[Opening visual of slide with text saying ‘Digital Transformation’, ‘Tech Talk’, ‘Webinar series’, ‘Digital Transformation and Delivery Division’, ‘Corporate Group’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘www.health.gov.au’]
[The visuals during this webinar are of each speaker presenting in turn via video, with reference to the content of a PowerPoint presentation being played on screen]
Janine Bennett:
Good afternoon. Welcome to the Digital Transformation Tech Talk. This is our sixth and last webinar for 2022 with the Tech Talk Series that is run by the Digital Transformation and Delivery Division in the Department of Health and Aged Care.
My name is Janine Bennett and I’m the Engagement Lead for the Transformation Project and I am today’s event moderator.
So welcome to everyone joining us today from your offices and homes across Australia and overseas. I’m joining you from Canberra, Australia the lands of the Ngunnawal people and I would like to open our conversation today by acknowledging these and the many other traditional owners of the lands on which we meet and pay my respects past and present to the cultural leaders.
I would especially like to acknowledge the presence of any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders joining us today. It’s an honour to have you with us.
Shortly I’ll hand you over to Fay Flevaras our First Assistant Secretary who is leading the digital transformation for aged care on behalf of the Department. But first a couple of quick housekeeping items. Just note first of all this webinar is being recorded. The recordings will be made available on the Health website as soon as we have our captioning complete after the event. If you have any technical difficulties during our presentation today we recommend that you use a phone line to dial in. The details are available in your invite. That will include the phone number and an access code that will get you back into the session.
As with our previous Tech Talks we have a block of time at the end for Q&A. You can raise questions throughout the session using the Slido app. Typically that just shows in the bottom right hand of your Webex screen. Just type your question in to Slido, click ‘Submit’ and your question will workflow its way through to being a public question. If you see something you like in terms of a question that you’d also like answered definitely feel free to vote it up. And as always we will be encouraging anyone who’s raised questions to join us on the virtual stage so that they can ask their questions themselves. To do that just submit your question using your name rather than using anonymous. We promise to give you fair warning before we invite you to stage so that you can prepare. Now I know that asking questions from a virtual stage might feel a little bit nerve wracking but it really does make for a better conversation with our panellists if you have the opportunity to raise that question yourself.
If you’re feeling shy and you’d prefer not to join us on the stage then you certainly can just write ‘no stage’ in your question and I’ll be happy to ask the panel on your behalf. As always given that we have such a large group we’ll get through as many questions as we can. And that’s the housekeeping done for the day. I’ll see you again during Q&A but without any further ado I’ll pass you over to the event host Fay Flevaras. Fay.
Fay Flevaras:
Thank you Janine and hello everyone. Great to have you all with us again for what is our last webinar for 2022 Tech Talk Series. It’s been a big year and we have a nice wrap up planned for you for today noting that our Tech Talk Series will continue next year. But today we had planned on the agenda to have Thea Connolly with us from the Reform Implementation Division joining. Unfortunately Thea was unable to present today whilst we waited to just clear on some of the information that we wanted to share with you more broadly. So I know that this was a highly anticipated presentation for our audience so we will have Thea join us at our first Tech Talk next year, in the new year.
If we want to look at it from a silver lining perspective I personally like that we do a year in reflection and celebrate some of our successes that we’ve achieved this year and let’s not think too much about all the work we’re going to have to do next year. We’ll wait for the new year on that one.
So we do have a number of great presentations though for you that we have planned to proceed today. We’ve got a demonstration from our business colleagues on the star ratings system and also a presentation from our partners from the Australian Digital Health Agency Aged Care Transformation Summary. So I'll take a minute to do some reflections of the year at the end and as always our panel of presenters will be available for Q&A before we do our wrap up. So given that we’ve dropped the item off the agenda. We may even be able to give you a holiday gift and give you some time back into the diary if we finish a little earlier.
So without further ado I’d like to hand over to Josh Maldon and Emma Cook. Sorry. My PC’s just flaking on me there a little bit. Who are both from the Quality and Assurance Division and they’re going to do a bit of a recap on star ratings and what its intent is and to provide us a quick sneak peek of the star ratings system. So welcome Josh and Emma. Have we got you on stage? Hello.
Josh Maldon:
[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Demo:’, ‘Star Ratings’, ‘Joshua Maldon & Emma Cook’, ‘Quality and Assurance Division’, ‘Ageing and Aged Care Group’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘www.health.gov.au’]
Lovely. Thanks for having us. So for those I haven’t met I’m Joshua Maldon. I’m the Assistant Secretary for the Choice and Transparency Branch and I’ve got responsibility for a number of quality reforms in aged care and one of the more topical ones is the star ratings which we’re really excited to talk to you about today.
So just to give you the headline on why we need star ratings. So star ratings is something that was really at the heart of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety which highlighted that currently we have a lack of quality measurement and transparency in the aged care system and we do need to set policy which creates a philosophical shift to place the voices of older Australians at the centre of the system. So in response it recommended a comprehensive approach to quality management. So indicators to measure quality, benchmarking for continuous improvement and a star ratings system for comparing the performance of providers.
So if we look at the benefits, what the expected benefits are, older Australians particularly and their representatives are going to be able to easily compare the quality of residential aged care homes, easily make choices on care options. Providers will be able to use nationally consistent quality measures to monitor, compare and improve services and deliver high quality care to older Australians, and from a Government perspective star ratings will give us that transparent information and indicators at a system level of how everything’s tracking. And that’s really important because what we want to do through this is we want to flip the switch on community confidence in aged care.
So I might just hand over to Emma just to talk about how star ratings were developed, what’s in them and the fundamental design. Over to you Emma.
Emma Cook:
Thanks Josh and thanks for having me at this second Tech Talk. For those who were involved in the most recent one you would have heard the more extensive presentation on the development process and design. And that’s certainly published on the Department’s website consistent with what Fay mentioned at the beginning so you’ll be able to have a look at that if you missed it. And that will go into a lot more detail. So what I’ll do is I’ll just quickly jump through the points that I covered off in that more extensive presentation that we did recently.
So I think from what you can see on the screen Josh has given really good context around why we need star ratings, where they’ve really come from, and certainly recommendation 24 of the Royal Commission was at the centre of initiating the development process for star ratings. So following that recommendation and Government’s response and commitment to implement star ratings by the end of 2022 we quickly started to move with support from the University of Queensland led consortium with the Aged Care Industry IT Council and PricewaterhouseCoopers to undertake research, so looking at international performance systems, in particular aged care quality measurement and performance systems, to learn what we could from them and internationally. Then we moved into consultation and spoke extensively through 24 workshops, 154 submissions and routine reference groups, Departmental committees and supported by peak bodies which Josh will go into a little bit further when we talk about the invaluable work of those sector partners.
And then from there we undertook data analysis in parallel to really inform the process of then bringing together what we’d heard from all of our consultations and from all of our sector partners, bringing that into developing the fundamental rules of the system and creating a system that works statistically as well. And translating those rules into a salesforce prototype that would basically ingest historical data and produce potential ratings and would support the use of that prototype to test with older Australians and their representatives as well as stakeholders more broadly whether the results were user friendly, whether they aligned to what people’s expectation was or to a scenario of what a service’s performance might be and were easy to navigate and use. And so we stepped through that really rigorous process to really land the final design and seek Ministerial agreement to the final design of star ratings.
The details of that final design of star ratings are available now on the Department’s website. We have webinars, a suite of materials and in particular a provider manual that’s published on the website that can step you through the real details. But keeping it to a high level in this presentation what it looks like is an overall star rating for every aged care service supported by and comprised of four sub-category ratings for residents’ experience, quality measurement, staffing and compliance. And so that is the fundamental construct is that overall you can see the weightings that each of them feed in to on the screen there and then a sub-category for each supported by a suite of information that really allows people to pick and choose what information is most appropriate for them and rely on a simple to use and easy to navigate star ratings system.
So they’re the fundamentals and in parallel to all of that development work obviously done an extensive amount of IT work to build, capture and process the data which Fay’s team has been incredibly instrumental in and which Josh is going to walk you through a piece of. We put in place primary legislation and of course developed all of those crucial communications on change for a range of audiences that really seek to ensure that we engage with everyone about this change, we inform everyone about what the change looks like and allow everyone, in particular our older Australians, to benefit from this change and help them to make informed choices about their aged care whilst also using this really important new measurement to drive improvement both by providers and Government across aged care.
So with that and with that quick summary if you’d like more as I said definitely head to the Department’s website where we have that range of new materials published and available as well as the previous Tech Talk that goes into a lot more detail about that process. If you think I’ve covered everything off there Josh happy to hand back to you.
Josh Maldon:
Cool. Thanks Emma. And Emma has absolutely been instrumental to this process. She’s enjoyed working weekends. A day out of the office is a day wasted. But absolutely really impressed with Emma’s commitment in a really complex project.
All right. So we’re jumping through to the next slide.
Cool. So as Emma said collaboration. Collaboration is key. So in aged care we truly believe in an engaging codesign and optimising user experience. And so as part of this process we went through a rigorous process with stakeholders, older Australians, families, representatives as well as aged care providers and peak organisations. So we did 24 workshops with older Australians, residential aged care providers and peak bodies. As Emma said there was 154 written submissions that we received and we had ongoing work through a sector reference group which had a range of aged care providers, for profits, not for profits, a range of rural, metro, to make sure we had a really diverse cross-section there to engage in this piece. We also had a consumer reference group as well, so older Australians, family, family friends, representatives. So it was really important to make sure that at the end of the day we had something which was fit for purpose to help people navigate the system because that’s the problem we’re trying to solve here.
So we developed algorithms that fed into a star rating prototype that ingested real data and that was tested and refined with older Australians, their representatives, providers and also care navigators. And so through that process we engaged over 100 older Australians and their representatives inclusive of people with dementia, LGBTQI+, culturally and linguistically diverse people, forgotten Australians and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
And then we tossed the football over to Fay and the team to do all the heavy lifting on the IT work and they continue to do an amazing job there. Really impressed. This project, the timeframes are aggressive. You could say ambitious. They’re aggressive. And the complexity is absolutely next level. So really thrilled to have the IT colleagues that we do.
Head on to the next slide.
Okay. Time to do the demo video.
Fay Flevaras:
Janine we have you on stage now. I think we need the video.
Janine Bennett:
Yeah. We’re working on it. Here we go. Welcome Jo.
Audrey:
Hey everyone. My name is Audrey and I’m one of the developers who have been building the star ratings capability. Now some of you may be wondering how these scores get calculated and to be honest there’s a lot to unpack there. So as an example let’s look at one of the domains, consumer experience reports. Now this is all dummy data but what you can see here is that we have a number of interviews that have been attached to the overall consumer experience report. These interviews capture the responses that the residents have given to the interview questions.
From there we use a bit of code to extract all of those responses and we have an array for every interview that was given. We then use some more code to actually count the number of response occurrences. So you can see what we have here is that in response to the question do you get the care that you need 12 people have said always, five have said most of the time, 13 have said never and seven have said some of the time. Now again this is just dummy data.
From here what we do is we run it through the formula. So we take the count of the response, divide it by the total to give the percentage and then we multiply by four. Most of the time is three, some of the time is two and never is one. This gives us the overall domain score with a minimum of one and a maximum of four. Those scores for each question are then added together to give the overall CER score with a minimum of 12 and a maximum of 48.
From there we then take that score and we run it through what we call a lookup table.
Which you can see here. These are all of the number ranges. So for your given score you’ll be returned a rating one through five and a label that describes what that rating means in the broader context.
And this is how we calculate the CER portion of your overall star ratings report. Thank you.
Josh Maldon:
Cool. Thanks for that. So it gives you a little bit of an insight into all the work that’s been happening there in starting to make it a tangible which is fabulous.
So in terms of next steps so Government is launching star ratings publicly in December. As a precursor to that we’ll be providing providers with a preview at least a week before we actually publish it on My Aged Care. And that’s really important because we want people to check their rating, understand what it means and be able to have those conversations with their residents about whether there may be any issues and what they’re doing to continuously improve and take remedial action where necessary.
I think it’s really important to note that this is a first step is how I would describe star ratings. It’s something that will evolve over time. So as part of this there will be an ongoing process of evaluation to see how it’s driving provider behaviour and the behaviour of older Australians, looking at the benchmarks. What good looks like can change over time so they’re things we have to be conscious of. And ultimately we do want to feed more datasets as they become available into the star ratings system so we can enhance transparency and people can make decisions about their care based on the things that are important to them.
So that probably closes off this presentation.
Fay Flevaras:
Thank you Josh. That was amazing. And it’s been such hard work and it’s one of the big initiatives that we’ve been driving this year. And it is kind of one of our firsts. So it’s the first one on the new platform, it’s the first one that we’ve put through the Tech Talk and the digital sector partners engagement. So I think there’s a lot of people looking forward to our first. There is some questions that we’ll throw to you later on in the Q&A section. So anyone who’s got questions please add them in there. But really thank you and it was nice to see a bit of the video, a bit of the behind the scenes workings that we’ve been prototyping along the way. So thank you for that and we’ll pass back to you later on in Q&A.
I think we’re on to our next section now which is the Aged Care Transfer Summary. And Laura welcome back. You are one of our regulars on Tech Talk and it’s great to have you with us. We do like to present a one Government and so you’re going to speak to us a little bit around Aged Care Transfer Summary. Over to you.
Laura Toyne:
[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Aged Care Transfer Summary’, ‘Laura Toyne’, ‘Assistant Secretary’, ‘Australian Digital Health Division’, ‘Australian Government’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘www.health.gov.au’]
Thanks Fay. Yes. And good to be back here again. And sort of in the theme of today’s Tech Talk we’ll kind of remind people and just reflect on what the Agency’s aged care program is doing and what it’s been established to do and showing you how we are aligning to those Royal Commission recommendations.
So this is just sort of a bit of a snapshot. You’ve seen this slide before if you’ve attended the Digital Tech Talks before about what the Agency is focusing its efforts on. Primarily I think we are really leaning in on recommendations 68 and 66 and they’re the primary drivers for the scope of the work that we’ve taken on and we’re obviously working in parallel with other areas of Government and obviously really closely with the Department of Health and Aged Care in relation to how these particular pieces of work are being implemented.
So whilst we’ve obviously informed our piece of work by the recommendations from the Royal Commission that are listed we’re not necessarily responsible for everything within those recommendations. So we’ve got a piece of work relating to recommendation 68 that goes to supporting residential aged care facilities to register for My Health Record. That was a key focus of that recommendation. With respect to recommendation 66 we are developing as was referenced at the start an Aged Care Transfer Summary again using the My Health Record technology to really support the transfer of residents in a facility when they need to go to an acute care or a hospital setting. So their information goes along with them digitally where we can and looking at options to reduce the use and potentially remove that yellow envelope as it’s traditionally sort of called and named that follows someone moving between those care settings. And those are two really big aspects of the Agency’s work that we’re focusing on.
What we’re really trying to seek to address with all of the work, and noting that we also have a role in education and digital enablement in the sector, is really just looking to improve that digitisation of the residential aged care sector in particular. We know that there is poor and inconsistent information sharing during that transfer of care and we really want to leverage Government’s investment in My Health Record by using that as the way we will support transfers. If I could go to the next slide please.
There we go. Thank you. So here’s the broad components of the things we are doing that support the Agency’s work. We’ve come to you before and talked about the fact that we’re working with the developers of clinical information and medication management systems in the residential aged care sector. We did that. We released an industry offer to market around about this time last year and we’re working with 14 vendors to actually uplift their products and make sure that they can integrate with My Health Record. Those vendors will also be asked to develop the new feature, the Aged Care Transfer Summary. That is a key part of working with the Agency through this process.
We are looking as I said at that supported registration pathway for residential aged care providers and facilities to connect to My Health Record and really just to assist them to benefit from the information that is actually available in My Health Record now and will be in the future so that they have access to some of that healthcare information that they may not have access to at the moment.
And really we’re working in partnership to align all of the Agency’s programs as we like to call them, or projects to line up with aged care data and digital strategies that have been developed and in place, being led by the Department. And where appropriate we’re also trying to align with those quality standards as well so that we all are doing our best to join this up for you with the work we are doing in the digital health space.
One of the things that we haven’t necessarily touched on through the Digital Tech Talks is some of the response and effort that’s also going in to medication management issues that were identified through the Royal Commission as well. And so some of you may be aware, and I hope a lot of you on the call are aware, that the Government’s implementing at the moment the Electronic National Residential Medication Chart. That’s acronym ENRMC. And that’s being supported as well with the release of an adoption grant and so we can put up some information that’s being led by the Department and we’re happy to sort of share the links to that if you aren’t aware of what that is. But really the Electronic National Residential Medication Chart is just an electronic or digital means of collecting information about medicines that have been or are being prescribed for someone in a facility and to enable the dispensing of those medicines off that chart at the same time. It is being rolled out to replace what has traditionally been used which is a paper-based chart and that’s something that we’re also working with the Department on as well at the moment. So if I could go to the next slide please.
So the where we fit. This sort of slide depicts a conceptual outline of how the Agency’s aged care program will support the broader reform agenda. We are just as I said – and I’d like to emphasise this again – we are a small part of the response to the Royal Commission but obviously healthcare, healthcare outcomes are a critical part as well of that response to the Royal Commission and providing better outcomes for residents in aged care settings.
So the program itself has the potential to enable and support other aged care reforms being delivered by the Government. For example the programs focus on improving access to health information and increasing the uptake of digital health tools, should assist in the broader efforts to improve the quality and efficiency of care delivery in the aged care sector. Beyond the aged care reforms we certainly believe that technology modernisation presents a really significant opportunity for the sector to better position itself to meet current and future demands. The program’s efforts to increase the sector’s digital maturity can really help you all to embrace technology and not just the My Health Record in this space. And by embracing technology that should improve how care is delivered to older Australians and improve the experience of delivering care for those who are actually working in the sector at the moment.
Just one example. In a recent interview series that we conducted in the Agency done with residential aged care facilities using My Health Record already the majority agreed that digital is the future across the care planning and management and in supporting to make the best use of the aged care workforce. But to be able to do work like this it’s really critical to address the interplay of the digital maturity between an organisation’s governance and management and their care approach and what the workforce needs are. So in other words what these insights are telling us from the interviews is how important it is for aged care to have support from the top level down and having a digital mindset at a board or a leadership level to enable those management teams to pursue digital options and in turn you can do that and you can assist lifting that digital proficiency of your care teams, back of house teams, administrative teams, carers, residents and indeed the families as well which is vitally important to improving healthcare outcomes.
We do understand here at the Agency that our program of work is certainly operating in a whole swathe of all of the must dos of the changes that are happening now. We do accept that we might be a nice to have option but a lot of people do value access to health information. It is important and a lot of facilities and organisations will need to find that capacity to participate and we’re really willing to help you there and lean in. The work we’re doing on digital maturity tools should really assist those facilities to just move a little bit further to achieving modernisation within their facility and within the provider sector.
I think a lot of you as well would have participated in the Department’s consultation on strengthened quality standards and that’s another part of the picture for us. We’re taking a continuous improvement approach to our work across Government and providers of care and really those strengthened quality standards outline the need for quality information management in delivering clinical care as well. And that’s what our program is certainly focusing on. We also are trying to put the consumer at the heart of everything we do. Assisting care teams to provide better connected care to older people through access to information really has that potential to improve health outcomes for older Australians in residential aged care. And so we are focusing on things like information sharing during transfers of care, My Health Record enabled software products that will be available in the sector to ensure that health and aged care professionals have the information they need when they need and that older Australians have that more seamless care experience.
So if I can go to sort of the last slide which shows at a very broad level what we look like in 2023. I’ve just as I said put up really high level points right now and happy to take questions at the end. But we will start that national rollout of the My Health Record registration in residential aged care next year. We’ve done a small, contained sort of pilot in the last few months to understand whether we’ve got the right materials and what might be difficulties during that process. And so we’ll be looking to roll that out more fully during the 2023 period. We will also contact facilities in each state and territory and invite them to participate in supported registration. We may do that on a state by state approach depending on some of the readiness that we find at the moment and we’ll really sort of be guided by the facilities themselves around what their capacity is to do it and the timing that’s appropriate for them.
We’ll also continue to work with partners such as software developers, peak organisations and primary health networks to promote the benefits and uptake of My Health Record registration with facilities. And we’ll have some more information out on this in the coming months, in the first few months of the next calendar year. We’ll also be undertaking some consultation in relation to standards for aged care clinical information system. We are considering a future industry offer and releasing that to market during next year again to work with vendors around the products that support residential aged care facilities and medical providers who are servicing those facilities to make sure that that information sharing can occur sensibly and to really support that broader rollout of the Aged Care Transfer Summary in the latter half of 2023.
So on that note I think I’ll leave it there. I’ll probably get a few questions later on but in the interests of time I’ll hand over. So thank you.
Fay Flevaras:
Thanks Laura. That’s awesome.
Just thinking back a little bit. Because aged care is so important to be hooked up to the My Health Record because clinical care – having that information at hand is so important for good outcomes. But it makes for a nice set of bookends because you were here at the beginning of the Tech Talk Series. So I think you were at our very first one and then you’re back here to close us out for the last one for the year. So if we haven’t said it enough in the past working across Government to provide a connected message to the sector is one of our top priorities. And so it’s a big task when you come and present with us. And so we don’t have all the answers yet and we’re working together but we greatly appreciate the partnership with ADHA throughout the year and we’re really looking forward to working with you guys in 2023.
[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Digital Transformation’, ‘Year in Reflection’, ‘Fay Flevaras’, ‘First Assistant Secretary’, ‘Digital Transformation and Delivery Division’, ‘Corporate Group’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘www.health.gov.au’]
So now I’d like to just spend a few minutes reflecting on 2022 more broadly. So if we can move to the next slide. We’ve talked a lot this year about what our north star is. That’s where we started this journey. We talked a lot about what does tech transformation, good tech transformation look like and how we anchor our vision. Early in the piece we set ourselves a few goals just to start what good looks like. We wanted to create a new online marketplace where providers, consumers and Government, we can digitally connect and interact so that we can collect data to ensure quality outcomes in real time.
We set a goal to create an automated, connected ecosystem that allows everyone to get on with their daily lives seamlessly and frictionlessly to access what they need when they need it and to have the right information at hand. We also set a goal to provide a place that provides a user friendly guided experience that’s intuitive, simplified and wherever possible automated workflows.
So given the volume of change we knew that we couldn’t sit here and kind of plan this all out for the next 12 months. So that’s why we wanted to have what was our north star and what good looked like so we could anchor some of our working and collaboration on. So we invested heavily in the collaboration process so that we could take the first step and then the next one and know that as we’re doing this we’re talking with you as much as we could and to as many different people as possible so that while we had that north star to guide us we were testing and iterating and learning along the way. So we’ve done a year of it so far and we sought to develop some of the foundational capabilities that we’ll use to help build our digital maturity on. So both in terms of the way we deliver and engage in Government but also in terms of driving digital maturity uplift across the sector.
We focused on the solutions that would help to remove time consuming or error prone manual processes so that we can provide digital and automated solutions where possible. Not because we’re evangelists and we think automation and digital first is the everything but because we see the benefit in striving to automate as a gold standard so that we can support the right solution for each problem space which might just be a combination of digital maturity levels because we understand that you’re all starting from a different starting position and a one size fits all does not maybe work. And we’re not all ready to jump digital maturity steps and get to automation. So there’s a lot of work to be done for all of us and so we need to kind of make solutions available that suit everyone.
So our north star was about leveraging digital capabilities and targeting the right solution for the specific use cases at the right time. Next slide please.
It was pretty obvious early on that we needed to build our own internal transformation capabilities to reach our north star. We had our own transformation to happen with our own people and processes. We needed to get the house in order. We needed to also make sure that we were change ready so that we could adopt emerging tools and methods and solutions. And while we were transforming internally we needed to be talking with you guys and collaborating with the sector.
So to that end we prioritised engaging with you guys early on. Sorry. Give me a second. Thank you. We wanted to create a space where we get connected and we wanted to start and continue the conversation with you guys, sharing the priorities of the day that we’re working on and asking you all in the sector for your input, not just once but throughout the discovery process, the ideation process and even the implementation process so that you had often and regular input as we’re developing throughout the year. We started the conversation with you all in the Tech Talks, running this webinar series, we spoke often at sector events, we published digital transformation information on the Health website and we put a significant effort in understanding the broader Government change agenda and advocating for cross-Government connections. Not a simple task given there’s a huge volume of work being driven across Government and there’s many players in the mix and there’s lots of priorities that need to be addressed. And we also set up the sector partner group, a representative group of volunteers across the sector who have been invaluable in designing better solutions and delivering methods with us. I really cannot emphasise enough the importance we placed on making this digital transformation happen and happen in step with the sector. Next slide thanks.
So how are we progressing with our goals? On the delivery front this financial year since July we’ve had four major releases and I talk more about those in a moment. But since the last Tech Talk as we’ve already discussed we’ve completed a significant star ratings release into our business verification piece that Josh and Emma talked about in production. Importantly we’ve started to build the foundation capabilities from which our digitally enabled, automated data sharing is coming from in our Business to Government gateway for APIs. We’ve built a foundational platform and early release on the platform for our Government provider management system, some aged care quarterly financial reporting and more. And these are all things that we’ve engaged with you either through the Tech Talk Series or through our sector partners for you guys to contribute in the designing and prototyping of.
And as always our work is subject to change so priority is based on policy and program decisions. But from an ICT perspective we’ve made a commitment to share our plan and track our progress so that we can continue the conversation with you and give you as much transparency as we can. So those were our north star goals. It’s December. It’s a good time to look back and ask how we did on it all.
First from an ICT delivery front it’s been a huge year. In this calendar year we’ve done 45 initiatives – we’ve got one more to go with star ratings – into production. But that’s almost a release every week this year not to mention all the additional releases we’ve needed to do. We have a further 28 initiatives currently that we are delivering on and there are at least four initiatives that we’re kicking off in design phases and 29 initiatives that will start early in the new year, or 28. So there’s a lot of project work happening that we’ve got going through the pipeline at various stages of ideation, solutioning and delivering.
On the engagement front our Tech Talks have been a key element of the transformation agenda. Our first Tech Talk was in April. We’ve had five of these. This is I think the sixth event. Our last Tech Talk in October had a record 750 registrations representing a really wide spectrum of people in the sector that are engaging. We’ve got providers, we’ve got aged care workforce, we’ve got IT software vendors, we’ve got Government partners, academics and so much more. And it’s great to have you all here because hearing everyone’s perspective actually gives us an opportunity to reimagine how things can come together and make sure that we’re testing and learning these new interactions.
We get attendees from all over Australia and some from overseas so it’s been fantastic. And we regularly feature our business reps in the Tech Talk as you saw with Joshua and Emma today because keeping the business priorities and the outcomes in mind are imperative when we’re building digital solutions. We also regularly feature our partners across Government as we attempt to present a one Government view such as Laura from the ADHA. And we release a survey after each event to make sure we’re hitting the mark and that we’re talking about what you want to know. So far we have an average satisfaction rating of 81% so it’s really important you fill in the surveys and let us know what you want to hear so that we can keep it relevant for you.
Next slide. Our Guest Speaker Series has been a big activity this year as well in 2022. Over the course of the year we’ve had approximately 80 invitations to come and speak which I don’t mind telling you is a lot more than what we expected. But we had the pleasure of addressing a range of audiences across the sector from large national conferences focused on aged care or technology or tech in Gov to targeted peak body events where we were invited to come and speak, to small regional providers and network meetings, to Government run committees and boards and basically everything in between.
So for me the gold in these events is the opportunity to talk to people in the sector in the course of your own work and about the ideas and questions that you have as well as the challenges and barriers that you face in adopting digital transformation so that we can keep that front of mind as we’re doing our work and hopefully solve along the way.
To make sure everything is transparent we put all of this content up on our websites. We’ve created two public web presences. All these Tech Talks are recorded and put up on the website so that you can watch or share at your own leisure. We understand that your time is valuable and you can’t always make the sessions so do look out for them. For one of the digital transformation agendas from this site you can see an address from Michael Lye from earlier in the year and we’ll look forward to getting a new address in the new year from him. You can read about the work we’ve done. You can watch previous Tech Talks. You can also create – we’ve also created a publicly available site for all the sector partner work that the group does because we know that not everyone has the time to come in and workshop with us. But it does outline who the current members are so that we’re totally transparent about who’s working with us, it provides copies of all the slide decks that we have used in our meetings, and it provides a high level summary of each meeting and any decisions that we reached along the way from our discussions.
So we have created a dedicated site for our sector partners to come in and collaborate with us. This is a bit more of a closed event but if you want to become a sector partner you can volunteer. We’re up to 65 sector partners now. And maybe I should flick to the next slide because that’s where we talk about our sector partners. So yeah our sector partners bring a lot to the work we do. They work with us in sprints so every fortnight. That’s a lot of time and dedication from them and we really appreciate it. We in Government don’t have all the answers. If anything we’ve got some goals we’re trying to achieve and if we solution together we’re going to get it right for both of us in the sector. One around maybe some of the policy priorities that we’re trying to create but how we implement them out with you is really important to make them relevant.
We initially got 25 brave volunteers early in the year but as I said we’ve got 65 members now as of October and we’ve currently got 16 new volunteers waiting to be inducted in 2023. We’ve run sector partner meetings every fortnight and we provide topic areas that we’re working on and the sector partners can volunteer which ones they want to work with us on. We follow a human centred approach to all of this. And so far this year we’ve completed eight full codesign activities. We’ve still got two currently open. So that’s ten kind of initiatives that we’ve gone through together. We also kind of pulse survey ourselves here as well and the joke is we’ve created our own little bit of a star rating. I think we’re at 4.2 satisfaction rate with 85% of our partners saying it was well worth their time to work with us on all of this. So we’ll be keen to see how we do for our next pulse survey. But again any questions please put it in the Slido.
That was a lot but that was the recap for the year. And I guess it shows that we’ve actually done a lot together. So now we’ve got question time. I’m going to throw to Janine and she’s going to kind of look after it all. Thank you for the claps. Yes. As a sector and a community of people we’ve done a lot together.
Janine over to you. Where’s our panellists?
Janine Bennett:
All right. So we’ll go about bringing the panellists to the stage. This is our own little version of question time. We have all of our speakers joining us today which is great. So we’ll keep Fay on stage. We’ll invite Laura, Josh, Emma who you’ve met already. We also have Herbert Down joining us from the ADHA. So welcome Herbert. We might start by just giving you a chance to introduce yourself to the group.
Herbert Down:
Thank you so much Janine and obviously Fay. I had the pleasure of presenting I think maybe at the fourth meeting earlier on this year which was a really good opportunity to introduce the conformance work and the other aspects of the aged care work we’re doing. Thanks.
Janine Bennett:
Thanks very much. Good to have you back Herbert. We like to see familiar faces. So as always noting that we’ve got a large group we’ll get through as many questions as we can. If you’ve joined us in the past you’ll know that we like to invite those with questions to the virtual stage so that they can ask their question of the panel in person. So let’s go ahead and make a conversation happen. If we can just give a bit of warning to Stephen Goodwin. Stephen I notice you’ve got a couple of questions in the Q&A so we’d love to get you on stage to ask your question. We also have someone by the name of Peter who we’re trying to identify from the list. So Peter if we’re able to identify you we’ll call you in otherwise I’ll ask the question on your behalf.
While we’re getting those folk set up I will direct a question to Josh and Emma. So the question is:
Q: What’s the exact date of the launch of star ratings?
Nice easy one to start.
Josh Maldon:
It’s the question on everyone’s mind isn’t it? So look Government will announce that pretty soon I expect. So keep your eyes out but I’m feeling an announcement will be soon.
Janine Bennett:
Great. We’ll stay tuned for that. Where can people find that date? Where will it be promoted once it’s available to be released?
Josh Maldon:
So no doubt there will be things like media releases. We’ll push things out by email and all the usual channels, up on our website. But yeah we’ll kick all the comms channels into gear.
Janine Bennett:
Great. All right. So it sounds like the Engagement Hub where we go for all of our aged care news will be the right place to go. Excellent. So we have Stephen joining us on stage. Stephen if you don’t mind just getting your video on and in the meantime I’ll just ask one more. We’ve got Stephen so we’ll let him jump right in. Welcome.
We’ve got a sound issue.
There we go.
Stephen Goodwin:
Apologies. Thanks for inviting me in. It was a bit of a surprise. And obviously I’ve got no backgrounds I can throw up in a quick hurry which is a shame.
Fay Flevaras:
We can take ours off too if that makes you feel better.
Stephen Goodwin:
No. It’s all good. It’s all good. Look it’s just really that question about – one of them was about sort of standards across systems and making sure systems are engaged. And it’s good to see that you’ve got 65 vendor partners already engaged. But the more important one from my perspective – I work for Merri Health in Coburg in Melbourne and we’re a community provider of in-home care rather than residential. And I was just interested in the star rating and whether star ratings are going to be extended into the community sector rather than it being – it appears to be mostly residential focused.
Fay Flevaras:
I’m going to throw to Josh on that one first.
Josh Maldon:
Yeah. Sure. So in relation to home care there’s no specific Government decision to expand the star rating system to home care but what I would say is broader aged care policy is looking at creating an end to end aged care system. So if you’re asking me my view is it’s not if it’s when, and what we need to see is actual – we need to produce data to inform a star ratings system. And so to me we need to bed down the reform of the home care program then look to capture certain data and then we could consider a star ratings system for home care. And that’s where older Australians want to be so improving transparency there I think will be really important for any colour of Government.
Stephen Goodwin:
Absolutely. It is both primary, community and acute care that’s really important as the residential stuff towards the end of life.
Fay Flevaras:
Correct. Thanks Stephen. And if you’ve got any ideas on what you think those measure points would be I’m sure Josh and Emma would love to hear some of those categories.
Stephen Goodwin:
Okay. Thank you.
Fay Flevaras:
Thanks. Did you have another question at all? Janine was it just the one for Stephen?
Janine Bennett:
The other was around the standards. So I think he felt that that had been answered further along in the presentation.
Fay Flevaras:
Thanks for joining us on stage Stephen.
Janine Bennett:
Thanks Stephen. That was great. And nice to see people’s homes in the background. We’re all working flexibly from home these days so it’s great to see that. So we have Peter who we’ve been able to identify so we’re going to bring Peter to the stage. Peter if you might turn on your audio and video. And Peter also has two questions that were pretty popular. While we’re waiting for Peter’s audio and video to come on I will just run with one of the questions around:
Q: Are the recordings and presentations available for previous Tech Talks?
Do you want to answer that one Fay?
Fay Flevaras:
Sure. And the answer is yes. So hopefully you guys picked up in a bit of my monologue on the year recap. There is definitely a website there, a presence. We are digital so we do record these all and they do get captioned and put up on the site so that people can watch them or refer them to others. I also like to kind of pitch it to some newbies and say you want to get inducted in digital? Go and look at the – and kind of binge them like a Netflix series. I’m not sure if it’s exactly the same thing, but anyway it’s up there for people to peruse at their own leisure. And I think we’ve not got Peter. Do you want to give your audio a go?
Peter:
Good afternoon all.
Fay Flevaras:
Excellent. Welcome.
Peter:
So the first question is about the preview and I think Josh has answered that, that no date’s going to be disclosed in this meeting. So we’ll just pass on that. But the other one was I’m very interested to know what percentage of people over 65 have opted in to My Health Record. I know the population generally is about 90% but the older population who are generally sceptical or untrusting of technology with their data, if they are not opting in is the effort wasted with My Health Record?
Fay Flevaras:
That’s a very good question. Do you have that stat off the top of your head Laura?
Laura Toyne:
Look I do and it is an excellent question. So thank you very much for asking that one. So yep. You’re right. The overall stats, we’ve got 23.3 million people have a My Health Record in Australia with 97% of those records actually having information in them right now. We’ll capture the over 65 group for the age group. 3.2 million people actually have a My Health Record in that over 65 years age group. It’s important to remember that it is not an opt in system. It is an opt out system for My Health Record. That was a significant change that came in to being about three/four years ago now.
So I think the estimated – if we take some estimated statistics. Everyone likes a bit of data – it’s more than 75% of those over 65 years that actually have a My Health Record. And as I said before the majority of people with a My Health Record, 97% of those records have information in them now. And I do take your point about older Australians. There has obviously been some older Australians possibly earlier on that did opt out of My Health Record. We’ve actually seen a lot of people since the commencement of COVID opt back in. Now I don’t have those statistics or data points for the over 65 population there but we have actually seen a swing back to people wanting to opt in and see information in the My Health Record.
We do know that consumer views as well have actually increased dramatically for My Health Record in the last 12 months. Around about a 290% increase in views for My Health Record in the last 12 months alone. So that is an amazing sort of - - -
Fay Flevaras:
Did we just lose Laura?
Janine Bennett:
Laura I think we might have lost you a bit.
Laura Toyne:
Pathology, diagnostic imaging. Just to make sure we can get that in there.
Janine Bennett:
Thanks Laura. We just lost those last couple of sentences from connection issues.
Laura Toyne:
Oh no. There we go. Would you like me to – I don’t know where we left off.
Fay Flevaras:
The last 20 seconds.
Laura Toyne:
The last 20 seconds. Okay. So I think I did cover off potentially the stats related to how the increased views, consumer views of My Health Record, 290%. Excellent. 76 million documents have been looked at in the last year compared to 19 million documents the year before. So the content in there is growing. And the Agency is working really very hard to try and get increased content into My Health Record as well. Consumers want it. They want to see their information and now it’s really incumbent upon providers to make sure that information is in there for those consumers to look at and those carers to look at and have access to information that is theirs around their health. And so we’re working on that quite closely with Government at the moment. And I know there’s been a little bit of media around that lately.
Fay Flevaras:
Excellent. Thanks Laura. And just a quick one. Peter had that question around when would star ratings be available for providers to preview. We don’t have the exact date but Josh if I’m not mistaken they will get it before global publishing. Is that a correct statement?
Josh Maldon:
Yeah correct. Providers will have it for at least a week before global publications. Spot on Fay.
Fay Flevaras:
Excellent. Thank you. And thanks Peter.
Janine Bennett:
Thank you. So we might go ahead and queue Natalie and also Andreia C and James Turnbull for questions. James I think we might have you scheduled to come up first if that suits you. So while we’re getting that staging organised there was a question from someone who has dropped off but I think it’s worth us asking because they may want to come back and look at the recording. So they’re asking:
Q: How frequently are star ratings updated?
Emma this looks like one for you.
Emma Cook:
Sure thing. So star ratings following publication, the first publication, at least a week after the provider preview and expected to occur before the end of 2022. It depends on the different datasets. So consumer experience data is annual. Quarterly Financial Reports, so staffing data and quality measure, so quality indicator reporting, occurs quarterly and so it will follow the quarterly cadence for the refresh of those two information sources. And in compliance information will continue to refresh on a daily basis consistent with the existing dot system. So the short kind of version of that is there’s a quarterly cadence that you can expect but compliance will occur on a daily basis.
Janine Bennett:
Great. Thanks very much for that one. So we were able to get James to the stage. James welcome. I notice you’ve got a couple of questions in there so keen to open you up to the panel. And I think these are going to go to Laura.
James Turnbull:
Cool. Well first to comment. I used to work in the care sector in a subacute hospital and now I work in aged care and I’m delighted to hear that you guys are moving to the My Health platform. I think it’s going to make a huge, huge difference. And I just see the gaps in aged care at the moment and I think having that overarching platform is absolutely the right way to go. So congratulations on that.
My question is what will be the unique identifier? Is it a Medicare number or is it something else? Because I guess we’re in the process like many others of replacing our current clinical system and we don’t have a clear vision of how it should sort of link together in that sort of system.
Fay Flevaras:
Now James that’s a really big question. Like really big question. Depending on who you ask you might get a different answer too. So just being really open about it. Laura do you want to give a perspective and then I can add?
Laura Toyne:
Yeah. Sure. No worries. And I’ve got no doubt Herbert in the standards space as well and the Agency will pop right in. So if you think about My Health Record it’s got identifiers built into it now. It uses the HI service, the healthcare identifiers service, and that is the primary identification sort of point and use through My Health Record and that’s quite a widely used identifier now in the healthcare sector. Look I will throw to Herbert and then no doubt to Fay. We’re certainly having discussions with the Department and AIHW and so forth around what a good minimum dataset looks like and whether indeed we capture IHIs through that process as well and through the technologies that are being stood up, other technologies that is. Those are ongoing discussions fair to say. But certainly in the healthcare – I take your point. In the healthcare setting which you’re familiar with we do use the HI service. It’s widely used.
Fay Flevaras:
Herbert do you want to add?
Herbert Down:
Other than to say that’s where my head would be going as well, the HI service. All providers are given their number annually through AHPRA and obviously everybody in Australia gets an HI. We’re working on getting those issued earlier at birth and making it easier as well for non‑citizens to get hold of theirs. It’s the only unique identifier that we have in Health. The question is can we apply it across the other settings where health and care are delivered.
Fay Flevaras:
And then from our perspective we’re absolutely trying to work together. If you can appreciate different departments, different systems. And not that we’re separate but it’s just trying to figure out how do you actually match the right people together so that if I can create a field and go that’s where the health identifier is supposed to go but trying to bring different record sets together and making sure they’re being matched correctly, that’s something we need to work through together so that as we’re building all the support at home, policy changes – and we’ve just finished doing a large portion of residential aged care facility pieces – how do we connect the My Health Record and all the clinical information to some of the other systems that we have within the Department of Health and Aged Care.
But we’re definitely on the same page. It’s a matter of how, knowing that we need to bring things together. Herbert?
Herbert Down:
If you’re in the process of developing requirements right now for a new system or a replacement system I would be including HI as part of your requirements.
Fay Flevaras:
That’s it. Yep.
James Turnbull:
That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. Thank you.
Laura Toyne:
And thanks James also for your comments as well in support of the use of My Health Record as one of the enablers – allowing people to access their health information and the carers who support them with the right permissions as well as the healthcare providers is certainly messaging we’re hearing quite strongly too. So thank you.
Fay Flevaras:
And look at that. So John from ADHA has also said that – and I probably should have mentioned this – that he’s working really closely with us to help us on the Business to Government gateways as well to make sure we’re matching there as well. So yeah lots of good work happening in that. But I suppose for you James health identifier way to go.
Janine Bennett:
Great. All right. We will invite Natalie to the stage next.
If she’s available. Hi Natalie. We’ll get you to turn on your video and audio if you could.
In the meantime we notice that a couple of people had glitchy problems during the event. It doesn’t look like it’s been consistent across the board so it might be local network issues. We’ve experienced it with some of our presenters as well. So just bear with us. This is the nature of our dispersed workforce now. How are we going Natalie?
I might just go ahead and ask Natalie’s question on her behalf. So the question was:
Q: Where can providers view the preview in MAC?
And this would be a star ratings question. Emma?
Emma Cook:
So I guess the current plan for providing star ratings or previews of star ratings hasn’t specified that these will be accessible in MAC but that we would contact all organisation administrators, so all org admins who are registered on MAC – and we encouraged everyone to ensure their details are up to date – we will contact them via email in order to allow them to access those preview ratings. So the best takeaway is to always ensure that details, org admin and service admin details are up to date in My Aged Care and then be aware that you’ll soon be expecting that email that we’ll provide you with details of your provider preview and what to do next.
Janine Bennett:
Great. Thanks Emma. And just to decode that MAC, My Aged Care system, for those people who are not familiar with our in-house acronyms.
Fay Flevaras:
And also just to add. So let’s be honest Emma. It’s been pretty hard work to get it to this stage of the project. And in a perfect world if we look at our north star eventually we will be actually presenting all that data through My Aged Care and the new GPMS system for provider management. It’s just a matter of when. And so in the first instance I think we’re communicating via the admins as we said and we’ll communicate directly to them, and then it’s probably earlier next year that we’ll give them the portal and they’ll have access ongoing. So this is the real, real here. This is for Tech Talks. It’s about how do you deliver. And so we are building NVP and then we’re iterating on our functionality and there will be future drops. So Emma is correct. In the first instance for the first one exactly what she said but then earlier in the year we will be connecting up portals and providing that self-service functionality. Thank you.
Janine Bennett:
Thank you. We have Andreia C with us. So if you’re able to – great. Good to see you. Welcome to the stage. And just to note Natalie didn’t have access to a microphone and video so she was happy for us to ask that question on her behalf. Okay. Andreia. Am I pronouncing that correctly?
Andreia C:
Yep. That’s correct. That’s correct. I just had a quick question. So I don’t know how many other providers had tried to do kind of like a mock star rating internally. I unfortunately got the opportunity to have to do it for a not for profit that I’m currently working for. I do give you guys a massive heads up. It was quite a difficult process to try and replicate, obviously on a smaller scale. But then the question that did come to us was although a lot of the information is available internally because we do supply it on to the MAC portal and etcetera, obviously the consumer portion was what was done externally. So the head of our department for residential aged care at this stage just wants to find out is that information going to be made available to us and if so how?
And the other question on top of that would be is this something that will then be managed internally and submitted, kind of like what we do with the care minutes and the quality indicators, or is there going to be a process to do this on a frequency basis?
Fay Flevaras:
Emma I’m going to throw to you first on that one.
Emma Cook:
I’m so sorry because I’ve just gotten glitching and I’ll need – I caught bits of – yeah. Sorry.
Fay Flevaras:
No. That’s all right. So Andreia I think what I heard you say was you’ve tried to do star ratings in‑house and you saw how hard it was. So thanks. Kudos. It’s been a bit of a hard job. But part of it was around the customer experience surveys. You want to know if the surveys we’ve received information on will be made available to you guys. Is that what I heard?
Andreia C:
Yep.
Emma Cook:
Perfect. Perfect. And I’m so sorry. Sometimes I’m not sure if it’s me or if it’s everyone. So when there was the pause I went it was just me. So yep absolutely. We’ll be providing – while I understand that the separate team that kind of administers the consumer experience surveys has plans for that process, also as part of star ratings and that preview that both myself and Fay spoke about we’ll give you the breakdown of information that sits under star ratings. So you won’t just get your overall and then the sub-category ratings. You’ll also get the information that would be presented alongside. And so what that will provide is for each of the 12 questions the percentage of responses for each of the four response options on that Likert scale. So it would give you the full breakdown. And that’s as granular as we would go whether it was through star ratings or from the consumer experience team because beyond that we’d be giving you individual survey results. So yes is the short answer. You’ll get a nice clean breakdown of the responses to the 12 question values as part of the provider preview.
Fay Flevaras:
Has that answered your question Andreia?
Andreia C:
It does. The only other part I had was just around – I know this will be done quite frequently. Well not frequently but throughout the year. Is that going to be managed by the providers and then submitted or is that going to be conducted externally moving forward?
Emma Cook:
Yeah. So I assume with respect to the consumer experience component? That’s what you’re referring to specifically? Yeah. Because obviously some of the others, the QIs and the staffing does get reported by the providers. But the consumer experience component at this stage is annual and so there will be – similar to in the last 12 months there will be another visit by that independent assessment workforce who operate with complete kind of privacy and deidentification to anyone as to survey responses and go out and conduct those processes and speak to the residents. So they will come as they did in the last 12 months. They’ll come again to each service and they’ll speak with at least 10% of care recipients at that service – but at the moment it’s around 20% on average – and get those results.
Now over time you’re completely right and you’re probably picking up that there’s a little bit happening in consumer experience quality of life in other quality measures, particularly in the quality indicators. That will roll out from April as part of the quality indicators and that’s a process of using the QOL-ACC and the QCE, the two quality of life and consumer experience tools respectively, whereby each provider – and it’s separate from star ratings but each provider is obliged to offer this survey to their care recipients each quarter. So it’s more about quality improvement. It’s more about them offering a survey, having that conversation, understanding the feedback from their care recipients as distinct from this other process of an independent workforce doing the star ratings assessment. But we hope over time we can find ways to converge the two, align the two, and ensure that we have that integrity and reliability of kind of unbiased reporting. And that’s not to assume that there’s any bias by a provider but the feeling that someone might have saying something to a provider is what I mean, whilst allowing providers to benefit from the licences that we’ve got from all of these tools and have those conversations in-house for that quality improvement component.
So there’s quite a lot going on but to bring it back to star ratings it will be the same arrangement where an independent workforce will do a CE once in the next 12 months.
Andreia C:
Okay. Perfect. Thank you very much.
Fay Flevaras:
Thanks Andreia.
Janine Bennett:
Thanks very much Andreia. So I’ll give Leonie Short a heads up that we’re going to invite her to the stage to ask her question momentarily. In the meantime just wanted to reiterate that we do have all of our previous Tech Talks on the website as Fay mentioned. If you’ve got some down time over the Christmas break, nine hours of it, feel free to go in and enjoy. Like Fay said a network binge of Tech Talk information. Leonie hi. Great to have you to the stage. Go ahead.
Leonie Short:
Thank you. I’d like to ask if there’s any developments or thought or anything about incorporating dental records into aged care facilities or into My Health Record?
Fay Flevaras:
Laura?
Laura Toyne:
Okay. That’s an excellent question and I did see that one pop up. There is no plan fair to say at this stage for incorporating dental records. We’d love to have for dental practitioners to actually access My Health Record and view the information in there. I think that would be an important first step so that the dentists themselves can sort of validate adverse drug events or allergy information that might be important in providing care to whoever it is they’re providing care for. But we don’t actually – it goes to the data issue I think around dental and what is structured data and what could come in. All the efforts of the Agency over the last few years have most certainly been focused on general practitioners, doctors, specialists, pharmacies, allied health, hospitals and the hospital sector, diagnostic imaging providers. So we haven’t probably gone through the long list of all of the care situations and healthcare situations and how they connect in to My Health Record but absolutely it’s a great idea and a great suggestion. I don’t think there’s anything preventing it and am happy to kind of look into that a bit further. But I don’t believe anyone has dental records at the moment in My Health Record so it’s not just for this sector.
Leonie Short:
Thank you. And we see it as two way. We want the aged care facility or home care to be able to see the dental records to help improve oral health. And it’s not just dentists. Please don’t think it’s dentists because they’re only 80% of the practitioners. The other practitioners are dental prosthetists, oral health therapists, dental therapists, dental hygienists, etcetera. So all dental practitioners. But thank you so much. I really appreciate the response.
Fay Flevaras:
Thanks Leonie. I think that was actually really informative for us. We’ll just take note of that and put it on our list. Really appreciate it. I think we’ve got two left.
Janine Bennett:
We do. So we’ll invite Katie up to the stage next. And George if you would like to get ready. We’ve noticed that you have a comment in there as well that it would be great if you could speak to. But first of all Katie if you don’t mind turning on your audio and video if you can.
Fay Flevaras:
I heard a beep there.
Janine Bennett:
That’s not a good sign.
All right. I might jump in. First of all thanks Katie for the question. So Katie says:
Q: We’re doing an internal survey based on star questions. Care Page doesn’t allow us to do this yet. Is anyone doing anything innovative here?
Fay Flevaras:
And we may not have the panellist who knows about this. I’m pretty sure if I’m not mistaken Care Page is one of our sector partners. There’s many out there. But what we might do is if anyone in the community has any innovative ideas on how they’re doing their own internal surveys happy for them to just email us at the engagement office. What’s our sector partner? DTsectorpartners@health.gov.au. Absolutely will take those innovative ideas and put it up there on our Q&A. Because any questions that we don’t deal with here we do follow up and put up on our website. So if anyone has any innovative ideas that they’re willing to share there is a few tools out there that we can do a bit of homework on and post some suggestions on. Not advocating any particular one but just helping with innovative ideas for people to test and learn within their own internal companies.
Emma Cook:
I can probably just add a little bit from the quality side as opposed to the tech side certainly which is just to reiterate the discussion between myself and Andreia I think it was a moment ago, which is that the national aged care mandatory quality indicator program for residential aged care services will be moving towards mandatory reporting on the QCE and the QOL-ACC which are two tools that are available only for the purposes – so we’ve licenced those. They were codesigned with older Australians living in residential aged care services and developed by Flinders University. The Department has acquired a licence that allows residential aged care services to use those tools free of charge for the purposes of measuring consumer experience and quality of life in aged care and reporting to the Department on those from next year.
So if you’re looking at different options for different tools I think be aware that those are out there, be aware that they’re freely available within the new draft manual on the Department’s website, and they’re really robust and rigorously developed measures that are available to all of you.
Fay Flevaras:
Thanks Emma. We might actually post that up on the Tech Talk site as well so that people can find it. Excellent.
Janine Bennett:
We’ll make a note of that. We do have another question from Margaret Noonan. So I wanted to get the questions out of the way before we get to George’s comment. Margaret we’ve just added you to stage. Sorry. Quick turnaround on that. Not much notice. If you’re able to get your audio and video going we’ll give it a try. This is looking promising.
Margaret Noonan:
Yes. Can you hear me?
Janine Bennett:
We can.
Margaret Noonan:
Okay. You might not be able to see me but you can hear me. I’ll try.
Janine Bennett:
Yep. No. That’s okay.
Margaret Noonan:
Okay. Just a very quick one. I work with Assistive Technology Suppliers Australia. So in the support at home program we’ll be providing episodic type services and I’m just trying to understand what preparation our members might have to have for the digital transformation? Is there anything we should be thinking of for this program?
Janine Bennett:
Fay sounds like a good question for you.
Fay Flevaras:
Yeah. And I’m not sure I have all the answers but what we might do is take the question and ask our peers. Where we’re up to at the moment is in the support at home policy consultation they’re doing quite a lot of consultation out into the sector. I think we’re waiting for some of that to come back and then we’re trying to figure out what does that mean? The how. How would we implement some of that? I think you’ll see a lot more of that in the new year and so it would be great to just stay connected with us on the Tech Talks. And at some point when it comes to the assistive technology pieces it might be through our sector partners is there any particular APIs or things like that that technically we might need to create for you guys to get connected. But yeah probably watch this space and more in the new year on that one Margaret. Thank you for your question. I think we’ve lost her as well.
Janine Bennett:
Thanks Margaret. And the video did work in the end so that was nice to see your face. Okay. George Margelis we’d like to invite you to the stage.
George Margelis:
Good afternoon everyone and thanks again for inviting me to the stage and inviting to the event. So I chair the Aged Care Industry Information Technology Council so a couple of comments. As far as engagement goes it’s really hard to compare the engagement we’re doing now with the past because it’s like exponentially increased. I can’t give you a one X or a two X or a five X. It’s just been an amazing increase in interaction with the industry which is really appreciated. In particular attending events and answering live questions so not just providing us with a printed summary. So from an industry perspective thank you very much. The engagement’s been great.
Fay Flevaras:
Thanks George.
George Margelis:
Very excited by 2023. I mean lots happening. We’ve had a busy year. I’m sure you’re all looking forward to a nice relaxing break because you all deserve it because it has been a hectic year. But the rubber hits the ground next year. The providers are prepping themselves for the transformation. You touched on the need for digital maturity and that’s one of the areas that the whole sector’s working on bringing everyone up. But the exciting thing is that we actually have providers asking us for things now. So two years ago it was like tell us what’s mandated and we’ll do it. Now it’s sort of saying well what about – and the assistive technology was a great example. What standards do I need to have for my assistive technology team to integrate with my [1:23:15]? Those sort of questions are starting to come out in the industry which just shows that the industry has taken this on with a great purpose. So thank you for this year. Look forward to next year. But have a break in between because next year’s going to be a big one.
Fay Flevaras:
Thanks George. Yeah. This was the warm up year wasn’t it? So I hope everyone’s got their skates on because next year we’re just getting bigger and better. So really appreciate the support George.
Laura Toyne:
Thank you George. And you’re also a really important part of our Aged Care Digital Advisory Group as well so thanks very much. Look forward to working with you as well during next year.
Fay Flevaras:
I think we might be at the end of our session.
Janine Bennett:
Yes. So thank you all. Thank you to all of our panellists for your bravery. It’s a big ask to have folks take questions live and I know that you all do this on a regular basis, Fay, Laura. I’ve seen you at lots of events and it’s brave and it’s also really needed across the sector. So thank you so much for that.
That brings us to the close of our Tech Talk for 2022. So we appreciate the great discussions you’ve given us over the course of the year. As we’ve talked about a lot the recordings for this event will be published on the Digital Transformation presence on the Health website and that will be up as soon as the closed captions are done.
You’ll also receive a post-event survey. There’s a QR code on screen now that you can use to open that survey but you’ll also receive an email link if you prefer to access it that way.
I wanted to just do a quick shout out to the multidisciplinary team that have helped us pull these Tech Talks together over the course of the year. It doesn’t happen on its own and it’s quite a conducting complex thing to get these off the ground. So I just wanted to say lots of thank you to Rishu, Tania, to Justin, to Gordon, Mel, Marina, Jess and the rest of the team and Alex who helped make these webinars happen. Apologies if I’ve missed anyone.
Thank you especially to your interest as participants. Your patronage in 2022 has helped us to see that this is a really valuable avenue to communicate with the sector. We’re really looking forward to seeing you all again for our Tech Talk series in 2023. In the meantime email us any questions or suggested agenda items. You can send that to the Digital Transformation Office and that address is on screen. That’s it from me. I’ll hand over to Fay for closing words. Thanks everyone.
Fay Flevaras:
Thanks Janine. I’d like to also echo your thank you to all my team internally to make this Tech Talk Series happen. I really appreciate all the effort everyone puts in. I want to also extend my thanks to my business colleagues who join us, our Departmental colleagues who have joined us, and lastly but not least to the sector. We really appreciate the time you take out in your day. We understand your time is valuable. And so we love having these conversations with you. It really gives us great insight and working together collaboratively so that we can deliver great outcomes in the aged care reform.
So finally happy holidays to everyone. I wish you all health, wealth and happiness into the new year and look forward to speaking to you in 2023. Thank you very much.
[Closing visual of slide with text saying ‘In Closing’, ‘Visit the Digital Transformation page on the Health website’, ‘Email us at DTDOffice@health.gov.au’, ‘Take the Event Survey’, with image of QR code]
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