of time Hall & Prior’s engineers spend dealing with troubled sites, leading to better care provider engagement, less work over the weekend and other unfavourable hours, and more time devoted to strategic projects that have a positive impact on both the business and care recipients.

Since the initial trials, Hall & Prior has increased the number of sites using SD-WAN and is rolling this technology out nationally with 80 per cent of sites already transitioned, 10 per cent of sites under way and 10 per cent on hold pending National Broadband Network (NBN) availability.

“With our previous provider, we had four different account managers over the duration of the contract – this isn’t the case with Macquarie. The Macquarie Team built and maintain a strong partnership with us, are early adopters and at the forefront of SD-WAN technology within the Australia market, and are well positioned to guide us through what is still relatively new ground,” said Mr Beeston.

“Hall & Prior is in a competitive industry and contingent to economic conditions and other factors outside of their control” said Luke Clifton, Group Executive, Macquarie Telecom. “The organisation knows that modern communicative technology is a must for its business, but also to ensure its care recipients receive the best care and reduce the risk of social isolation.”

Find out more about Hall & Prior Aged Care.