Aged Care Data Compare (ACDC) and Aged Care Data Compare Plus (ACDC+)

Opportunity

Addressing the lack of standardisation of data and of functional assessment remain critical and urgent actions following the Royal Commission.

Quality reforms in aged care need to be underpinned by comprehensive data which requires interoperability between data sources and applications across the health and aged care sectors. Residential aged care facilities in Australia use a variety of clinical information systems to collect and manage data related to the assessment and care of residents. Using individual and distinct systems can mean inconsistent, unreliable and inefficient data collection, making it difficult for data sharing within organisations. This also hampers comparisons of care, quality and performance across provider organisations hindering benchmarking of quality and performance outcomes in aged care.

Project Objectives

This program of work aims to improve the way that data is used within the Australian residential aged care system.

The initial ACDC project addressed the need identified by Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety (2021), amongst others, for aged care open standards and protocols to facilitate interoperability among systems and sharing of information to drive funding and care quality reforms.

In ACDC Phase 1 and 2, the project undertook to produce and validate a prototype data hub to facilitate aged care assessment data interoperability across residential aged care facilities (RACFs) that use different aged care IT solutions and enable benchmarking of provider quality indicators (QIs).

In the subsequent project (ACDC+ – Phase 3 and 4), the objective is to implement and evaluate the data standards, interoperability solutions, and quality of care benchmarking capability designed and constructed in ACDC. This is an opportunity to test the feasibility of the outputs of the previous project, and to address challenges that inhibit data standardisation and sharing in the Australian residential aged care sector.

The aim is to transform the current approach to quality indicators (QIs) for benchmarking and performance-managing the provision of residential aged care in Australia. This will streamline QI capturing and reporting, ensuring that QIs are relevant and reliable.