Since 2023, Calvary has implemented MEG as the digital auditing tool for clinical quality audits, to ensure a standardised monitoring and measuring of the data across our hospital, residential aged care, home care and virtual care services.

On Wednesday, 13 March, Calvary hosted Ireland’s Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly, to showcase how the innovative Irish auditing tool is enhancing practice at Calvary Ryde Residential Aged Care home.

Improving care and enabling transparency

Calvary’s National Director Clinical Governance, Kris Salisbury, said the decision to use MEG was about making an essential task meaningful.

“As a healthcare provider committed to quality care, we adopt robust auditing processes to ensure we remain compliant in a highly regulated system and do our best to ensure patient safety,” Ms Salisbury said.

“Ultimately, we wanted our auditing practices to lead to improving care and enabling transparency about the care we provide to our patients, residents and clients.”

Calvary collaborated with MEG to develop a flexible auditing tool that has been adapted to suit the various health streams across the organisation and the service changes that have been implemented over time.

The roll-out of MEG commenced in 2022, with the onboarding of Calvary’s then 14 hospitals, and the response within those services has been overwhelmingly positive.

“The real-time dashboard has made a significant difference across the hospitals, as it allows individual users across the sites to focus on their own data, more easily identifying opportunities for consistent improvement.

“Our aged care homes transitioned to MEG six months later following a major acquisition. This has allowed us to generate a culture of transparency and standardised improvements, and create operational efficiencies,” Ms Salisbury added.

Calvary’s home care services were brought on to the digital auditing dashboard in 2023, enabling an organisational-wide view of compliance, quality and safety with standardised audit controls underpinned by an efficient, digitised process.

“The next steps for us in using MEG is to create data-backed benchmarking across the organisation to track our improvements and that is an exciting space to be in,” Ms Salisbury said.

Continued international collaboration

Minister Donnelly said he was thrilled to be in Australia celebrating the positive impact of Irish innovation on Australian healthcare.

“The partnership of MEG and Calvary Health Care serves as an excellent example of successful collaboration between the two countries. I am delighted to acknowledge the progress made since the initial rollout of MEG’s quality management services to Calvary Health Care in 2022,” he said.

“Today, we celebrate the expansion of this partnership, which reinforces the continued collaboration and exchange of knowledge between the Irish and Australian healthcare sectors.”

Enterprise Ireland supported MEG to bring its services to the Australian and New Zealand markets and Sophie O’Grady, Digital Health Market Advisor, said the team was proud to celebrate use of MEG’s quality management software across Calvary Health Care’s 90 sites.

“This successful partnership is exemplified by MEG and Calvary Health Care’s common goal of commitment to continual improvement, quality care and patient safety, and serves as an excellent example as to the positive impact that can be made when innovation meets forward-thinking in healthcare,” she said.