Dorkas Sangalang is just 30 minutes into her morning shift, and she’s already up to speed on clinical concerns raised overnight about the residents of the aged care home she works at.
She knows who in the 97-bed home has had a fall, who’s refusing medication and if someone is nearing end of life. And she’s all set for the 9:30 a.m. meeting, where she flags the day’s follow-ups and priorities to her team of registered nurses and personal care assistants.
“My role is to make sure that nothing is missed,” said the clinical care manager of a Regis Aged Care home in Melbourne, Australia.
This involves spending hours scouring pages of progress notes and reports written by frontline carers and nurses – required daily reading for managers like Sangalang.
But since September 2025, they’ve had help from RegiCare Assist, built with Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Foundry and developed by Regis Aged Care with solutions partner Cognizant.
This AI assistant summarizes the voluminous notes, flags concerns and sorts them by clinical issue.
“Today’s 24-hour report is 68 pages long,” said Mariamma George, a clinical care manager in a Regis home in Cairns, a city 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.”
Easing this pain point was what Regis landed on when it first began thinking about deploying AI in 2024. Now RegiCare Assist is used by about 150 employees across its network of 72 aged care homes in Australia.
“We realized that AI was really good at absorbing large blocks of text, picking up sentiment and picking up key themes,” said Regis’ chief information officer Imtiaz Bhayat.
Daily updates about the residents’ health within the progress notes are now sorted by RegiCare Assist into key categories like immediate clinical concerns, clinical trends, agitation, signs of pain or infection, and bowel movements.
Having this information organized and surfaced early means clinical care managers can spend less time reading and more time doing. On top of monitoring that day’s priority cases and responding to clinical events and emergencies, managers may be meeting with family members, reviewing new admission files and conducting staff training.
“Instead of focusing on paperwork, I have more time to walk the floor,” said Sangalang. “And to actually sit down with residents and listen to their feedback.”
Involving these frontline managers was key to developing RegiCare Assist, not just to get their buy-in but also to ensure the system does not compromise resident safety.
“We told them: This (AI) is to support you, not replace your clinical judgment or decision-making,” said Rameez Hassan, chief nursing officer at Regis. “We put those parameters clearly in place because resident safety is critical.”
Regis used Microsoft Copilot Studio, a low‑code platform for building and customizing AI‑powered agents, to design conversation flows around everyday clinical scenarios and refine prompts for the AI assistant, powered by large language models in Microsoft Foundry.
To boost accuracy and safety, the AI assistant uses RAG (retrieval augmented generation) that’s designed to produce information from a knowledge base of Regis’ clinical policies and procedures. Meanwhile, a click-based interface with approved prompts reduces the risk of ambiguous questions and unsafe answers.
“We spent a lot of time engineering the prompts, making it easier for the users,” said Bhayat. They also spent time structuring prompts to ensure residents would not go missing in the AI’s responses.
“There was one instance when we said: Summarize all the residents who have needs to be addressed. We discovered that if you put the word ‘all’ in front, it captures everybody. Whereas not having that word ‘all’ sometimes meant that people dropped off,” he explained.
Regis chose Microsoft’s AI solutions, said Bhayat, because of its security and ease of use. To protect residents’ personal information, the AI assistant runs within Regis’ secure environment, with strict controls on how data is accessed and shared.
Bhayat was also impressed by how quickly the technology was moving.
“We’ve seen Copilot evolving rapidly from the time it was released,” he said.
Future reviews and upgrades are in store for RegiCare Assist. At the top of the list is an integrated solution with the care provider’s existing care management system, so that managers no longer need to manually upload the 24-hour report.
It’s still too early to know whether the AI assistant has improved Regis’ clinical governance, said chief nursing officer Hassan. But the feedback so far is positive.
“We do have some anecdotal data as well as feedback from our clinicians who have been using it in terms of how it has reduced the time and helped them. And of course, any reduced time … gives them more time to focus on resident clinical care,” he said.
“The less time we spend on a computer, the more time we can spend thinking about the care of the resident, with them,” said Bhayat.
So far, clinical care managers Sangalang and George both agree their AI assistant has lowered their anxiety levels and boosted their confidence.
“We are on top of incidents and not stressing about the 24-hour report,” said George. “Now our notes are at a manageable level.”
Top image: Regis clinical care manager Dorkas Sangalang with a care home resident. Since using RegiCare Assist, she has more time to sit down with residents and listen to their feedback. Photo by Graham Denholm for Microsoft.
Lim Ai Leen reports on AI for Microsoft Source, focusing on how it’s improving lives in Asia. Ai Leen was formerly associate foreign editor at The Straits Times in Singapore and still pens an occasional weekend column. Contact her on LinkedIn.
Regis CIO shares his tips on bringing people along on the AI journey
Start with a pain point your colleagues are already feeling. This is what Regis Aged Care chief information officer Imtiaz Bhayat advises, after successfully rolling out an AI assistant to some 150 staff across care homes in Australia. Read more tips from him on how to bring workers along on your AI journey.