Aged Care Data Compare
Project rationale
Understanding the needs of older people naturally leads to personalised and good quality care. Providers of residential aged care gather this information, but their processes vary and software solutions record it differently. This lack of “standardisation” leads to inefficiencies and missed opportunities.
- Without a standardised way of recording data, sharing information among care professionals and organisations is difficult.
- Understanding and comparing quality of care within and between organisations is currently hindered by non-standardised data.
- Preparing reports for management and funders, including government, is likewise challenging.
Project aims
We aim to resolve technical challenges around the standardisation and sharing of valuable data that is recorded as part of every-day practice in residential aged care. To this end, will work with interested aged care service providers, software vendors and government. We will:
- Survey types of information currently recorded in software solutions to judge suitability for standardisation.
- Create an agreed standardised data inventory that software solutions can draw on.
- Configure data items and develop protocols that allow sharing between organisations and software platforms.
- Construct a prototype ‘data hub’ to support a quality benchmarking platform.
- Identify a suite of quality indicators that can be calculated from the standardised data.
- Ultimately enable residential aged care providers to understand, compare and improve their quality of care.
Future potential
This technical ‘ground-work’ will allow assessment data that is routinely collected in residential aged care to be used to greater potential; for every-day efficiency, for care improvement, for transparency, and for ease of reporting to government.
We envisage that, in the future, our proposed data standard and prototype ‘data hub’ will facilitate the calculation of quality indicators and preparations of reports from standardised data. Such infrastructure will enable organisations to compare their performance – within their own operations, or with facilities operated by other, anonymous, providers.
Beyond this two-year project, we plan to make our solutions available to all interested aged care providers and software vendors, and will work toward the creation of an extensive benchmarking capability for the industry. The availability of standardised data will create opportunities for data exchange with health care systems outside of the aged care program, including hospitals, primary care and mental health services.