Calvary Health Care previews digital assistant for 20,000 staff and volunteers

Calvary Health Care is poised to switch on a multilingual, AI virtual assistant for its 20,000 staff and volunteers to use on smartphones.

The new assistant, called “Cally”, won’t go live until next week, but the hospital and aged care specialist’s chief information officer John Sutherland previewed it in a LinkedIn post.

A Calvary Health Care spokesperson declined to provide further detail when approached by Digital Nation.

“Cally is a single digital front door, sitting in front of and integrated to our core systems, enabling the provision of quality care, better access to information, and reducing administrative burdens so staff spend more time on what matters most: caring for others,” Sutherland wrote.

The assistant is fluent in over 60 languages and had been tested and refined based on feedback from a group of “frontier participants and champions”.

“Our staff are embracing AI far more readily than many expected,” Sutherland wrote.

On the tech side, Anthropic, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Salesforce, Microsoft and Cygnus Consulting all played roles in the project, Sutherland wrote.

Screenshots of the assistant Sutherland appended to his post indicate it has access to a variety of operations data, from finance and human resources right through to clinical care and pastoral guidance.

For instance, it can generate executive briefings that provide a snapshot of revenue forecast and occupancy broken down by business units and check how the organisation is tracking against strategic initiatives.

Cally also appears to give staff access to a range of HR functions, such as the ability to make queries about leave, track training requirements and even complete performance reviews.

At a care level the screenshots of the assistant appear to show it capturing clinical notes in an ICU setting and generating AI discharge summaries “in minutes, not hours”.

The screenshots also show it is capable of capturing audio voice records of visit summaries, notes for shift handovers and giving staff access to knowledge bases of clinical care guidelines.  

Sutherland - who has held a number of technology leadership roles in the health sector - is a previous iTnews Benchmark Awards winner and finalist.