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An NEC spokesman told iTWire, "This was regarded as the best option for the industry [because of] its ability to reduce the cost of IT and provide the applications and computing power in a way that is cost effective and simple to consume. Many of the aged care organisations have little or no IT expertise."
Rod Young, CEO of Aged Care Association Australia, said: "Many aged care providers have been introducing IT systems to support staff in daily care and administration activities. However, making decisions about software products can be difficult and once IT systems are in place, they can be even more difficult."
Greg Mundy, CEO Aged & Community Services Australia added: "The aim of the partnership is to help aged care providers gain better access to software products, reduce the need for costly capital investment in hardware and to provide seven day a week remote technical support for staff if the computer system crashes for some reason."
The NEC spokesman said that NEC had signed a memorandum of understanding with the two bodies making it the preferred vendor for IT services across all member organisations.
"The peak bodies want to use technology to meet the increasing demand for aged care, control regulatory risks and reduce the cost of care delivery. They will recommend and facilitate the use of NEC's offering to their members and encourage them to adopt this service across the board."
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"This agreement has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of delivering care to Australia's elderly - something that is becoming ever more crucial in the face of an ageing population. Using Cloud computing, we're making IT systems more cost effective, easier to manage and more accessible to aged care providers large and small, public and private."
NEC will host and offer to aged care providing organisations a range of established software applications from a number of vendors. These include iCare, ComCare, AutumnCare, leecareplus and i.on my Care. It will complement these sector-specific applications with telephony, security, infrastructure and data management services; all hosted in its Australian data centres.
Also, NEC says it is working to develop additional services and technology to deliver remote and 'in-home' care, designed to defer moving old people into residential care and to increase efficiencies and productivities of the aged care industry. NEC says it "believes the maturity of the cloud and ubiquity of broadband connectivity provides a fertile ground for these developments."
Cooke said: "We're providing a platform that opens up additional routes to market without application developers having to create their own cloud computing offering from scratch'¦NEC's open access cloud application platform allows developers alternative billing and customer management approaches through NEC, leverages additional functionality such as video and telephony integration, and uses a solid, secure, locally hosted infrastructure."
