Addressing the Ageing Australia ITAC conference in Melbourne today, CEO of the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (DHCRC), Annette Schmiede, issued a call for collective action to industry leaders to support the urgent need for a standardised, government-backed, nationwide approach to assessing functional abilities of older Australians in residential aged care.
The DHCRC has experienced first-hand the challenges posed by a lack of data standardisation across the sector in its flagship Aged Care Data Compare (ACDC) research project.
“The ACDC project has been running for five years, in two phases, the second of which completes in June when we conclude the piloting of a Quality Indicator (QI) App, providing near-real time QI data to help better inform care decisions,” Ms Schmiede said.
“The learnings from ACDC are many. But the overriding one is that to scale the DHCRC QI App the aged care sector needs to be using common data items – and with the same language used by everyone – captured at the point of care and reused for all other information needs.”
“This requires having common data sets reflected in the National Aged Care Minimum Data Set (NMDS) and in a national, evidence-based functional assessment – to reduce the inefficiency and costs associated from the current bespoke approach.”
This issue of data consistency and reliability was brought into sharp focus by the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety, which identified concerns around substandard care and called for stronger measures to uphold care standards and enhance accountability and decision-making in the aged care system based on robust data.
“Four years on and Australia is at a real tipping point when it comes to aged care policy,” Ms Schmiede said. “The current lack of data standardisation in aged care is a critical issue hindering quality of care and efficient service delivery.”
Moving the sector forward, together
To provide a framework for a way to actively address these ongoing challenges, the DHCRC engaged independent digital health specialist, Semantic Consulting, to advise on the proof points that will be needed from a socio-technical perspective to implement a national, evidence-based functional assessment.
The report, released at the ITAC conference today, makes a series of recommendations around the implementation of a standardised functional assessment framework.
The DHCRC has committed its support behind the report’s recommendation to develop a prototype SMART on FHIR app with the ability for aged care software vendors to easily integrate.
“This report underscores the urgency of addressing the need for a standardised functional assessment framework through an evidence-based approach, recommending the roll out of interRAI, a research-backed suite of standardised functional assessments and screening tools that has been implemented across Belgium, New Zealand, Ireland, Finland, Singapore, Switzerland, the United States and Canada,” Ms Schmiede said.
The DHCRC plans to use interRAI to inform the development and scale its QI App, incorporating the IP, lessons learnt, and outputs generated from the ACDC Project. The DHCRC aims to build out the QI app, incorporating interRAI assessment instruments, pre-populated with existing data, and sharing information back to B2G APIs and a BI Dashboard.
Given the critical need for a solution that supports all stakeholders across the sector, the DHCRC is openly welcoming input from aged care providers and vendors with plans to host a series of events, webinars and industry consultations to encourage input and participation throughout the development of the prototype QI App.
“Addressing data challenges across the aged care sector is both imperative and urgent,” Ms Schmiede said. “To effectively achieve this, we need an industry that is united in its commitment to adopt a national consistent approach to data collection and functional assessment. We hope by coming together we can bring tangible change that ultimately delivers better care outcomes for patients.”
For a copy of the full report, click here.
