Webinar recording – Digital Transformation Tech Talk – 19 April 2023

[Opening visual of slide with text saying ‘Tech Talk’, ‘Digital Transformation for the Aged Care sector’, ‘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’, ‘Tech Talk #8’, ’19.04.2023’]

[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:

Thank you all for joining us for our eighth webinar in our Tech Talk Series run by the Digital Transformation and Delivery Division in the Department of Health and Aged Care. My name is Janine Bennett and I am the Engagement Lead for the Digital Transformation Program and today’s event moderator.

Welcome to everyone who’s joining us from your offices and homes across Australia and elsewhere. I’m joining you from Canberra today and that is the land of the Ngunnawal people. We’re really pleased to be opening our conversation today by acknowledging the Ngunnawal people and the many other traditional owners of the lands on which we meet across Australia and beyond. I’d like to pay my personal respects to those cultural First Nation leaders past, present and emerging and also to acknowledge the presence of any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders joining us today. It’s a real honour to have you with us.

So before we get started just some quick housekeeping items. As always this webinar is being recorded. The recording will be made available on the Health website as soon as our captioning is completed. Typically that takes us about a week or so after the event to get that live on the web. If you have any technical difficulties during our event we recommend that you use a phoneline to dial back in. The phone number and the access code are included in your invite so you can quickly re-join us if you have any issues.

As with all of our Tech Talks we’ve set aside some time at the end for a conversation. So we encourage you to raise your questions as we go. Raising questions is really easy. Just use the Slido app which is typically available in the bottom right hand of your Webex screen. Type your question into Slido, click ‘Submit’ and your question will workflow its way through to being a public question. If you see something you like in Slido and it’s a question you’re also asking definitely feel free to vote it up.

For those that are new to our Tech Talks we invite anyone who has raised questions to join us on the virtual stage so that you can actually ask your question in person to the panel. The process is pretty simple. Just make sure when you submit your question in Slido you use your name rather than anonymous. When we’re ready to invite you to the stage I’ll give you some warning so you can prepare yourself. Our technical director will then queue you up so that you’re ready to join the stage and once you have all you need to do is unmute and turn on your video to ask your question. It’s as easy as that. If you are feeling shy today don’t panic. You’re still able to ask your burning question. Simply just submit your question under anonymous or add a note into the question to say no stage. If we see that I’m happy to ask the question on your behalf so that it doesn’t go unanswered. Where possible we do love it when people join us on the stage though. It makes for a better conversation for everyone. And I promise the panellists are a really welcoming bunch and are easy to talk to so we encourage you to come and join us on stage. As always we’ll get through as many questions as we can. But obviously that will be based on the time allowance that we have left.

Okay. So that’s our housekeeping out of the way. I now have the pleasure of introducing you to your host for the day Fay Flevaras who is the First Assistant Secretary of the Digital Transformation and Delivery Division. Fay is responsible for leading digital transformation for aged care on behalf of the Department. I’ll see you again in Q&A but for now over to you Fay.

Fay Flevaras:

Thank you so much Janine. And hello and welcome everyone. Great to have you back with us for our ongoing digital transformation webinar series. Another busy agenda today. A quick note that the planned presentation from the policy area on the aged care policy priorities has been deferred while the group await some additional clearances. We’ll reschedule that item as soon as they are good to go with the policy priority update.

But in the meantime we do have Emma Cook from Aged Care and Amanda Smith from the Digital Transformation and Delivery here to provide an update on the newly released Government provider management system portal. So that’s very exciting news. We also have Dr Phillip Gould one of my colleagues from the Health Economics and Research Division here to give us an update on the Department’s data strategy. And we have been able to squeeze in a late presentation from John Sidey who will be stepping us through the Business to Government onboarding and conformance process. So as always our panel of presenters will be available for Q&A before we wrap up so as Janine mentioned enter your questions in the Slido as we go along.

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Digital Transformation update’, ‘The plan as we know it’, ‘Fay Flevaras’, ‘First Assistant Secretary’, ‘Digital Transformation and Delivery Division’, ‘Corporate Group’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’]

But first I’d like to start by talking us through the current status of our Digital Transformation initiatives. We always like to make sure that we keep the conversation going and give you an insight into the work that we’re doing. We’ll have a brief look at what we’ve been working on since our last meeting and what we’ve got planned for the next upcoming three months. So over to the next slide.

So this is the working timeline for our portfolio release. It’s the visual that we bring to you every time we meet showing where we’re up to today and hopefully a few ticks along the way. We’ve made a commitment to keep sharing this timeline with you and this is the plan that we are working with inside the Department for the Digital Transformation Delivery Division. But we are aware that changes are possible and even to be honest quite likely. At the end of the day our scope, sequence and deadlines will be determined by Government. We strive to keep you across what we’re working on as early as possible but that comes with an understanding that some of this work is evolving in parallel with final policy decision making.

So what does that mean? Well it means our timeline is subject to change and we have to work agile and be ready to pivot when policy or program priorities or decisions are updated with us. So given that importantly nothing we discuss here should be considered an official commitment from Government. Suffice to say that this is how we believe the sequence and timeframes will look. This is the perspective we are working on within the ICT area.

Okay. Now that we’ve set that understanding I’d like to walk through some of our recent deliverables.

This month has seen an important milestone met made possible by the tireless efforts over many months by a lot of very dedicated staff and sector partners and the community. Our government provider management system was officially launched to external providers on the 3rd of April. You might recall that the core GPMS platform was released in December last year to support the star ratings previews. But we’ve hit another milestone by taking GPMS live for the broader provider audience with our portal. And on the 11th of April the star ratings preview period also commenced using GPMS when providers were granted access to the new star ratings tile. But I’m not going to give too much away. That’s why we have Emma and Amanda with us since we’ll be putting a spotlight on this initiative later in the agenda. But suffice to say this is a great achievement for all of us in the Department and for our sector partner community and a big first step towards a new whole of Government capability.

In non-GPMS news we’ve completed the design and development of the Support at Home integrated assessment tool trial enhancements which were released on the 31st of March to support the commencement of that trial and that trial will officially kick off I think last Monday, the 17th of April. So we’ve also completed some internal RBITS release which is our risk-based targeting and information sharing system. These most recent updates will improve the risk‑based targeting system in use by the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission and improving data management around the admissions, events and services including bed place counts and providing better risk reporting.

So lastly we wound down our warranty phase of our last large enterprise wide production release in February which meant any hiccups or small defects have been ironed out and we’re closing out the final support for those capabilities. So big thank you to everyone involved in getting these recent releases out the door. As you can see we’re putting a lot of effort into incrementally delivering outcomes and as you can see I think it’s almost a couple of releases a month so we’re all very busy working with you guys.

So what’s up next? Probably what is of most interest to this group is where we’re going. And high on our priority list for the remainder of this quarter is progressing our work around future releases, around quality indicators, some quarterly financial reporting. We’re also looking at the AQFR provider trial and more work on some RBITS that will enhance the risk application user interface. This work is currently scheduled for release in May but importantly we have marked these releases with a red star on the timeline to indicate that although we may be doing some of this work, some of it may be moving, it is possible for some of this work that when we do the elements of technical releases into a staging space or in an alpha version as we like to call it, but we may not make them publicly available at this time. But we’ll keep you posted while we work to align all of the policy, technical and change aspects, ie the business readiness and the sector readiness, for any new capabilities in the background to make sure that we’re in sync before we launch it in go live for public consumption. The plan will be regardless to have the tech ready but public release might happen a little bit later.

Looking ahead into the financial year we’re targeting also some larger releases in July including further enhancements to star ratings, potentially introducing 24 x 7 registered nursing screens and some technical upgrades to our systems that will better support the new capabilities we’re delivering onto our platforms. So more on those plans at our next Tech Talk. We’re also waiting with bated breath to see what we get from the May Budget. This will also inform the schedule for the second half of the year and as always we will share information as soon as we have it in our plans.

So that’s where we’ve been and where we’re going. Next on the agenda as mentioned the Department has recently launched the GPMS portal and I’d like to invite and welcome Emma Cook and Amanda Smith to the stage to talk us through all things GPMS. Over to you Emma and Amanda.

Emma Cook:

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘Government Provider Management System (GPMS)’, ‘Tech Talk’, ’19 April 2023’, ‘Initiative spotlight’, ‘Emma Cook’, ‘Assistant Secretary’, ‘Enabling Capabilities Branch’, ‘Ageing and Aged Care Group’, ‘Amanda Smith’, ‘Assistant Secretary’, ‘Aged Care Transformation and Quality Branch’, ‘Digital Transformation and Delivery Division’]

Thanks very much Fay and thanks to everyone for joining us today. I’m really pleased to be speaking with you all and sharing our progress on Government Provider Management System or GPMS. My name’s Emma Cook and I’m the Acting Assistant Secretary of the Enabling Capabilities Branch who’s responsible for overseeing the development of this new exciting platform. And I will hand over briefly to my colleague and co-presenter for today Amanda Smith to give a brief introduction of herself.

I think we might have an audio issue.

If that’s the case I might just push on.

Fay Flevaras:

I think you’re there Emma. Just project a little bit. Hopefully you don’t fade in and out.

Emma Cook:

No. No. All good. So I’ll introduce Amanda on her behalf. Amanda is the Assistant Secretary as you can see of the Aged Care Transformation and Quality Branch responsible for the IT component. So certainly working side by side in the delivery of this both more broadly and in today’s presentation.

In terms of what we’ll be covering today I’ll be providing a little bit of context around GPMS, a brief introduction and overview of progress to date. We’ll be talking about what’s next for GPMS and of course questions and answers will follow at the end of the session as has already been outlined.

So on the next slide you’ll see really the impetus for many of the aged care reforms at present which is the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. So the Royal Commission made a number of key recommendations related to technology and ICT, in particular highlighting that an improved aged care system relies on a technology enabled environment and that this environment should provide efficiency in the use of clinical business and operating systems, improve the quality and multiplicity of use of data that exists within the system and also must be centred around the people receiving care and designed to support optimal service delivery for older people receiving aged care.

Government’s responded to these recommendations and invested in improving ICT infrastructure and technology to provide a strong foundation for an improved aged care system and with particular focus on precisely what was highlighted by the Royal Commission being systems designed to improve the services that older people receive. That is the aged care services that our older Australians are receiving daily as well as the ability for systems to share data between aged care, healthcare providers and Government in a seamless and efficient way that not only allows more time to be spent delivering good quality care but also ensures that we have better information on which to base our improvement at a service and system level.

So we’re also working on as Fay has clearly outlined many, many I guess strategies and mechanisms to bring all of these together and ensure that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And GPMS is undoubtedly a central component of all of this. And so I guess jumping right in it’s a critical first step to enable greater connectivity as you’ll see on the next slide, and integration as part of aged care reforms. And it will be the focus of today’s agenda item.

So jumping through again to the next slide so what is GPMS? I guess stepping back for a moment GPMS establishes a flexible platform underpinned by modern database technology to enable aged care providers and Government to interact efficiently thereby ensuring that Australians have access to up to date information on the quality and safety of aged care. And we know that the systems are critical to get the information and that the information really has three core functions around providing transparent information and supporting choice and quality in aged care. It can go to providers and support that use of information, efficient collection and use of information to inform improvement and go to Government for similar reasons to allow clear monitoring, measurement and improvement of aged care at a system level. So an absolute critical enabler.

GPMS is a modern digital platform as I’ve said that will take on new and existing reporting functionality over time, provide a streamlined single access point for aged care services as well as support automation and interoperability over time.

Our progress to date. And it is early days as Fay’s touched on. This is a first – we’re excited to talk about some first steps and first milestones but it is the start of a journey. And in the ethos of Tech Talks we’re pleased to share with you our progress as well as our plans for where we’ll be going to next. So in that ethos we’re sharing that we had the first release of GPMS on 3 April following extensive user testing with providers to ensure that the system was behaving as intended and fit for purpose. This has enabled us to work closely with residential aged care providers. And I should take this opportunity to say a big thank you to everyone from our sector and communities that has been participating and involved in the development and introduction. We’ve worked closely with many of you as you’ll know to authenticate and login to the portal and manage user accesses.

And of course I’d encourage you to continue to be involved in sector partners and in those communities where we can really continue to work and learn from your feedback and constantly keep an eye on that provider experience and journey as we build this system and improve from here.

The second release following that exciting launch of GPMS was on 11 April 2023 where we launched the star ratings application that allows all residential aged care services to preview star ratings prior to their publication on my aged care. And that happens on a quarterly basis as the new data flows into those ratings.

And these are really important milestones as I’ve said in the launch of the platform that provides a real lynchpin for us to build on in terms of IT reform and aged care reforms more broadly. However they are first steps and there will be future updates that will gradually improve and expand on GPMS to support more applications and functions being added in the future.

So with that I might hand over to Amanda to provide us a little bit of a demonstration on all the amazing work and what I’ve provided the context to in really tangible and practical terms, being the technology and equipment walk-through.

Fay Flevaras:

Amanda I think you have a problem with your audio. You might want to check that one.

Amanda Smith:

Take two. Sorry about that everybody. Thanks Emma. That’s a great summary of where things are at. Welcome everyone. It’s really great to have the opportunity to talk to you all about GPMS. It’s certainly a piece of work that’s been very near and dear to the hearts of myself and the team for many, many months.

My name is Amanda Smith and I’m the Assistant Secretary for the Aged Care Transformation and Quality Branch. My branch has had a lot of opportunities throughout the GPMS journey to work with the sector on getting this solution right upfront. And I want to reiterate the earlier messaging that without this strong collaboration we really couldn’t have reached this important milestone that we’ve just hit. So today I’m going to talk to you about the beta testing that Emma touched on, our self-service forms and show you a short video. So first the fun bit. Let’s take a look at that video.

[START VIDEO PLAYBACK]

§(Music Playing)§

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘GPMS’, ‘Government Provider Management System’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’]

Voiceover:

Welcome to the demonstration of the Government Provider Management System or GPMS provider portal. Today we will be taking you through the login process, how to view star ratings information and how to manage users within the portal.

The first screen you’ll be directed to is the login screen. You will first need to select the authentication method that you regularly use for the My Aged Care Service and Support Portal to login. Either VANguard or myGovID. For the purposes of this demonstration today we will be selecting myGovID.

You will then be redirected to the Digital Identity screen where you will need to select myGov as your verification method.

Next you’ll enter in your myGov email and select ‘Login’ and then accept the verification code on your myGov app.

If you are a user with access to multiple organisations you will then be directed to RAM where you’ll be able to select the organisation that you’d like to login with. Please note that at this current stage GPMS is only accessible for residential aged care ACOs.

If you are logging into the system for the first time you’ll be directed to a screen where you will need to agree to the terms of use for the GPMS system. Once you have agreed you will then be directed to enter a verification code which will be sent to your email addresses. What you will need to do is retrieve that code, place it in and hit ‘Login’.

And that will verify your identity. For users that have logged into the portal before you will just need to select ‘Finish’ on this screen. The verification code is only required for your first login to the GPMS portal.

This is the Home screen of the GPMS portal. Once you’ve logged in you will see a greeting with your salutation, first name and surname and the ACO that you have logged in with. There are two tiles currently available on the Home page of the GPMS portal. The ‘Looking for something else’ tile which will direct you to login to the My Aged Care Service Provider Portal and the ‘Star Ratings’ tile where you’ll be able to view the calculated star ratings for your organisation.

By selecting on the ‘Star Ratings’ tile you will then be directed to a list of services whose star ratings you’re able to view. You have the ability to filter by quarters, statuses or search for a service name or ID to lower down the list so you can find the organisation you’d like to view the star ratings for.

In the list you’ll be able to see the star ratings calculated for the service. To view more detailed information about the star ratings for your organisation you can select an individual service and select the view button on the right hand side.

Up the top you’ll be able to view the current rating and the new rating for your organisation and by scrolling down you can view more information of the sub-category ratings. And by selecting ‘Show more details’ under each you’ll be able to compare your organisation’s performance to the national average for each sub-category.

The other ability that is currently available in the GPMS portal is for organisation administrators to be able to manage the access for the users of the portal. There are currently two role types available within the GPMS portal, organisation administrator and a star ratings reviewer either at the organisation level or the service level. Organisation administrators are able to manage access for all other users within the portal. To add a new user you select the purple ‘Add a new user’ button when in the ‘Manage users’ tab.

You’ll then be able to enter in the email address for the user.

And fill in the details about your new user by selecting their salutation, their first name, surname and date of birth.

Down the bottom you’ll be able to select the role that you would like to assign to this user by clicking in the tick box here. By selecting star ratings viewer at the organisation level you are giving the user the ability to view the star ratings for every single service underneath your organisation. Once you’ve selected the appropriate roles you then select ‘Add user’.

The user that you added will then receive an email and they will be able to follow the link and login to the portal. You are also able to add users at the provider level by selecting the provider sitting underneath the ACO.

Selecting the ‘Add a new user’ button.

Entering in the email address.

Again entering in their salutation.

First name, surname and date of birth.

By adding a user at the service level you are able to select the individual services that you would like them to be able to view the star ratings for. You can select all services or you can select any number of individual services that you would like them to be able to view.

Once you have selected all the services you can then select the ‘Add user’ button.

And the user will receive an email to their email address, be able to forward the link to the GPMS portal and login and view the star ratings for the services that you gave them permission to access.

If at any time you would like to adjust the access that a user has been given you can navigate to the ‘Manage’ button.

And adjust their access level. You can remove or add either of the roles or if the user has left the organisation and you would no longer like them to have access to the portal you can select ‘Remove user’.

Finally to log out of the portal we select the person icon in the top right hand corner and select ‘Sign out’.

You will then be directed back to the Department of Health website where if you would like to login again you can select the blue ‘Log in to GPMS’ button. That concludes the demonstration of the GPMS portal.

§(Music Playing)§

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘GPMS’, ‘Digital Transformation and Delivery Division’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’]

[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]

Amanda Smith:

Thanks everyone. So great to see this video and I hope you all enjoyed that. The GPMS beta testing was a really important step in ensuring that any major issues were identified prior to the full rollout to the sector because little issues are expected when we roll out brand new technology. We conducted two rounds of beta testing. The first round was with a small amount of providers in one on one sessions. Then we had a session with a larger group of volunteers from our sector partners group.

If you haven’t already I would encourage you to log in to the GPMS portal and check it out. And of course our capable contact centre is there should you need any support, have issues or have any questions.

Last year we commenced work on the online provider registration forms for GPMS and also held UX codesign sessions with sector partners. However in December 2022 legislative changes hit which meant this work had to be placed on hold. We are now back progressing the development of these forms. Rest assured any of the valuable feedback we have already received from you will be taken into consideration in the design of these forms. I’ll look forward to sharing our insights and updates on the development of these forms as we progress.

And I think that’s it from me. Any questions be sure and put them into Slido and we’ll pick them up during the Q&A at the end. And for now back to Emma.

Emma Cook:

Thanks Amanda. And I hope that my audio is well improved. I understand that I was fading in a little before. So in terms of next steps – and I have to reiterate before I start on next steps how great all of the video looked and how worthwhile that beta testing and collaboration has been with the sector and with our really valued partners and providers. And that is set to continue which is the point here. We will continue working closely with you, working closely with sector partners to inform future development and future enhancement of GPMS. We expect iterative releases to support that new functionality, the additional forms, improved provider forms and reporting highlighted by Amanda, additional quality indicators that will be due for reporting mid-year as well as extending to providers beyond residential care in the future.

So all of that work is underway. If you’d like to get involved, if you’d like to participate certainly use the QR code on your screen, register, stay in touch with the reform and if you can get involved. That’s probably a good overview from me and I might leave it there noting that as Amanda said if you have questions, if you have queries then feel free to drop those into Slido and we’ll look forward to continuing the discussion at the end of the session. Thanks Fay.

Fay Flevaras:

Thank you Emma and Amanda. That’s fabulous. I really enjoyed the demonstration. I like the fact that we’re thinking big but that we’re starting small and that we’re incrementally adding functionality. It represents the platform foundation on which Government can build many new capabilities on giving us all a single, modern platform to enhance the provider experience that we can grow and industrialise. I believe it’s a key enabler for health and for the sector so really exciting work.

So next up I’d like to welcome John Sidey to the stage. John is going to walk us through the approach that we have for our Business to Government Gateway Onboarding and Conformance. Over to you John.

John Sidey:

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Business to Government (B2G)’, ‘Onboarding & Conformance’, ‘Initiative spotlight’, ‘John Sidey’, ‘G2G Authentication Discovery Lead’, ‘Digital Transformation and Delivery Division’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’]

Thanks Fay. Afternoon all. Thanks very much for having me. My name’s John Sidey. I am working really closely with the Department leading a bit of a discovery activity around authentication for in particular providers into the whole of Government ecosystem which as we’ve started to peel back the covers of this problem space is not the easiest thing to deal with from time to time. So if we can jump into the first slide please team.

This slide makes things look a little bit easy but effectively what we’re really looking at is what does the end to end ecosystem look like for providers interacting with Government. So we’ve just launched GPMS which is really exciting. That has authentication options using myGovID and the Digital Identity ecosystem as well as VANguard FAS. Some of the exam questions we’re looking to answer is what other options should we be supporting? What do we need to support for machine to machine type interactions with service providers? What does the longer term roadmap look like for Government in particular to simplify this landscape? I think some of our early observations would be this is not a simple problem to deal with for the whole of Government and whole of provider landscape. So we’re really keen to engage with the sector, engage with software providers and the broader community and the whole of Government landscape to come up and make some recommendations around how we start moving towards a more coherent and more structured target state that makes it easy for providers to keep focused on what they do best which is providing care to the broader community and we can look to simplify that landscape moving forward whilst maintaining security and resilience as a really key part of the platform.

Next slide please team.

So the rough timeline for this initiative. We kicked off a few weeks ago with our first engagement through the sector partners community. We’ve launched a survey out that’s seeking to gather some specific feedback around the options, the current state, the areas of complexity. We’ve got a few workshops booked in the next couple of weeks with the care community. We’re engaging quite extensively with the software provider community through one on one engagements and we’re starting to interact and engage pretty comprehensively across Government. So that includes the ATO, the Digital Transformation Agency, Services Australia, the NDIA and DVA. Really trying to understand the common themes across all of these stakeholder groups, how we best serve providers in particular across that landscape to make sure it’s simple and easy for people to engage with and we’re building out a roadmap of activity that does move us towards a simpler target state.

Following all the engagement we’re looking to have a set of recommendations for the Government to consider that will make a recommendation on effectively what we need to provide. And probably really telling in some of our earlier engagement is this piece was initially really focused on the authentication parts of the ecosystem but we really recognise that we can’t just look at authentication. We really need to look at the end to end value chain around discovery of services, registering, managing accounts, authorisations. And that’s quite a complex ecosystem and the experience is certainly not super streamlined. So we’re trying to build out a really clear picture. Certainly not proposing there will be a silver bullet to this quite complex and challenging ecosystem but we are looking to make some recommendations that progress us towards that as I said simpler target state based on what both the care, the software community and the Government landscape looks like.

We are looking and seeking to make those recommendations late May/early June which will then inform a Government decision about what happens next, with the major focus being we want to really streamline how the care community can interact with Government through Business to Government interfaces, through seamless software connections, to make it as simple as possible. So we are looking at some of the leading practices across the globe as well like Singpass who have really well defined processes and support systems as well. So we’re engaging fairly extensively. Anyone that wants to get involved please self-nominate. We’re really keen to talk to as many people in the care and support and software community as possible and then make some informed recommendations across Government.

Next slide please.

So we’ve pulled together a bit of a view that in some ways makes this problem space seem almost a little bit too simple when it’s actually quite a complex ecosystem. But effectively we have a range of organisational users that are interacting with agency systems, with their own software, with provider portals across different Government contexts and a lot of those things are duplicated, they require extra overhead and processes. We often have to maintain different credentials, usernames and passwords across these different platforms and systems. That can often drive us to sort of poor security practices, sharing usernames and passwords of course being one of the common things that we do when we don’t want to remember 500 different accounts. So that ecosystem is really complex particularly across the Government landscape and then of course there are different identity and authentication systems operating in the backend. I touched on a couple just before but we have sort of PRODA, the digital identity ecosystem and VANguard FAS as sort of three of the major authentication mechanisms that we do have available in the community.

Certainly not saying we’re going to go down to one but we’re looking to streamline how and what that looks like and again really putting individual providers, organisational users and members of the public front and centre, taking a really citizen centric or experience led approach to identifying those options and then proposing a target state.

So this is the current state. Lots of complexity in the backend obviously where the single slide doesn’t do a lot of that complexity justice. But we’ll be looking to make some recommendations as I said late May/early June for Government to consider what the next steps might look like and then we’ll be engaging and playing back some of those findings to the community in particular through the sector partners forum and depending on whether Fay lets me come back and present we’re more than happy to come back and share the findings of that work with this community as well.

I think that’s the breadth of what I wanted to cover today. We are very early days in the piece. We’re looking forward to speaking with everyone that’s sort of already been engaged to date. But please feel free to throw any questions in the chat and more than happy to schedule some one on ones or invite people to workshops that we’ve got planned in this space. Thanks Fay. Back to you.

Fay Flevaras:

Thank you John. And it’s great to see this work progressing of our Business to Government Gateway because I do feel that if we want the true benefits for automation to be realised then we need to invest and build on this capability and get the APIs right to help support both My Aged Care and GPMS.

So yes I look forward to having you back to talk to us about the engagement and the results of the efforts and the solution recommendations. So look forward to bringing you back in a couple of months so we can discuss that.

So now for a bit of a change of pace. I’m really pleased to introduce our next special guest speaker. For those that have heard me speak before in our Tech Talks you are no doubt aware how passionate I am about developing sound data strategies that enable us connected and secure use of data. That whole automation nirvana to get us a health connected ecosystem in aged care and allow us to leverage a tell us once and use it many times model actually fundamentally needs a great data strategy and implementation plan.

So given the importance of data strategy to our success in digital transformation we thought it would be great to invite one of the Department’s leading thinkers in this space Dr Phillip Gould from the health Economics and Research Division. Dr Gould welcome and over to you.

Dr Phillip Gould:

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Departmental Data Strategy’, ‘Partner presentation’, ‘Dr Phillip Gould’, ‘Chief Data Officer’, ‘Health Economics and Research Division’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’]

Thanks very much Fay and thank you for having me here. It’s a real pleasure to talk about something which is definitely a shared passion for me with Fay in terms of using data effectively. So I’ve recently been given the title of Chief Data Officer in the Department which I feel the weight of expectation, I feel honoured, I feel nervous about it, all sorts of things. But I think it’s really good that as a Department we have this position in place as it recognises the value of the data that we have and the value of the data that we have both for use within the Department but also for the broader community. And as I talk about our data strategy today I hope you’ll all get a sense of that value that we place on data and the approach that we are taking which really balances the idea of the value and the potential and the duty that we have to make good use of data against the potential risks of getting things wrong.

So I’ve got a few slides to work my way through with you all and I know I’ve got some capable driving here. So if we can move on to the next slide that would be great.

So what I thought I’d do is I’ll give you an overview of the data strategy which we released last year. We’ll talk about some future directions. I can’t give a data presentation or data presentation. And sorry to people. You’ll be annoyed. I keep switching between saying data and data. As Chief Data Officer I should be able to stick to one or the other but I never can. But as a data person I’ll have to show you some slides which use data because I love talking about the kinds of insights that data offers us. And then finally we’ll talk about implementation and next steps. So if we go to the next slide please.

Okay. So the data strategy that we have is designed to last for three years. We think that that’s a really useful timeframe because it sets some directions over a significant period of time but without locking us into something for too long. I think every three years is a good time to look at this.

What it does is it really sets priorities for the Department around the way we use data and the way we develop our own capability to do that effectively. We’ve also got as with any good strategy implementation priorities. So what are the actual things that we’re going to do to turn this strategy into something meaningful. And for those of you who are interested please do have a look at the data strategy. It is online. And I’m not saying this to be sucky but my favourite part is actually the Secretary’s foreword. I think it really sets the tone very nicely for what we’re trying to do as a Department. So if we go to the next slide.

Okay. Thank you. So we can see here that we’ve got seven key areas that we’re working on, our strategic objectives with the data strategy. And that’s all underpinned by an approach, a cultural approach to data. And that harks back to a point that I made earlier about safe and effective use and sharing of data. So there’s a recognition there that the Department has to be able to share data to be doing its job properly. We have to be able to provide other people with information that helps them make better decisions. It’s not just all about our own use of the data. But as I said that doesn’t mean we can just publish everything online. That would pose at times very significant privacy risks but also we do have a duty to ensure that people understand the context of the data that we’re looking at. But for my mind one really important aspect of this is that we’re really trying to view it as the Department having a duty to share data.

In order to do that effectively I’ll just quickly go over these priority areas. I think we need people to basically trust and understand what we’re doing with data. And if I’d have given this talk five years ago I think people would have been really concerned about the privacy aspects of things and worried about what the Government’s doing. And that remains true and I think it’s appropriate that people do think about these things and want to be reassured but interestingly with COVID I think we saw a flip as well in terms of expectations that Government is actually doing things with data. So that really has been something that we have seen develop over recent years.

Second one is governance. So that’s basically the way we organise ourselves and that we have proper accountability. And as I said that means a good degree of accountability actually sits with me as a decision maker within the Department as Chief Data Officer and that’s appropriate. But that’s probably the bit that you really do feel the weight and the importance of what you’re doing there.

The next one is really important about internal and external users actually knowing what data the Department has. It sounds like a ridiculous thing to say but we don’t have this beautiful catalogue of all of the information that’s held by the Department and that’s something we’d like to work towards, a really good understanding of our data holdings and searchability of that so that people can use it as effectively as possible. There’s no point in having this wonderful information that’s hidden away and that people can’t find so it’s a really important part of the work that we’re doing.

I’ve already talked about data commitment to safe sharing of data and that’s really strong and that’s been a strong element of my whole career. Data quality is the next one and that’s really important. Those of you – and I’m sure many of you here have experienced it – when people are filling in forms which are then used to generate data it can be a really difficult thing to do effectively if you’ve got other tasks that you need to do. It can sometimes be confusing to know what to fill in a form. There might be some things which are open to interpretation. So these are challenges for data quality but also the standards that we have. And for those of you who like data a lot, metadata standards are something that’s really important. That’s the information that we have about the data. So getting those quality elements are really critical.

Next we have capability with staff. It’s really interesting. I think a lot of people – and I’m sure a lot of people on this call included – would say ‘I’m not a data person’. But I think someone who knows how to analyse a table with information or analyse and draw conclusions from a graph, that’s a good data person. It’s not just about people who can do that sophisticated modelling. We need to have the sophisticated modellers but we also need to have people who are just willing to engage with numbers and think about what they mean. So that’s a really important part of the capability side of the strategy.

Finally we have the technology and tools to support our work. Again good tools can actually help people who may not be data experts, who may not be good at writing their own code and all of that sort of thing. Good tools can help them still get maximum value from data so that’s really important. But we also need to have the right IT platforms and software to help us do the work. So these are all the things that we’re working on as a Department really proactively to improve. We are on a journey. In three years’ time when this data strategy ends I certainly don’t think we’ll be at a point where we can say we’ve done everything that we need to do in this space. This will be an ongoing area for us to improve on but one that we’re committed to working towards.

So if we go to the next slide.

Okay. I wanted to talk about data integration. So that was part of objective five. And data integration is a really interesting piece of work. I actually came to the public service – I’m a time series data person if that means anything to anyone. I moved to the ABS and when I moved there they said ‘Sorry. We’re not going to give you the job we told you we were giving you. You’re going to work in data integration’. And I thought what on earth is happening here? This is not my area. So I was really disappointed but I sort of thought well I have to make the best of it. And a few months later they said ‘Okay. We’ll put you back in your time series job that you initially applied for’ and I refused to leave the data integration area because I could see so much value in it. And what it’s really about is bringing different datasets together.

So in Government we hold a lot of data. So we have the ABS that’s collected the census and then we have MBS and PBS data which the Department has, the Medical and Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme data. And 10 or 11 years ago when I started in the public service the census information wasn’t linked to that so all of the wonderful pieces of information that we have in the census were kind of kept separate from that really important health information. These were not linked with the National Health Survey, education data, welfare data, all of these things. Aged care data as well. And through better data integration work we’ve actually been able to link these pieces together. At best the best way you can link is actually at the individual level. The ABS does a lot of this work as does AIHW. They always do it with deidentified data. It’s very clever what they do. So it’s never for us about who the individuals are. It’s just about drawing insights from these datasets. But there’s just so much power in bringing data together.

And my goal is to work more closely with states and territories and providers to bring more of that data in so that we all together can work on a more complete picture of health and aged care systems. So with that in mind we might go to the next slide.

Okay. So this is a really kind of busy slide but it’s one that I really like. So probably very few of you have heard of MADIP. It’s a really kind of boring sounding name. It stands for the Multi‑Agency Data Integration Project. I know the person who came up with the name for it. I’ve told them it’s not a very exciting name but it is a really exciting dataset. It has linked all of this information about education, health, income, disability, cultural backgrounds together so that we have this amazing resource for performing research. And to me this is a wonderful example of that data integration work that I told you about before and we’ve really worked on this a lot.

Over coming months and over the last few months we have been doing work with AIHW as well to do things like linking people who live in aged care facilities so that we’ve got a flag in the data so that we know that and that can help us perform an analysis there. And that’s an ongoing priority for us. If we go to the next slide.

I’ll just talk a little bit – and I realise already I’m probably talking for too long. I do get a bit overexcited with this stuff so I will try and speed it up. We use this to help – I think a really nice example is to help with the vaccine rollout. So to this MADIP dataset that you saw we managed to work with the ABS to link the Australian Immunisation Register to that on a weekly basis which gave us really up to date insights into the characteristics of people who were and weren’t getting vaccinated. And one of the really interesting areas that we worked on was culturally and linguistically diverse communities. And we’ve worked really closely with community groups on this as well as statistical experts to do I think a really valuable piece of work here. And if we go to the next slide.

Okay. So there’s a bit to unpack on this slide but what it shows, this is actually a point in time. So this was from 2021, September and October, and this was at a point where we had a lot of COVID moving through a range of communities for the first time, a lot of COVID spreading through culturally and linguistically diverse communities as well as concerns over coverage in some of those communities and those concerns were expressed by community leaders. And what this graph did – it was only possible because we had integrated data – it allowed us to look at the difference in coverage between the 7th of September and the 4th of October. So roughly a one month period. And the blue arrows represent the change and if you look at the axis down the bottom at vaccine coverage rate the blue arrows show over that period the increase in coverage rate for people who spoke these different languages in particular parts of Australia, so particular LGAs. And what we can see if you look at the bottom is that there was a big increase in vaccine uptake for Turkish speakers during that period. And the kind of gold line represents the national average. So you can see for the Turkish speakers there was a much bigger uptake of vaccine than for the rest of the population during that time.

Conversely though we saw Vietnamese people are a very large community. That’s why they’re at the top of that graph there. That represents the size of the community of Vietnamese speakers. They had actually quite high coverage rates and over that period though they saw less of an increase than the general population. So this kind of analysis was really powerful for us in order to drill in at quite local areas to understand whether people were or weren’t getting vaccinated. And we were then able to work with the states and territories to help them target communication activities and work with community organisations to help different culturally and linguistically diverse communities understand the value of vaccine uptake. And that was really powerful and really effective.

So I just wanted to show you that as an example of the good work that we’ve been able to do with integrated data and the types of work that we really want to continue working on. If we go to the next slide. We’ll keep going. I’m taking too long.

So if we can go to the next slide please.

So the only other thing I wanted to talk about was some of the work that we’re doing on top of the data. So we’ve got this amazing data but also we’re using it to better understand how outcomes for people can change over time and we’ve created this model. It’s called the HOME Project and it’s the Health Outcomes Modelling and Evaluation Project. Hence the name HOME. And that enables us to look at some really interesting and quite detailed questions. And the example I give here is actually really relevant today where we’ve done some work looking at different population groups. This particular example is females aged 75 to 79. And understanding based on the data that we have the probability of them having a fall and then the probability of them entering a residential aged care facility after having a fall. So looking at the impact of earlier life events on outcomes later in life which is really helpful from a planning and a management perspective.

So I could give you a two hour presentation on this. I won’t do that but I just wanted to give you the sense through this slide that it’s not just about having lots and lots of data together. It’s about drawing valuable insights from it that actually help us make better decisions and manage the health and aged care systems as effectively as possible. This is still in its infancy but something that we’re really excited about and really proud to be working on.

So we’ll just go to the next slide and that’s pretty much it from me. I’m very happy to take questions and comments later.

Fay Flevaras:

Thanks. Thanks Dr Phil.

Dr Phillip Gould:

Don’t call me Dr Phil please.

Fay Flevaras:

I wasn’t going to go there but I did. So it’s great to see the depth of the consultation being done across the data strategy and all the engagement. We’re really big on engagement and really passionate about that in digital transformation. I think for us data is so important. I’m not sure if you noticed during the demonstration in GPMS the star ratings. We gave a bit of data back to our providers and where they sat in the average of everything. So I know Emma’s very passionate about that too. We’ve been working closely with your team especially around the B2G so that we can use standard data elements when we’re building up our APIs to do the interoperability and exchange of data. So data is just a key enabler underpinning everything. So thank you so much for that and hopefully as we progress we’ll get you back and you can give us some more updates as we start to connect more within the aged care and health ecosystem.

All right. So that brings us to our Q&A. And I’m sure that there’s lots of questions for Dr Gould and Emma and Amanda. So we might bring them all up on stage and I’m going to hand back to Janine who’s going to moderate us through our Q&A. Do we have everyone?

We’ve got Janine there.

Janine Bennett:

Great. Thanks Fay. And thank you to everyone who’s submitted questions so far. And we get the fun task now of putting all those questions to the panel. So welcome back to the stage. We’ll be queuing up Fay and Phil, Emma, Amanda and John. As always noting we have such a large group we’ll get through as many questions as we can but we’re really keen to make this a conversation. As the moderator I’m under strict instructions to give everyone a little bit of warning that they’ll be invited to the stage so that you’ll have a minute to get prepared.

So in that spirit I’d like to start by inviting George, Lisa Rollinson and Thu Ha Dang to join us on the stage. So we’ll take questions in that order if my team can get those people set up. Once you’ve been added to the stage just feel free to turn off your audio and turn on your video and we’ll put your questions to the group.

While we’re waiting to queue those folks up I might start by presenting an anonymous question. And this one’s quite a popular one and I think this is a question for you Fay. It says:

Q:        Any API integration coming to My Aged Care so that we can send SIRs incidents from our IMS to the My Aged Care portal instead of manually adding the information?

So SIRs is serious incident reporting if I’m correct. Yeah. I’ll let you go ahead and answer that one.

Fay Flevaras:

And the answer is yes. And we’ve got Emma on stage here with us and that’s her other project that she looks after which is the Business to Government Gateway. That’s the one we all talk about, B2G. That is about standing up a capability where we get to then offer up API integrations for those who are technical so that we can get the software industry to be able to connect with us.

A big part of what we talk about sometimes in the Tech Talk is about digital maturity. And I might just spend 30 seconds on that and just go through it. We talk about four levels of digital maturity. We start with level one which is just manual, which is you get face to face, you fill a form in, and it’s a very valid interaction because not everything needs to be automated and digital in that sense. So that’s great. That’s level one is our manual. Level two is then when we get systemised. So we take that form and we scan it in and it’s in a PDF. We can then share that information but we can’t access the individual data elements on the form. But it’s a good next step. So we systemise it and we put it into the system. Then we go level three which is our digitised and that’s where our GPMS portal comes in and MAC and other portals that we have available. For us that’s really important because that’s the level setter. We recognise that in the industry we have different maturities in our landscape. Some are very manual, some are very highly mature in their IT systems. So we need to make sure that we offer up a capability that enables everyone to do business in aged care.

And then finally level four which is our automated and that’s where our Business to Government Gateway comes into it and where we would like to have pre-agreed service catalogues of APIs that we’re going to build and that we offer it up so that the industry can start building towards those. And I guess that’s where our data strategy comes in. That’s where our national minimum data standards that we’ve been working closely with the team on so that we can define that data model and then define the service catalogue of our open APIs that we’re going to offer up. So that’s a work in progress. Maybe the next Tech Talk we might bring back the next status update Emma. Are you up for it on the next one?

Emma Cook:

Of course.

Fay Flevaras:

And then we can tell you where we’re up to. We’ve been working on that as the second priority behind GPMS but we’ve definitely made a lot of progress. So hopefully that answers the question. APIs are a must and we must get there if we want to start automating and getting a connected ecosystem.

Janine Bennett:

Great. Thank you panel. We’ll get George on the stage. And we have a question for Dr Phillip Gould. So just for anybody who has questions for Phillip just be aware he needs to leave a little early so we will prioritise those questions and get those answered first. But George over to you.

Audience Member:

Yeah. Hi. Can you hear me okay?

Yeah. Okay. Hi George Margelis. I chair the Aged Care Industry Information Technology Council. Very excited by Phil’s presentation but before we go there Fay touched on digital maturity so I’ll use this opportunity to let everyone know that the Digital Health Agency has commissioned us to do a survey of the digital maturity of the sector so you will be getting quite a detailed questionnaire coming out fairly soon. So look forward to that information. And that’s really to sort of level set where we are.

Dr Phil’s presentation around data has really excited me because one of the things we’ve been talking about a long time in aged care is using the data for continuous quality improvement. And the challenge we’ve had of course is that data has been collected mainly for certification reasons rather than for quality improvement reasons, so the tools you had there. So what do we need to embed in our workforce around the need to capture high quality data, not tick box data, but high quality data that can be analysed and what sort of skillsets do we need to introduce into that workforce to make them data addicts and data fans Phil?

Dr Phillip Gould:

Thanks. That’s a really good question. I think there’s two things that we need to do in this space. So one is for the people who are entering the data. I think we have a duty to show them the other uses that it can be put to. Because if you can’t see that then it’s very hard to get motivated about the value of it. So I think showing the value in practice can be really helpful, so through presentations. I really like the – we’ve got a whole heap of graphs actually that really show how we’ve driven change through the use of integrated data and I always like the opportunity to show people who are actually at the point of collection those pieces because that’s ultimately the thing that we need to do to motivate it. So that’s something if ever I get a chance to talk to people who are collecting data I love to do that.

But that’s one part of it. But I also think that we – and I talk about we as in people like me who work on data for policy and driving insights – need to spend more time with people who are actually collecting the data as well. And when I worked at the ABS that was one of the first things that I did was I actually went out with a lot of people when they were actually doing the collections because it gives you a better sense of the strengths and the weaknesses around what you’re analysing. So I think it’s just a really good point that you’ve made but I think it’s a two-way communication piece. And as I said if you think that there are opportunities to talk to people who are actually collecting this data and show them how it can be used outside of their day to day job that’s just an incredibly powerful thing to do. I’m interested if you’ve got thoughts as well.

Audience Member:

Absolutely. Look happy to work with you on that because like I said we’ve got our round table groups and Fay’s presented to those around the broader picture but the challenge has always been that data collection is seen as an onerous task that’s only there because we need to do it for qualification and those sort of issues. So happy to help coordinate through the Council some presentations to both executive teams but the truth is it’s the people on the ground level who are capturing that data and entering it who need to understand the value. And that predictive model you showed earlier was a great example of – that enables them to determine their workflow based on who’s most likely to need intervention in the short term. So those sort of things are really, really important.

Dr Phillip Gould:

That sounds great. And it’s funny. I can’t help saying that there was a really interesting example that we had during COVID though and it was a really challenging example which is with the national notifiable disease system. When COVID really hit and we started getting a lot of cases and a lot of deaths through COVID we found that the people who were providing us with the data that we needed were more pressed than ever with their clinical duties and it meant that the quality of the data degraded. And it was a really tough thing to manage there because I think these people wanted to give us good information but they were so busy at the time that it was impossible for them to fill out all the information fields. But better and earlier engagement with the clinicians who are filling in that would have probably helped streamline that system. So again it’s just absolutely critical at that interface between the users and the people who generate and record the data.

Audience Member:

Well the other thing of course is they’re often capturing that data in their own system so making them double enter it becomes a challenge. So if there’s a way of integrating directly with their clinical systems where they’re entering data for their internal use and exporting that out easily that makes life a lot easier as well.

Janine Bennett:

Thank you very much both. It’s obviously a really rich subject and we could talk about it endlessly. But we do have a bunch of other questions so I might keep the train running. Thanks very much George. Great to see you again. So we’ll invite Lisa Rollinson to the stage. So Lisa you should have been queued up and you’ll be good to jump in there. But just while we’re waiting for Lisa we have an anonymous question.

Q:        What other Government services are you considering for GPMS outside of aged care?

And this might be a good question for Fay or Amanda. I’ll let you decide who wants to jump in.

Fay Flevaras:

Amanda do you want to start?

Amanda Smith:

Sure. I can give it a go and you can jump in if I’ve left anything important off. Look we are certainly building the Government Provider Management System as a whole of Government extensible platform because we’ve done some really exciting discovery work in the care and support sector that has identified a lot of synergies in the provider space around the business processes and the data models across both Department of Health and Aged Care, Department of Veteran Affairs and the National Disability Insurance Agency. And so we are actually at the moment embarking on a discovery piece just starting with those agencies to actually look for opportunities to expand on the platform. Again noting we’re early days. So the benefits that we’re getting in the aged care space over time in terms of improving our data quality and the ease at which service providers can actually submit data to the Department, good quality data, reducing their sort of administrative burden and red tape, that we can look to actually extend those benefits across those other sectors.

So we have a really big vision in terms of the benefits that we can bring to you in really expanding on this beginning platform. So Fay I know this is your baby and your vision so if there’s anything you’d like to add.

Fay Flevaras:

So we’re sharing the love now. So Emma’s officially now our new product owner in the business for GPMS. And I guess I’d like to qualify we’re definitely thinking big but starting small. So the conversations are not a commitment in that sense. There’s probably a lot more discussions to happen between Departments. And just because we’re talking about leveraging a platform does not mean that we – the policy and reform is a different thing altogether and potential synergies there. So in the interest of sharing yes we’re thinking about it and we like to think big. The NDIA and DVA are the first ones we’re talking to but no commitment. Emma did you want to add anything there?

Emma Cook:

No. I think you’ve covered it all nicely between the two of you. And as you say there’s the two parts of we might have something that’s of utility and benefit across Government and we’re obviously having those conversations as you’ve said, and then there’s also natural policy alignments and where those potentially eventuated as a result of future Government decisions they may also create opportunities for the technology to support that.

Janine Bennett:

It’s exciting to think about where – sorry Emma. I was just going to say it’s exciting to think about we’re building a foundation here and right now we don’t know where it could go. We might end up using it for things that haven’t even been imagined yet. So that’s really exciting to think we’ve got that solid foundation that we’re building on.

We have Lisa on stage. Lisa we don’t have video for you but if you could just turn off your mute I’m happy for you to jump in with audio to ask your question.

Audience Member:

That’s fine. I don’t know what’s happened to my camera. It was really just a technical question. So we’ve been trying to log in to the GPMS system and we haven’t been able to get a generated code. So my limited understanding is that we need to get a generated code to an email address and that way we’re able to log in. So we’ve logged the problem quite a few times but the response we’re getting is ‘Yes we know and we’re in the process of trying to rectify it’. So is that still the case?

Janine Bennett:

Amanda that sounds like a good question for you.

Amanda Smith:

Yeah. I’m happy to take that. Thanks for raising Lisa. You are right. That is a known issue that’s affecting 17 cases of which you’re obviously one. We are actually working through a tactical fix. So three of those 17 cases we’ve already resolved today and we’ve actually identified the long term permanent fix and we’re looking for the opportunity to schedule that fix to production. But look in the interest of making sure you’re on that tactical fast train I’ll make sure to capture your organisation’s name and double check in our records that you’re on that list to be resolved manually.

Audience Member:

Okay great. So it will be – have you got those details now or did you want me to provide those details?

Janine Bennett:

We don’t have comments enabled in the session but the last slide has an email address Lisa and you can feel free to email us and we’ll make sure your information gets to Amanda. So it’s just DT Office but you’ll see it on the last slide. We’ll make sure you get that. There will also be an email coming out from that same mailbox after the session so you can just reply to that email.

Audience Member:

Okay. Great. Thank you.

Janine Bennett:

Thank you. And then Lisa I noticed you also had a question about the GPMS being used in the community aged care space.

Audience Member:

In community aged care. Yeah.

Janine Bennett:

That was a very popular question so let’s see if Emma can answer that one for us.

Emma Cook:

Yeah. Sure. So I guess the short answer is yes. GPMS will be extended over time to aged care providers including providers providing services in home care. The initial launch of GPMS and the functionality being the star ratings preview has had obvious focus on residential providers and as we add more functionality that’s of particular relevance to in home care we’ll certainly be looking to build upon what we have at the moment.

Audience Member:

So sorry you were dropping out then Emma. Is there a date for that?

Emma Cook:

There’s no firm date that we can advise but we’ll continue to communicate through this forum and through all the usual channels. You won’t miss our communications at all and we’ll stay in touch as that’s coming.

Audience Member:

All right. Great. Thank you.

Janine Bennett:

Thanks so much Lisa. Appreciate you participating. So we have Thu Ha Dang – I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly – who will be brought up to the stage. But while we’re waiting I did just want to address a couple of the anonymous questions that have come through. So we had a number of questions around whether these sessions are recorded and will they be shared. We had some comments about people having trouble seeing the timeline on screen because it’s a little small. I just wanted to reiterate to everyone if you’ve had connection issues, if you’re having trouble seeing the detail in the screens, if you want to watch this again at your own pace later, we publish the video about a week after every event and we publish the slide deck. So you’ll be able to freezeframe anywhere you like and blow that up and have a really good look at the detail of any of those slides that we’ve included.

And I’ll hand over to Thu Ha. Am I pronouncing that correctly?

Audience Member:

Yes. Correct. You pronounced great. Thank you very much Janine. Thanks everyone for a great presentation today. Really happy to hear about the upgrade, about the progress sorry, and also information about the GPMS. And I just have a little question about the GPMS updates, so how frequent it is updated. So when we see star rating change, for example for one organisation, it’s from five stars to three stars, so what is the action after that?

Fay Flevaras:

That one’s for Emma.

Janine Bennett:

I think that’s an Emma one. Yes.

Emma Cook:

It sounds like me and I’ll give you the answer but tell me if there’s anything you want me to go into further. So GPMS, we’ve done the first launch. We have then done the second launch in the star ratings preview which you’re enquiring about. The further kind of introduction or the specific timing, we don’t have that to hand at this point, the particular dates of any future applications, but we will share them. Noting that Fay’s given that broad kind of timeline and a high level of the work underway. As we have specific timeframes we’ll certainly communicate those.

Now with respect to star ratings and the frequency of star ratings updates and what happens next there – it’s not my current role I should caveat but I’m sure many of you have seen me here from my previous role which was leading that star ratings component so I’m pretty confident in talking about it – which is that you should have for any kind of existing service that has been open long enough you’ll have an overall star rating and four sub-category ratings published on My Aged Care. Each day that data updates and largely the data that updates is compliance information from the Commission. So your star ratings can change at any point in time if compliance information changes that underpins that rating.

Now assuming that the compliance information stays the same on a quarterly basis care minutes or staffing and quality indicators or quality measures in the context of star ratings updates. You now have the star ratings application and you’ll get that two week preview window, at least two weeks, to log in and see what your new rating is likely to be. And when you do that you don’t have to take a particular action. You don’t have to ask us to then release it or do anything. That’s just two weeks for you to look at it, ensure that it all looks right and that you can then work to prepare staff, you can work to prepare residents, you can look at what your rating is doing, how you’re going to improve on it based on the information that’s available on the Department’s website, and be ready for when that publishes that you have a plan or you’re well positioned to respond to any questions or concerns you may have from people affiliated with your service or receiving care provided by your service.

So it’s really that early heads up and early notice that that star rating will be published. After the timeframe, so in this case by the end of the month, the star ratings will then automatically push through and be published on My Aged Care. They’ll replace the existing ratings and the data that sits beneath them. And where appropriate, so for staffing or quality measures ratings, you’ll then start to get your trend graph populating to show that actually your service is lifting over time or remaining stable and high performing over time and start to build those graphs out. So that’s really I guess the sort of lifecycle on a quarterly basis of star ratings and how that preview fits in. It's really an opportunity to engage, prepare and improve service delivery. It’s not a step that requires any particular action from you into those things.

Janine Bennett:

Thanks very much Emma. Thanks Thu Ha. Appreciate the question. That was a really good question. So I’m going to invite Jane Sheills to the stage if Jane wants to get herself ready. And in the meantime we’ve got a couple of questions for John. And there’s a bit of similar theme to them so I might just go ahead and summarise those questions for you John. They’re basically around:

Q:        How do we self-nominate to be involved in the ecosystem discussion as a software provider or the discovery discussion as a service provider?

John over to you.

John Sidey:

Thanks very much Janine. And look super exciting to have some more self-nominations into the process. Like I said we’re really keen to talk to as much of the community as we possibly can. So an email address hopefully can be provided into the chat but it’s dtsectorpartners@health.gov.au and if you send an email through to that address just stating that you want to nominate for the B2G authentication engagement then our team will be in touch very soon to schedule either a one on one, invite you to the workshop, and we will plan to send out the link to the survey as well. So we’re running a survey as well. Again I’ll peddle my survey wherever I can to try and get as much data as we possibly can to inform that direction. But anyone that can spend five minutes providing a bit of data into that as well that would be great as well. So really important that we get as much data. So that email address again is dtsectorpartners@health.gov.au. And please flick us a note and we’ll be in touch and schedule some time as soon as possible. There are some one on ones planned and we do have some workshops scheduled. So really looking forward to engaging with as many people as are keen to get involved.

Janine Bennett:

Thanks very much John. We’ll be sure and include that email address that John has mentioned in the post-event email. So don’t fear. You’re not going to miss out on that. We have had another couple of people come in as well with technical issues with the GPMS that they want the team to know about. Again we’ll have the contact email that you can use to provide information on those in the post-event email.

Great. Jane welcome. You might be our last questioner for the day. We’re running really tight on time as usual. Jump in.

Audience Member:

Okay. Well it wasn’t really a question but I did just want to thank Fay and the team at the Digital Transformation Office for including software providers in the discovery. We have been working with NDIA and Services Australia through integrations and are really keen to work with Fay and her team on assisting in that process as well. Hoping that the work that we’ve done in our solutions is reusable for the work that we’re doing through there. And we’re committed to helping Fay in that space and looking forward to the workshops.

Fay Flevaras:

Thank you Jane. Really appreciate it. And yeah that’s the goal. We do recognise that you guys have worked with other areas of Government and Department and so the work that John’s doing there is about how do we kind of level set that. I’ve even gone so far as going can we be reciprocal in our conformance process. So if you’ve already passed theirs can we recognise that and have a singular approach to it. So look thinking big and then starting small and baby steps, and we’ll get there. But your time and effort that you guys put into this is integral for us to create successful solutions that make it easy for all of us to adopt. So thanks so much for the feedback.

Audience Member:

No worries.

Janine Bennett:

Thanks very much Jane. We actually have a bunch of questions that we haven’t gotten to today including a very popular one from Francis. Apologies Francis. We haven’t been able to get to that one. But we will try and figure out a way to summarise the key themes that people are still wanting information about and to put something up on the web that helps to answer those. And there was a question about FAQs from Jo and we’ll try and address that and provide some information in our post-event email.

Okay. Thank you panellists. Very much appreciate your time and letting us put you on the spot as always. And also thank you for your presentations. Thanks very much to everyone who raised questions and particularly those folks who joined us on the stage for a conversation. It was great as always.

Okay. So we might just go ahead and get the in closing slide up just quickly so that again we can show you – if we just make that large, the slide large. I’m just trying to give people the contact email address. So a couple of questions were around that email address. That’s the email address you can use to contact us. It will also be the same sender that you’ll receive your post‑event email from.

Fay Flevaras:

Janine I was cheeky and I did put them as Slido notes, questions, so people might find them in the Slido as well.

Janine Bennett:

Great. Thanks Fay. We’ll use that to do the FAQs later. Okay. So our next Tech Talk will be in about six weeks’ time as usual. You will receive an email post this event and it will have a survey link in it. If you want to take the survey now you can just go ahead and use the QR code on screen to complete that survey. We really do read your comments and we look at these results closely so we would love it if you would contribute. The recording will be available on the Health website in about a week or so. If you’ve got suggestions, agenda items, improvements you’d like to see us make to these Tech Talks definitely just email us at the email address that’s on screen now.

I will hand over to Fay to close us out. Thanks Fay.

Fay Flevaras:

Thank you so much and thank you to all of our presenters and Janine for doing a great job in facilitating. We really appreciate everyone coming. It was great to have an opportunity to put the spotlight on our GPMS initiative given that it represents a key milestone for our digital transformation. As we always say digital transformation is a big undertaking and like all big undertakings there is a bit of an art to digital success. So we have to be willing or reimagine how we will deliver, how we share and listen. We have to start small. Think big but start small but with a solid foundation that we can build upon. And GPMS is exactly that.

I also wanted to make a special mention that if you’re keen to influence how this digital transformation rolls out we want to hear from you. We have an active group of at the moment 97 sector partner volunteers who meet with us each fortnight to discuss digital solutions. The sector partner group for us is all about evening the playing field and let everyone get involved. We release the initiatives via our sector partners, those that can volunteer for specific activities. You don’t have to do everything. Just the ones that you’re most interested in. Whether or not you make the regular meetings it doesn’t matter because you’ll get the information in the sector partner community shared dedicated collaboration site. So it allows people to get an insight into the topics that we’re working on and we get to hear from you.

So for everyone who isn’t a sector partner yet that’s okay. You don’t miss out because we summarise the work that we do there and then we post it up onto the Health and Aged Care website. We also then use this information and play it back in our Tech Talks here. So that means everyone who’s interested can get a sense of what we’re doing and where we’re up to and where we’re thinking and where we’re going. So if you’re curious check it out on our website.

Now we know that not every sector partner will come to every single meeting. This is why we – so if you have been reluctant to volunteer because you don’t think you can make it all it’s okay. You can join anyway and just volunteer for what you want to get involved with. You’ll also get access to all the information about what’s going on and it’s totally fine if you end up opting in on the activities that are specific for you. So our message is if you’re keen to get involved just email us. That’s the email that we said, the DT sector partner community, and we’ll induct you in.

Okay. That’s it from us. We’re sorry we’ve run a little bit over time. Thanks again for coming and I look forward to seeing everyone next time. Bye everyone.

[Closing visual of slide with text saying ‘In Closing’, ‘Visit the Digital Transformation page on the Health and Aged Care website’, ‘Email us at DTDOffice@health.gov.au’, ‘Take the Event Survey’, with QR code]