At aged care provider Regis, AI takes on paperwork so staff can focus on residents - Source Asia

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At aged care provider Regis, AI takes on paperwork so staff can focus on residents - Source Asia

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Regis Aged Care, one of Australia's largest residential aged care providers operating 72 homes with more than 10,000 residents, deployed RegiCare Assist — an internal AI assistant built on Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry and developed with solutions partner Cognizant — in September 2025. The system is now used by about 150 employees across the network and compresses the daily 24-hour clinical report from 68 pages to a 3-page summary, freeing clinical care managers from paperwork so they can spend more time on direct resident care. ‘Today's 24-hour report is 68 pages long,’ said Mariamma George, a clinical care manager at a Regis home in Cairns in northeast Australia. ‘I uploaded it into RegiCare Assist. Within minutes, I could print out a summary of clinical events to get a whole picture of what's going on. It's three pages.’ Dorkas Sangalang, a clinical care manager at a 97-bed Regis home in Melbourne, said the system lets her prepare the 9:30 a.m. handover briefing in 30 minutes, versus roughly two hours previously, with the freed time spent walking the floor and sitting with residents. The pain point that drove the deployment was simple: clinical care managers were spending hours each morning reading handover notes from frontline carers and registered nurses, and important clinical signals — falls, medication refusals, end-of-life flags — were being buried in long progress-note dumps. RegiCare Assist ingests overnight reports from 14 different clinical systems and groups concerns into categories such as immediate clinical concerns, agitation, signs of pain or infection, and bowel movements. The system runs on Azure infrastructure inside Regis' secure environment, with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) constrained to a knowledge base of Regis' own clinical policies and procedures. A click-based interface with approved prompts limits ambiguous queries and unsafe responses. According to chief information officer Imtiaz Bhayat, prompt engineering specifically ensured the model would not silently drop residents from summaries — adding the word ‘all’ to prompts was needed to capture every resident mentioned. ‘We told them: This (AI) is to support you, not replace your clinical judgment or decision-making,’ said chief nursing officer Rameez Hassan, who with Bhayat drove the deployment. The next milestone is integrating RegiCare Assist directly with Regis' existing care management system so the 24-hour report no longer needs to be manually uploaded.