Success Story
Anglicare Tasmania cuts client risk assessment time with Layla
Industry
Aged care and community services
Founded
1983
Location
Hobart
Employees
726
About Anglicare Tasmania
Anglicare Tasmania is a Christian not-for-profit that delivers a wide range of services across the state, including at-home aged care, financial counselling, acquired injury support, homelessness services, research and advocacy.
Founded in 1983, the organisation has grown into one of the state’s largest community service providers. Its mission is to achieve social justice and provide the opportunity for people in need to reach fullness of life.
As administrative demands increased under Support at Home, Anglicare Tasmania needed a faster, more consistent way to assess client risk during onboarding. That search led the team to Layla, which is now helping care partners and clinical staff review incoming assessments more efficiently and with greater confidence.
Interview with
Ellen Nicholson
General Manager Aged Care Services, Anglicare Tasmania
The Challenge
For Anglicare Tasmania, client onboarding starts with the Care Partner team reviewing Integrated Assessment Tool (IAT) forms to understand risk, complexity and whether the organisation can safely support each person. That process used to rely on staff manually reading the incoming assessment and completing a lengthy internal form.
“There were about 46 questions in the form,” says Ellen. “And the things that you wanted to know, you might not always get answered.”
That created a double challenge. The process was time-consuming, but it also depended on staff anticipating every important question in advance.
As Ellen explains, “You had to decide what questions you wanted to ask. But that might mean you miss key information.”
In some cases, that also meant important clinical details were not being surfaced early enough, and key details were missed, as Care Partners were required to interpret the lengthy form manually.
The Solution
Layla gave Anglicare Tasmania a new way to approach risk assessment. Instead of working through the long manual form, the team now imports information from the integrated assessment tool and uses a tailored prompt to generate a structured risk summary.
“Now that we have Layla, we don’t actually need to do that big, long form,” says Ellen. “We use a script we’ve developed to ask Layla to summarise the risk under these categories for clients, based on what’s in the IAT.”
That summary is then checked by the team against the original document. Layla also helps surface missing information, so nurses and care partners can quickly identify what still needs to be clarified with the client or their next of kin.
For Ellen, one of Layla’s biggest strengths is that it can surface risks staff may not have explicitly asked for. “It will answer the question you haven’t even thought of yet,” she says.
The fact that Layla sits inside AlayaCare also mattered. “What’s great about having Layla is it’s inbuilt into our system.”
This gave the team assurance of its safety for Anglicare Tasmania and its users. “This means we don’t have to worry about privacy and confidentiality,” explains Ellen.
To support adoption, Anglicare Tasmania started with a small group of internal champions rather than forcing a large rollout all at once. That made it easier for confident users to lead by example and help others get comfortable with the technology.
The Result
The most immediate result has been time saved. On more difficult assessments, the manual process could take up to an hour. With Layla, Ellen says, “Now we can do it in 10 minutes.”
That saving matters at scale. Anglicare Tasmania estimates it is onboarding around 20 new Support at Home clients a month, and has recently extended the same Layla-supported risk assessment approach to roughly 30 CHSP clients a month. Based on those volumes, the team is potentially saving more than 40 hours of administrative time each month.
Just as importantly, Layla has made broader risk review possible in areas where that level of assessment would previously have been too resource-intensive. “The quality of our service provision is improved greatly by having Layla,” Ellen says.
That is especially valuable for CHSP, where administrative requirements can be difficult to absorb. As Ellen puts it, Layla “will likely mean that we’re much more successful in meeting the standards in the future.”
Due to the success of Layla, the team is now looking at other AI-enabled workflows created by AlayaCare.
Ellen’s view is simple: “If you’re using AlayaCare, then you should be using Layla.”
Looking to reduce risk assessment admin while improving onboarding quality? Get in touch with our friendly team today.