Providers have until 13 February to take up Digital Health CRC’s funded offer to test Kinnexus.
For years aged care providers have been hamstrung by the inability to know at any point in time how the quality of the care they provided compared with how it was being provided in previous years or even compared with their peers.
Now researchers and developers from the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (DHCRC), in collaboration with Bupa and Regis Aged Care, believe they have come up with a scalable, evidence-based solution using the latest HL7 FHIR standards and SMART on FHIR technology.
Kinnexus began life as the Aged Care Data Compare Project after the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety final report came down.
“A lot of providers were being hammered during the Royal Commission,” said Dr Isobel Frean, the DHCRC’s director of digital health integration.
“Some of them, quite rightly, felt that was unfair, but they were defenceless in their ability to convey what were the good things they were doing.
“Australia is one of the few countries where an aged care provider – and this was exactly the situation that Bupa found itself in – cannot compare quality care outcomes on a like-for-like basis across their own portfolio.
“Australia still can’t participate meaningfully in international conversations around quality of care, what care models work well, etc.”
The Aged Care Data Compare Project (ACDC) was set up to address that exact industry need.
Every organisation was collecting and assessing residents’ needs differently, with no standardised approach to functional assessment.
The DHCRC ACDC project partners (Bupa, University of Queensland and DoHDA, then Regis Aged Care, CSIRO and AutumnCare) employed the interRAI Long-Term Care Functional Assessment – a standardised, evidence-based system designed to evaluate the needs, strengths and preferences of individuals requiring long-term care – as a de facto assessment tool – to map provider clinical information to interRAI.
Throughout 2025, the tool was used by Regis Aged Care as a testing ground.
“We were able to demonstrate the value of having a standardised approach, the value of using the decision support held within the interRAI toolkit, because it’s got a whole host of its own case mix algorithms,” said Dr Frean.
“It generates evidence-based quality indicator benchmarks.”
But to that point, the system wasn’t scalable, Dr Frean told HSD. That’s where HL7 FHIR standards and SMART on FHIR technology came in.
Along with support from Department of Health, Disability and Ageing – which wanted to see if the tool would encourage providers to use its business-to-government portal more – Regis Aged Care and commercialisation funds from the DHCRC, the Aged Care Data Compare Project morphed into Kinnexus.
“We now have an evidence-based clinical data collection tool,” said Dr Frean.
“It’s no mean feat and to our knowledge it’s the first aged care application that uses SMART on FIHR.”
Platinum6, Leecare Solutions and MediRecords have successfully launched Kinnexus in their clinical information systems.
Kinnexus takes data from the provider’s system, maps it to AU Core, and applies the interRAI logic to generate the quality indicators.
“Those quality indicators have been validated as able to generate the mandatory quality indicators to the Department’s requirements,” said Dr Frean.
Early in December, Kinnexus connected for the first time to the DoHDA B2G gateway.
“In summary, it takes data from the point of care, passes it all the way through, and now technically solves that problem of delivering to the B2G quality indicator reporting.”
Now the quest is on to get as many providers as possible using Kinnexus. By reducing manual data entry, significant clinical time will be returned to resident care.
“We have developed a working tool. We’ve shown how it works. We need to test it some more,” said Dr Frean.
“We want it to work with every clinical system. The value of the SMART on FHIR approach is you build it once, and then you deploy it many times.
“What we’re so excited about is the interest that this is generating is coming, significantly, from nurses, because they just see the value.”
Until 13 February, providers are welcome to try Kinnexus, which is currently funded by the DHCRC until June of this year.
“We’ve got an offer out there to any provider and their vendor partnership who wants to come and really put Kinnexus through its paces,” said Dr Frean.
“We’ve taken some of the scary aspects of that away from providers by building a clinical information system simulator.
“Come and play with it in the simulator.
“But if you would like to put it into your development environment, we’ve got the resources to help you do that.
“We want to get as many vendors that consider themselves to be trailblazers in the sector, telling us whether it as good as we say.”
If aged care providers wish to get involved, or know others who might, they can reach out to kinnexus@dhcrc.com to test Kinnexus.
Written by Cate Swannell, Health Services Daily
