Aged care provider Regis Aged Care and its resident care software supplier AutumnCare will begin a trial this month of a prototype quality indicator application that may be used as a quality benchmarking and reporting solution for the residential aged care sector.
The app will incorporate the Department of Health and Aged Care’s national aged care mandatory quality indicator (QI) program quality indicators and additional indicators identified by carers as enhancing care delivery to residents.
The trial is part of the Aged Care Data Compare (ACDC) project, which kicked off in 2020 to resolve technical challenges around the standardisation and sharing of aged care data.
A flagship project for the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre (DHCRC), it is led by the University of Queensland’s Centre for Health Services Research and has built the foundations for quality reporting measures with the development of an HL7 FHIR data exchange specification.
That project also validated 25 recommended quality indicators and developed a secure data and analytics platform to share the data.
ACDC developed the first iteration of DoHAC’s star rating system for residential aged care facilities, which went live in December last year and drew on data that is already collected on a range of quality indicators as well as consumer experience reports and service accreditation.
The next phase is being called ACDC Plus and will now trial and evaluate the prototype app’s effectiveness as a potential quality benchmarking and reporting solution for residential aged care.
Project lead investigator Len Gray announced in May last year that the ACDC project team was in negotiations with a large aged care provider and a software vendor to build a data extraction, collection and export capability.
This will now be trialled by Regis – one of Australia’s largest RACF providers – and AutumnCare, which was founded in 2000 with a commercial clinical information system product released in 2005. AutumnCare has a mobile app for nurses and a cloud-based medications management interface that GPs can use on their phones.
AutumnCare’s system had dashboard functionality that allows users to customise indicators to match organisational processes, such as how often care plans are evaluated.
ACDC Plus
The next phase of the ACDC project is ACDC Plus, which will test the app in Regis aged care homes as part of its existing quality improvement program. UQ will use FHIR APIs to extract data from AutumnCare to support the calculation of evidence-based quality indicators.
FHIR experts at the Australian e-Health Research Centre (AEHRC) will then further develop the software so it can be integrated into existing clinical workflows and to support the capture of quality indicators.
ACDC Plus will also trial the KeyPoint secure data and analytics platform, an eResearch platform developed by the Centre for Health Services Research and collaborators at the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF) to generate risk adjusted quality indicators and implement co-designed user dashboards that gives Regis’ care staff accurate information on the outcomes.
A DHCRC spokesperson said the project would involve the first data exchange technology using FHIR in aged care.
Professor Gray said ACDC Plus was an opportunity to work collaboratively with industry to implement modern-day standards of data representation and exchange, and to test the use of quality indicators in care monitoring and improvement.
“This project will act as a springboard for provider-led initiatives around care quality and will have important synergies with government policy and practice,” he said.
Regis CEO and managing director Linda Mellors said the project would use contemporary digital standards to help care staff and providers capture and report the data required to generate quality indicators that are relevant and reliable.
“It will also help demonstrate the benefit of data standardisation and sharing in Australian residential aged care at a time when the sector lacks a national minimum data set,” Dr Mellors said.
AutumnCare executive chair and founder Stuart Hope said this was a significant project that has the potential to be a benefit for all in the aged care sector in Australia.
“We are pleased to be working with a group of partners who are committed to embracing the innovation that this project will deliver,” Mr Hope said.
DHCRC CEO Annette Schmiede said the initiative comes at a critical juncture with Australia still lacking a transparent and consistent aged care quality benchmarking solution.
“The implementation of a quality benchmarking tool will be a game-changer for providers, their staff and their residents,” Ms Schmiede said. “We’re thrilled to put these innovations into practice with an initial industry trial.”
“The project partners expect the findings from ACDC Plus will demonstrate the technical feasibility of capturing and reporting care quality in real time along with the benefits that such timely reporting will have in transforming the visibility of the care provided in care homes across Australia.”
The project commences this month and will run for two years.
Thank you Pulse IT, and Kate McDonald for taking the priority research we are doing at the DHCRC to a wider audience across Australia’s health and aged care sector. This project is an stand out example of the value of the CRC model, bringing university researchers, industry and government together to work on these big challenges. This is the model that will see priority driven research translated and implemented to improve health outcomes for all Australians. Prof Len Gray and his team at UQ have been exemplary partners bringing the project to this next stage.
AutumnCare is excited to be working with partners such as Regis, UQ, DHCRC and CSIRO. By actively working to expand the insights provided by Quality Indictors while reducing the data capture and reporting burden, the ACDC+ project will change the future of aged care in Australia.