Digital Transformation Tech Talk – 13 November 2024

[Opening visual of slide with text saying ‘Digital Transformation’, ‘Tech Talk’, ‘Webinar series for the aged care sector’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘health.gov.au’, ‘Tech Talk #20’, ‘13 November 2024’]

[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:

As always we’re here to talk about digital transformation for the aged care sector. I’m Janine Bennett, the Engagement Lead for the Department’s Digital Transformation Program and your moderator for today’s webinar.

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Welcome’, ‘Connect by phone’, ‘Dial-in 02 8318 0010 PIN 942 001 999#’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘This session is recorded’]

I’m joining you today from the land of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people and I’d like to recognise the traditional owners as well as the people and families with continuing connection to the land and waters of this region. I pay my respects to their contributions to this country and to Elders past, present and emerging and to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people joining us today. It’s great to have you with us.

Firstly some housekeeping. Before we begin I’ll share with you that we’ve had some technical issues with another meeting today. Hopefully that’s not going to affect us here at Tech Talk. But if you do lose connection you will be able to go ahead and rejoin. Our Tech Support team are monitoring in the background and as always I will send a recap and recording of the session after the event so you won’t miss anything. You’ll be able to catch up later if you do drop off.

If you’re joining us for the first time a couple of things to keep in mind. Our phone dial-in details are there on the slide and they’re also in your meeting invite in case you come across any connectivity issues throughout the session today. We record our sessions so that you can play it back yourself or share it with others after the event and we post that recording to our website. That should be available in the next couple of weeks as soon as we have the transcripts done.

As always we keep an eye out for your questions. So go ahead and add your questions as you hear the presenters talking today. We’ll put those to our panel during Q&A. If you’d like to get involved it’s really easy to ask a question. You just open up the Q&A tab in the top navigation bar in Teams, type your question so that it’s ready and waiting, and when we get to our Q&A session we’ll try and get to as many questions as we can. If you’d like to ask a question live on camera we’d love for you to join us on the Tech Talk stage. To do that please make sure you include your name when you send your question in. When the time comes I’ll give you a quick heads up before we bring you to stage. From there just make sure your video and audio is on and then you can go ahead and ask your question directly to the panel. If you’re feeling a bit shy today and you don’t want to appear on camera that’s totally fine too. I’m happy to ask the question for you. Just post anonymously in that case or write ‘No stage’ on your question and then I’ll go ahead and ask the panel on your behalf.

Okay. Keeping in mind that our focus here is on Tech Talk and it’s targeting the technology and delivery work we do under digital transformation we’ll answer all the questions that we can. If we need to take a question offline, if we’re not quite sure of the answer in the room today, we’ll follow up and let you know the outcome.

I want to quickly welcome any media representatives attending today. We appreciate your ongoing interest in this important work that we’re doing for the aged care sector. A quick reminder that media questions should go to the Department’s Media and Events team at news@health.gov.au. They’re best placed to help you with those formal media questions.

Okay. With our housekeeping out of the way let’s get onto the main game. On today’s agenda we’re opening proceedings for our 20th Tech Talk with our routine digital transformation update taking us through the latest delivery roadmap including a bit of a look at what’s coming in 2025, followed by a presentation on the ‘Manage Your Organisation’ tile in GPMS which recently went live. Then we have some folks with us from the Monthly Care Statements who are doing a joint update from the Department and Liquid Interactive. Next we’ll hear about our latest sector pulse survey, followed by a quick flashback for all that we’ve achieved together in 2024 and then we finish up with our usual live Q&A.

Now it’s my pleasure to introduce your host for the day, Fay Flevaras. Fay leads the digital transformation work and is currently acting in the role of Chief Digital Information Officer at the Department of Health and Aged Care. Fay is a very skilled technologist and an IT architect who brings her extensive experience in leading transformational change in private industry to her work here at the Department. Fay welcome. Happy 20th Tech Talk and over to you.

Fay Flevaras:

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Digital Transformation update’, ‘Fay Flevaras’, ‘Acting Chief Digital Information Officer’, ‘Corporate Operations Group’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’]

Thanks Janine. And firstly give me a thumbs up. Hopefully everyone can hear me. Yes. Excellent. Okay. So welcome everyone, to all our regulars. That’s lovely. Thanks everyone. And to anyone joining us for the first time today glad to have you with us. It’s good to see you all. A quick reminder to type your questions in the Q&A as we go because that will give people the opportunity to like questions up and get us ready for the Q&A section later on in the event. We’ll also pop handy links into the Q&A as well so keep an eye out for those as we’re working our way through the presentation.

Okay. So firstly I want to start by sharing that we’ve been doing continued presentations and collaborations and engaging with the sector, in particular to mention our Digital Transformation Guest Speaker Series. As part of our guest speaker events I and other members of the team present at different events when you guys want us to come as we’re invited and one of those events was the ACCPA conference, the national conference in Adelaide, which was just one of the many presentations that we’ve done this year at various meetings, forums, conferences, peak bodies, all sorts of groups who want us to make sure that we’re providing a channel where people can invite us to their event. We talk to them specifically about the elements of the program that are relevant to them and that might be of special interest.

We’re always open to presenting at forums like this. So it gives us the ability to have direct contact with you guys, provide you direct information around the work that we’re doing, and it gives us the important opportunity to hear your experiences and your expectations on the key challenges and the priorities for the digital transformation.

[Visual of text saying ‘Book a guest speaker,’ with image of QR code, ‘DTDDEngagementOffice@health.gov.au’]

If you’re interested in having us visit in 2025 you can reach out to the Engagement Office. Simply scan the QR code that you’ve got there for the email address and we’re putting it into the chat for others as well. So let’s start with the delivery side of things.

Now here you’ll see our Digital Transformation Roadmap for 2024. This will be a familiar slide for our Tech Talk regulars. This is the plan that we’ve been tracking to and delivering to all year. And I’ll draw your attention to the ticks at the top of the columns for each quarter. That confirms that these programs of work have all been completed and delivered.

So in our last release in October we improved star ratings, updated the B2G developer portal and we made platform improvements to remove system generated duplicate users in GPMS. We made some additional upgrades to the B2G developer portal and relevant Department of Health and Aged Care web pages to improve the user experience and ensure information is easily accessible based on some of the feedback you gave, and improved the Australian National Aged Care Classification referral management and assessments to remove the manual inputting of aged care planning region details when the geospatial information is created or updated. We also made changes to the 24/7 registered nursing information to ensure that the additional funding is provided to very small facilities so they can keep increasing their nursing coverage and quality of care for residents. And that’s just some of the things that we touched on. There were so many more but I can’t cover them all here. Because these were all very important and incremental improvements but I know that talking about what we’ve done in 2024 is potentially not what you’re all asking for at the moment. So how about we take a little look forward.

As we’ve shared in our last Tech Talk these are the projected delivery dates for 2025 with major releases planned for February, June and October. Here you can see there’s three major releases for 2025 and you can see the associated sort of design build and test phases that go with that. These are not our only releases but our major releases. We also do put monthly sort of deployments and patches but we won’t showcase these at the moment. So since our last Tech Talk we’ve been working really hard to provide more detail to this roadmap. And here it is. Our first cut at the Digital Transformation Roadmap for next year. This is a forecast of the work up until June 2025. So we thought we’d share early. We couldn’t give you the full year but we thought we’d share what we have so far.

So I’m going to share this with my usual disclaimer. Think of this as our technical delivery roadmap. It’s our working plan. It is important to note this timeline supports the aged care reform agenda but it should not be considered an official commitment from Government. As I always say these announcements happen elsewhere usually via Ministers and other formal mechanisms. What I’m sharing here is a working draft view of the planning we’ve been doing with our policy partners in the Department and some of our other agency partners with the caveat that some decisions are still pending and there might be shifts. And if this does happen and we need to shift something we will let you know in the next Tech Talk and be very transparent about what’s moved.

As previously mentioned we had three planned releases for 2025 in February, June and October. Here you can see the deliverables for February and June only ahead of the implementation for the new Aged Care Act.

All right. So how about we dive in a little bit specifically around the February release. We’re making changes to My Aged Care portal to allow recipients’ exceptional circumstances to be captured, information like Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander status or homelessness or at risk of homelessness, family connection reasons or urgent residential respite information. In preparation for the new Act we’re making further changes to My Aged Care to support the rollout of the new Supporting Decision Making Framework. Enhancements are being made to the single assessment system with the introduction of the new triage delegate role and making enhancements to the assessment delegate form to reflect the new processes. These changes are being built in a dormant state. What that means is we’re building it early and deploying it but will not be turned on in the February release.

We’re updating terminology in GPMS and B2G to better reflect changes in terminology for the quality indicators. And an additional three new staff quality indicators will be added to the National Aged Care Mandatory Quality Indicator Program with the focus on enrolled nursing, allied health and lifestyle officers.

Star ratings, staff rating will be updated to reflect the combined care minutes for registered nursing and enrolled nurses. Providers and consumers will be able to view the new combined care minutes in various portals and we’re also adding in an explanatory note section alongside the staffing rating and overall star rating. The care services model will provide a basis for other business product owners and project areas to consume and interact with this information. The care service model is defined as a set of reference data that stores the aged care services list and the categorisations according to the new Aged Care Act. We’ll also have a set of attributes reference data that is used to support the provider service delivery data, business rules and the user experience during the business processes such as the provider registration, support plans, delivery management, referrals and much more. So you can see the care service model is a very foundational piece.

Lastly it will also include the relationships these entities have with other business entities to consume the care services data in support of business functions. So for more information and detailed information on those we will provide more in coming Tech Talks but also if you really want to get involved in the nitty gritty on those your sector partner community is the place to be as we share a lot of the data elements as they come to fruition and we share them early.

As part of the provider preview finally we will email out data to providers so that they can confirm the facilities, services and details have been considered correctly as part of the new legislative structure ahead of the launch of 1st of July next year. And we’ll also be enabling the submission of supporting documentation to support the younger persons in residential aged care delegate to decide eligibility for younger persons’ access for Government funded aged care. And then finally enabling First Nations clients to specify their preference to be assessed by the First Nations Assessment Organisations. 

This is kind of like the executive summary of all we’re doing. There’s a lot more detail but we thought this would be a good first cut to share with you. Everything I just ran through is also described here on this slide and the deck will be made available on our website very soon so you can reference the detail in your own time.

Lastly I wanted to brief you also on the digital maturity research project that we’re doing. We’ve heard it loud and clear from the sector around concerns being digitally ready for the reform is something they’ve got front of mind. So we know the digital maturity is an important driving force that will help organisations such as yours and our own to thrive. So the Department is committed to exploring how aged care providers and the software industry that supports them can keep pace with us while leveraging the benefits available for digital innovation. 

To that end we’re conducting a study on digital maturity. The aim is to better understand the benchmark of our current digital maturity levels across the aged care sector and we hope that the insights from this research will inform policies and supporting mechanisms to bolster the sector’s digital readiness and growth into the next year. Our research tackles four important questions. Firstly what is the current level of digital maturity for aged care providers? Second what are the key barriers and challenges to aged care providers improving their digital maturity? Third what do aged care providers need help on to improve their digital maturity? And fourthly what are the core elements of the digital maturity for aged care providers that lead to success?

To answer these questions we’re going to need your help and input. Already we’ve been meeting with some key groups conducting workshops and deep dive interviews, and soon we’ll be launching a digital assessment survey for all aged care providers and the software vendor community that supports them so that you guys can complete for us. We’ve been hoping to launch the survey this month but we hit a conflict with a few other surveys that are going out. And so to take the pressure off the sector we’re now aiming to release this in late January. So watch that space for it. We encourage you to keep an eye out for the survey. We’ll promote it broadly so that you can get involved. And we really need you guys to participate and be honest as we value your honesty and the raw engagement that we get including the hard truths. So that way we can make sure that we’re addressing any concerns you guys have in order to get ready. So I say it cheekily, but don’t hold back but please be nice. We just need to hear all your concerns though.

Okay. So that’s kind of the update on our delivery roadmap. Hopefully that’s been some information that you’ve all been waiting for eagerly. Onto our next agenda. I’m pleased to welcome Amanda Smith who is here to update us on the GPMS Manage Your Organisation tile. Amanda over to you.

Amanda Smith:

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘GPMS Manage Your Organisation tile’, ‘Amanda Smith’, ‘Assistant Secretary’, ‘Aged Care Transformation and Quality Branch’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’]

Thanks Fay. And hello everyone. I’m Amanda Smith. I’m the Assistant Secretary of the Aged Care Transformation and Quality Branch where we oversee the development of GPMS. The GPMS journey has provided opportunities for the Department to work with the sector on getting the solution right. And I’d like to start by reiterating that without this strong collaboration with you guys we couldn’t have reached the important milestone we have to date.

In July we provided you with an update about the ‘Manage Your Organisation’ tile which was formerly known as the Self Service Portal. And we were letting you know then that it would be available soon and I’m pleased to say it is now live and ready for use by approved providers in GPMS. So what this means is you can review your information and make the necessary updates in the ‘Manage Your Organisation’ tile. So now you can update provider details, service details, key personnel and contacts, third party arrangements, and all using the new ‘Manage Your Organisation’ tile.

As we all start to get ready for the implementation of the new Act that Fay was talking about earlier we ask that you all make a point of going in now and checking that your system details are correct. That would really help us with the range of changes and data migrations we have to do. We have also developed six videos to help you get familiar with new functionality in GPMS all of which are available on the Health website. And I think the team will drop some of the links into the chat there.

Today we are going to share one of those videos with you. This video is targeted to provider staff for both service and organisation changes as well as provider governing persons to help guide them through the process of completing a digital notification form to update organisational details through that ‘Manage Your Organisation’ tile. We’ll play that now to give you a preview of what to expect when using the functionality.

[START VIDEO PLAYBACK]

§(Music Playing)§

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Provider Staff (Service), Provider Staff (Org), ‘Provider Governing Person’, ‘How to complete a digital notification form in the Self Service Portal’, ‘Government Provider Management System (GPMS)’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’]

Speaker:

Welcome to the guide on how to complete a notification form on the Self Service Portal. The provider logs in to the Self Service Portal and is presented with the portal landing page. The provider wishes to complete a notification form and they select the ‘Manage Your Organisation’ tile. On the ‘Manage Your Organisation’ page the provider can initiate a notification form by selecting the ‘Begin Notification Form’ button. On the Notifications workspace page the provider is able to view the ‘Before you start’ information which includes sections for privacy and your personal information, notice of collection and who can approve and submit this form. 

The provider wants to notify an organisational change and selects the ‘Add’ button from the Organisational Changes section. From the list of organisational change options the provider selects the ‘Change to organisation’s governance’ option and then selects the ‘Next’ button.

On this page the provider selects board or governance committees as the type of organisation’s governance change. The provider then fills out the fields for this change which includes the detailed statement describing the change that has occurred, the upload of any supporting documents, the date when the change came into effect, reason for the change and how the change affects the suitability of the approved provider. The provider then selects the ‘Complete’ button and is taken back to the Notifications workspace page.

From this page the provider wishes to notify of a key personnel change and selects ‘Add’ from the Key personnel changes button.

From the list of options the provider selects the ‘Add as a new key personnel’ option. Note that the provider is also able to select to update a key personnel’s details, cease all key personnel roles and also report on suitability as key personnel. For the purpose of this recording the provider only selects the ‘Add as a new key personnel’ change and then selects the ‘Next’ button. The provider then searches for a contact through the first name and last name fields, selects ‘Search’ which returns no matches. The provider then selects the option to create a new contact record for the person above and add them as a key personnel and then selects the ‘Next’ button.

On the ‘Add personal details’ page the provider enters the personal details of the new contact. This includes the title, first name, last name and date of birth and then selects the ‘Next’ button. On the ‘Add position details’ page the provider enters the position details which includes position title, date they started as a key personnel, principal purpose of key personnel position, duties of position, employment type, main contact number and email, and then selects the ‘Next’ button.

On the ‘Add individual screening check details’ the provider selects the type of background check that has been completed, have you received the outcome of the worker screening check, NDIS worker screening check number, NDIS worker screening check expiry date, and upload of the worker screening check number. Once the document has successfully uploaded the provider then selects the ‘Next’ button.

On the ‘Add insolvency check details’ page the provider completes the following fields which include date the insolvency check was completed, the search ID and upload of the insolvency check document. Once the document has successfully uploaded the provider then selects the ‘Next’ button.

On the ‘Add disqualification details’ page the provider answers the following question regarding the disqualification status of the key personnel and then selects the ‘Next’ button.

On the ‘Add AHPRA registration details’ page the provider then completes the following fields. Are they currently registered with AHPRA? Are they responsible for nursing services? Registration type, registration number, the copy of the AHPRA certificate, whether the key personnel’s name is different to the one shown on the AHPRA registration and the copy of the statutory declaration. Once the document has been successfully uploaded the provider then selects the ‘Next’ button.

On the ‘Add membership of governing body details’ page the provider completes the following field. Is the key personnel a member of your governing body or quality care advisory body? In this scenario the key personnel is not and the provider selects the ‘Next’ button.

On the ‘Add qualifications’ page the provider answers the following questions regarding relevant qualifications. Do they have any qualifications relevant to the position held, the name of the qualification, educational facility and date obtained. The provider then selects the ‘Next’ button.

On the ‘Add relevant experience’ page the provider would complete the following fields. Do they have any experience relevant to the position held, name of the employer, role title and description, role commencement date and role cease date. Once done the provider then selects the ‘Complete’ button and is taken back to the Notifications workspace page. 

The provider now wishes to submit the notification form for review. On the Notifications workspace page the provider can add an authorised representative and a governing person. The provider selects the ‘Edit’ button on the authorised representative box and is asked to enter the details of the authorised representative which includes full name, role, position, phone and email, and then selects ‘Confirm’. The provider then selects the ‘Edit’ button on the governing person box and is able to select a governing person from the list of governing persons available at the organisation and then selects ‘Confirm’.

The provider then selects the ‘View Summary’ button and is then taken to the ‘Summary of Changes’ page.

On the ‘Summary of Changes’ page the provider can review the notification and then selects the ‘Send for review’ button. The provider then sees the confirmation page stating that the notification has been sent to the governing person for review and submission. And that’s how a provider staff organisation user can complete a notification in the Self Service Portal.

§(Music Playing)§

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Please contact My Aged Care Service Provider and Assessor helpline on:’, ‘1800 836 799’, ‘Monday to Friday (8am to 8pm) and Saturday (10am to 2pm) local time across Australia’, with image of QR code, ‘For more information go to:’, ‘https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/government-provider-management-system-gpms’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’]

[END VIDEO PLAYBACK] 

Amanda Smith:

Thanks team. Love a good video. For more information on how to update your organisation’s details as I mentioned we have resources available on our website. You can also scan the QR code on the screen to revisit the presentation we did at our July Tech Talk. Just remember Self Service Portal equals ‘Manage Your Organisation’ tile. We just thought that title was a bit more meaningful. 

And that’s all for today. We’re happy to take questions on GPMS and the ‘Manage Your Organisation’ tile but for any policy specific questions I’ll need to take them on notice and connect in with my business counterpart Emma Cook. But we’ll make sure we get back to you either offline or at a future meeting if there’s anything you would like to ask. And on that note thank you for listening and Fay back to you.

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘GPMS: Manage Your Organisation Tile’, ‘Find out more’, ‘GPMS resources’, with image of QR code, ’10 July 2024 Tech Talk’, ‘with image of QR code, ‘Watch the video again’, with image of QR code, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’]

Fay Flevaras:

Thanks Amanda. And I hope you found the video instructive folks. That will be made available elsewhere so you can refer back to again. We are debating just how much of the detail we bring here to Tech Talk versus how much is it learning material to be put elsewhere. If you have an opinion it would be great for you to drop it in the Q&A and that way you can vote it up one way or another. But we do think there’s a lot being done and we are just trying to over communicate and share. So please keep providing feedback on the best way to communicate some of this detail.

Okay. Now onto the next item for today, a joint presentation about Monthly Care Statements. Katy Roberts from our Quality Assurance Division will be joined by the guest presenter Steve Marrinan from Liquid Interactive. Katy will update us from the Department’s perspective while Steven will speak to the software aspects. So Katy over to you. Just take yourself off mute. Excellent.

Katy Roberts:

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Katy Roberts’, ‘Director, Resident Experience and Food Policy’, ‘Choice and Transparency Branch’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘Steven Marrinan’, ‘Senior Partner’, ‘Liquid Interactive’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’]

Thanks Fay. Good afternoon. I’m Katy Roberts, Director of the Resident Experience and Food Policy section in the Quality Assurance Division, and my team is responsible for implementing the Monthly Care Statements. And as Fay said I’m joined here today by Steven Marrinan who’s a partner at Liquid Interactive and he’s working with us on a project to help us look at software solutions for the statements. But before I hand over to Steven to discuss the project I just wanted to give you an overview of the statements and where we’re up to with implementation.

So Monthly Care Statements are written statements that providers can give to residents and their representatives each month. They were announced following the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety to address concerns raised about a lack of communication between providers, residents and their representatives. And communication remains one of the top ten complaints raised with the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission which is reflected in their quarterly sector performance reports.

In terms of the content the statement summarises the care the resident has received over the previous month, changes to the resident’s health or care needs and any other relevant events that occurred during that period. And for all residents the statement should include information on wellbeing activities which might include the social activities or arts and crafts, exercise, those sorts of things, changes to medication, appointments and hospital visits and nutrition and weight.

And when relevant to a particular resident the statement may also include summary information around a diagnosis that’s relevant to a person’s care, wound management, mobility and falls.

So while the main audience of the Monthly Care Statements is the resident they can also be provided to another person if requested by that resident. Obviously explicit consent would need to be obtained and recorded from the resident for that to happen. If the resident doesn’t have the capacity to receive and understand statements that providers may be able to give those statements to the representative. The statements can be delivered on a rolling basis or on a set day each month providing flexibility to suit the provider. And for written statements they can be delivered as a hard or a digital copy depending on the preferences of the provider and the resident.

Some components of the preparation of the statements will count towards care minutes. So a clinical review of the statement, for example determining whether changes to a resident’s care plan is required, and any follow up conversations and activities that relate to refining and amending a resident’s care plan will count towards care minutes. It’s also important to note that residents will have the opportunity to opt out of receiving the statements. We also recognise that it wouldn’t be appropriate in some scenarios to provide a statement. So residents receiving respite care or palliative care don’t need to receive a statement.

So we see the key benefit of Monthly Care Statements is giving residents important information about their care in a single statement and these can act as a prompt for further conversations with the provider about whether care needs might need to be adjusted. In proactively providing this information residents will have confidence that their provider has listed and acted on their request and feedback. The statements will also help increase visibility of residents’ care assessments and planning results which providers must make available to them under the Aged Care Quality Standards.

Monthly Care Statements also offer benefits to providers. They give providers a view of the residents’ care needs in one place which helps to review and adjust care management plans, improve communication with residents about their needs, address concerns in a timely way and identify trends in feedback received which can help improve care across the home.

The statements are being introduced through a staged implementation approach which has started with a voluntary period. That period commenced on the 1st of October. And so far around 50 providers have informed the Department that they’re offering statements to residents and we’re hoping there will be more engagement from providers as the voluntary period progresses. The Australian Government has not yet made a decision on when the statements will become mandatory and we expect there will be learnings from this voluntary period that will inform the mandatory national rollout. During the voluntary period the statements can be introduced in a flexible way that suits the provider helping to build up to full implementation for when statements become mandatory. For example during the voluntary period providers can choose to give the statements in a written format or even as a verbal update which could align with other communication mechanisms that might already be in place such as resident of the day processes. Providers could also choose to deliver the statements at a less frequent cadence for example every two months or quarterly or even to a subset of residents during this voluntary period.

We’ve developed some guidance material to help support aged care homes during this time including guidelines and a template for the statements. And these are available on our website.

Just scrolling down. Sorry. Lastly I’d like to encourage you to let us know if you are participating in the voluntary period or would like to be involved in the software pilot which Steve will talk to you about in a moment. Please use the QR codes on the screen to register your interest. So now I will hand over to Steven Marrinan to fill you in on the Monthly Care Statements software development project. Thanks Steven.

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Monthly Care Statements update’, ‘Sign up for voluntary Monthly Care Statements’, with image of QR code, ‘Sign up to the software pilot’, with image of QR code, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’]

Steven Marrinan:

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Monthly Care Statements – Liquid Interactive’, ‘Development of Digital Solutions for Monthly Care Statements’, ‘Liquid Interactive and Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘Steven Marrinan’, ‘Partner, Liquid’]

Sorry. Apologies. Just a few technical issues. Thanks Katy. It’s nice to be talking about our work on the Monthly Care Statements digital solutions pilot again. I was fortunate to be given the opportunity to present to the sector in a different forum in August and for those in the audience here today who were able to make that session I will cover a lot of the same ground, but we do have some initial findings from our engagement so far to share with you today. 

So everyone I’m Steve. I’m a partner at Liquid. We’re a digital design consultancy who have been engaged by the Department to conduct a pilot of digital solutions to reduce the administrative burden of the Monthly Care Statements. So today I’m going to give you an overview of the pilot, tell you about where we are in our journey so far, share some initial findings from our engagement with the sector to date and let you know that we still have spots left in our pilot for both aged care homes and software vendors to participate. So if you are interested in Monthly Care Statements and evolving your capability we’d love to hear from you and we’d love your participation.

So as mentioned earlier the Australian Government has committed to requiring residential aged care providers to issue individualised Monthly Care Statements as Katy mentioned. These statements detail the care provided to residents over the previous month and any changes in their health status across four key categories mentioned. Medication, appointments, wellbeing and food and nutrition.

So prior to Liquid being engaged by the Department for these digital solutions research and trial had been done in this space already. The research revealed that residents found the statements useful for both tracking the care they receive and as a reference point for future planning. And this research and trial previously recommended two key recommendations. As Katy mentioned a voluntary period was recommended to allow aged care providers time to adjust to the new requirements of preparing Monthly Care Statements and the development of a digital solution or solutions to automate the generation of these statements was recommended to reduce the administrative burden on providers. And this brings me to the digital solutions pilot.

So next year Liquid will run a trial of digital solutions for Monthly Care Statement generation and presentation in February. This pilot focuses on testing solutions to reduce the administrative burden and we’ll collect feedback from aged care homes, residents and software vendors. 

We have completed our initial research phase and we are now in the second phase of our project which is codesign. This codesign phase will assist in finalising the digital solutions and determining the approach for the trial.

What we’ve heard so far from the sector is that software vendors are seeking more clarification around the audit and record keeping requirements that will be implemented when the statements become mandatory, and aged care providers are looking for more options to deliver this information as they’re often delivering this information verbally and continuously. The example there being communication of falls often happens over the phone personally and needs to be tracked within the current system but may not currently be.

Based on this we think there is a really good opportunity for collaboration through this pilot to meet each of these needs. If software vendors are seeking more clarification around requirements this pilot is a great way to find out more. And aged care providers can obviously work with software vendors and Liquid to see more options about what they can do to build capability.

So we’ve still got spots left in our pilot. The message for aged care homes in the audience, we can assist you with implementing solutions to automate the creation of Monthly Care Statements. And for software vendors we’d love your input in making the standards and guidelines of statements feasible and achievable. So I’m here to say if you haven’t expressed an interest and still want to participate please fill out our EOI form. Details on how to do that are on the next slide. And if you have expressed an interest previously and decided not to participate there is still time. If you want to change your mind please reach out to us again. And thirdly if you have expressed an interest and want to participate and for whatever reason we couldn’t get in touch with you please email us again at mcs@liquidinteractive.com.au. You may not be able to complete the form again due to the technology we use to collect these expressions of interest.

So how can you participate? As you can see on screen scan the QR code and complete the short EOI form. After that we’ll be in touch about how you can contribute to the codesign phase and what you can do to prepare for trial next year. Or if you have any questions and would like to speak to us directly please email us at mcs@liquidinteractive.com.au. Cool. Thank you.

Fay Flevaras:

Thanks. Thanks both. Thank you Steven and Katy. Appreciate the update. As you’ve just heard there’s still scope for aged care homes and their software providers to participate in the pilot. If you didn’t catch the nomination link the team will put it in the chat. Okay. So now it’s time to talk about our upcoming aged care reforms sector pulse survey. Now I understand Stevie you’re jumping in at the last minute for this. Thank you very much for joining us and we’re glad you could be here with us. So over to you.

Stevie George:

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Pulse Survey’, ‘Stevie George’, ‘Director’, ‘People Communication and Parliamentary Division’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’]

Thank you. Well thank you and also thank you for the invitation as well. So I am Stevie. I am the Director of the Change Management Office and it is really lovely to be invited back. I was here earlier this year in June but for those of you who may not know me my team is responsible for the change really from the people and business perspective. So we do support the broader aged care reforms by working with individual policy and project areas to design and develop as well as deliver those activities that support the transition through the change including what this means for you.

So what I’m here to do today is I would really love to encourage you all to participate. We do have an upcoming sector pulse survey and we’re planning on running this from the 25th of November. So normally we do run this for between two to three weeks and so that will be coming out and you’ll be able to access this through the Engagement Hub. And the Engagement Hub, you’ll notice that there is a link there.

So we are also hoping that your responses do help to provide us with a greater understanding of your and the broader sector awareness, preparedness and adoption of the aged care reforms. And the survey will be released across various channels and we have provided the QR code which I was just referring to to the Engagement Hub which is where you’ll be able to find the survey when it goes live.

So just to provide a little bit of background our sector pulse surveys are administered by us here in the Department of Health and Aged Care and specifically within my team which is the Change Management Office. They’re really designed to measure the sector sentiment, adoption, readiness and confidence across the reforms. We do conduct these sector pulse surveys twice a year and this one is actually our fifth survey. And this has been a little bit of a collaboration between a couple of different business areas, both my team as well as our Systems, Strategy and Network Support Branch who are responsible for the state and territory offices.

So one of the things we noticed in our most recent pulse survey that we ran in June – and that was pulse survey number four – was that we only really received 0.3% of respondents who were identified as technology enablers. It wasn’t an increase on the previous result but the previous result was still only around that 0.2%. So it was a pretty marginal increase with that. What we would like for you to do, we would really hope to increase this participation as we do know that there are quite a number of technology enabled projects that have been included in this survey. And these include the Business to Government, GPMS which we were just discussing through the provider gateway, My Health Record through My Aged Care, as well as the integrated assessment tool. And what we would really like to hear from you is about what you need from the Department to help you manage the reforms.

So what we have heard in the past is that you’ve consistently told us, or the broader sector has consistently told us that there is a lot of work to do and there’s a little bit of feeling overwhelmed by the reforms. So this sentiment did remain unchanged from our previous surveys. And we did hear that some of the barriers to those implementation and adoption were really around that lack of time to implement the reforms, the short implementation timeframes which we believe are still impacting the sector’s ability to plan or mobilise the resources in the time required, workforce shortages and incumbent care professionals managing the administration rather than necessarily providing the care, access to funding and grants, and timely and targeted information that’s relevant to your organisation and also to these changes.

We have heard also what supports you need or what things you find are most useful and are working well for you. And we are continuing to provide these and you’ll hear that very much in this. And that includes things like webinars, the online step by step guides, as well as fact sheets. We are also working directly with the policy and project areas across the reform so we will be feeding them your responses and building those responses back into the change activities and timelines. We’ll also be establishing an approach to monitoring these activities and using this survey as well as other methods to measure the effectiveness of these change readiness activities.

So yet again I’m just really hoping that you can participate in this survey because all of the information that we gather from this really does help us structure those change activities as we move forward. And just a little bit of a reminder that that is opening on the 25th of November. Thank you very much and thank you for the opportunity today. Thanks Fay.

Fay Flevaras:

Thank you. And if I’m not mistaken we have heard through the pulse surveys that people do like the Tech Talks and the sector partner community so that’s nice to hear. And if there’s any other suggestions that you guys want to make that’s the pulse survey, that’s where you can get your feedback in.

So as we mentioned earlier today we’re on our 20th Tech Talk. I’ll just ask to move to the next slide folks unless that’s me. Thank you.

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘2024 achievements’, ‘Fay Flevaras’, ‘Acting Chief Digital Information Officer’, ‘Corporate Operations Group’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘Janine Bennett’, ‘Assistant Secretary’, ‘Digital Business and Sector Engagement’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’]

And it’s our final one for the year and so we thought it might be nice to round it out by looking at some of the achievements that we’ve all done together. It’s timely for us to have a bit of a pause and reflect on the progress and celebrate a little bit of the successes that we’ve delivered all together. So before we move into some Q&A I wanted to briefly share with you the origin story for this forum. And I wanted to especially thank my wingman to these Tech Talks, my Engagement Lead, which is Janine, who’s been your favourite moderator in all of this. Hey Janine. There you are. So Janine I think I’m safe to say that you’ve been a big part of the guiding force behind this with me in the Tech Talks and the sector partner group and also the other engagement channels where we do guest speaker series. And from the outset I think we’ve made engagement a core pillar of our transformation program and how we do things. And you and your team who’ve helped me and the broader Department deliver on that commitment, I just want to do a big shoutout to you guys and say thank you very much. I’m putting you on the spot now. So I’m not sure if she was ready for this folks. But what’s your take on how engagement and how Tech Talk particularly fits our vision together and how we work with the sector?

Janine Bennett:

Well you know I’m always ready to talk engagement so I’m happy with that. And just to say all of these channels that we use, it takes a village to do it. We have lots of technical SMEs who lean in and help us present information. We’re talking about their hard work. So thank you to them for trusting us with the work and letting us sort of showcase all that they do.

But Fay when I think about how we kind of started out, we started with a challenge from you. And you basically came to me and said we have to make sure that this digital transformation keeps the sector front of mind in everything we do. And so that was the broad vision and scope that I had at that time, just myself, and that’s grown into a big group of people who help me deliver these things. So we started out by setting some really - - - 

Fay Flevaras:

Janine I think your reaction might have been that.

Janine Bennett:

There was a time when I had that reaction. I’m about to tell you about it. But we started out by setting some really basic core principles about how we wanted to engage with the sector. We knew that we wanted to talk about what we were doing but we knew we also wanted to listen. So we didn’t want to work in isolation. We wanted to build partnerships, to join forces with the other creative, smart, motivated people who in and outside of Government were trying to make a difference for the aged care digital ecosystem. We knew that we wanted to be transparent, to prioritise openness over perfection. And that was scary to do at times. But we wanted to be really upfront about where we were at, and when we couldn’t share something for good reasons, because we’re Government and sometimes we have to take care with what we talk about, we wanted to be really upfront that we weren’t in a position to share.

It was really important to us that we engaged regularly and reliably. So regardless of what happened with the program, if we hit a deadline, if we missed a deadline, if we were able to share legislative intent or we weren’t, we wanted to keep the conversation going. And we decided really quickly that we wouldn’t shy away from tough conversations or tough questions and that we would embrace as much robust and lively discussion as we could because we feel like that’s where the gold is, that’s where we’re going to all learn the most.

So our plan was to release a suite of simple channels that would help us engage. So the Tech Talk is one of those channels. We kicked off the Tech Talk in April 2022 if you can believe that. I had less grey hairs back then.

Fay Flevaras:

You and I both. 

Janine Bennett:

We had about 400 people turn up to our first Tech Talk which was a bit of a shock to me at the time. I thought if we got 30 I’d be pretty happy. And I don’t know if you remember Fay but I was actually on rec leave that week of the first Tech Talk but I refused to miss it so I actually dialled in from the hotel room in Tasmania so that I could host the event. Technology held up.

Fay Flevaras:

There’s dedication.

Janine Bennett:

It was totally worth attending. It was a great event and I was so happy to be involved in it. But I don’t know if you remember – speaking of shocked faces – at I think it was that Tech Talk or it might have been the second one. I’m pretty sure it was the first one. In our very first Q&A you asked one of the attendees to be brought to stage for the Q&A panel. And in the background we hadn’t tested that. We didn’t know how to do it. In the background we’re all freaking out thinking oh my goodness. How do you bring someone to stage? So we did it on the fly. I’m not going to say we didn’t panic but we figured it out. That was how our live Q&A was born. So it’s been a Tech Talk standard ever since. I think it’s one of the standout elements of the Tech Talk series is that great discussion we get between the panel and our attendees. So thank you for that I guess. It came to be a good addition to the suite.

Okay. So the other foundational channels that we have. You’ve talked about it before. We talk about them a lot in our Tech Talk sessions. Our sector partner group. So this was an invitation that we put out to the sector in April 2022 and we formed a group of about 30 volunteers in May 2022. These are our sector volunteers who meet with us each fortnight to cocreate, codesign, co‑deliver our digital solutions. It’s quite an intimate group. It’s a very dedicated group and a very giving group of their knowledge and their expertise and their opinions. At last count – that was at the end of October – we had 225 members in that group. So not that I’m great at math but that’s a 580% increase on the just over 30 members that we started with. We see that as hugely representative of how invested the sector is in this aged care transformation.

And then we also have our guest speaker series which you talked about earlier in today’s Tech Talk. This is where anyone from the sector can invite us to come and speak about aspects of the digital transformation that are of particular interest to them. So we present at all types of events, small NGO meetings, international conferences, everything in between. And all that happens under our guest speaker series. If you’d like us to come and talk to your group just send us an email and we can get that on the list. This year we’ve done over 50 events as part of that guest speaker series.

And then lastly everything we do we try to make available publicly so that it’s searchable online. So we have lots of information up on the Department’s website. We use other popular channels like YouTube and LinkedIn. We hope to use a little bit more on LinkedIn next year so stay tuned for that. But that’s really about making everything that we talk about visible and easy to access and available to all.

So I suppose in summary I would say for us it’s about creating the spaces where we get to talk to people often and we get to have those conversations that will drive better solutions. You as our sponsor give us permission to showcase the incredible work of the delivery teams but you always encourage us not just to focus on the technology but to create ways to make sure that our digital solutions are working for people in the real world. So in that spirit we have pulled together a bit of a 2024 achievements video that we’d like to share with you and our Tech Talkers today. 

But before we do that we’ll do a quick group exercise. So this is only our second meeting using Teams so this is a little bit of an experiment with the Teams functionality so we’ll see how it goes. Everybody cross their fingers. As an engagement team the challenge for us is always what information can we deliver that’s going to be most useful for our very broad audience and how do we make best use of the time you invest in us. So to help us figure out our plan for 2025 we’re going to do a bit of a word cloud game. So I’ll get the team to lodge the word cloud. If you don’t see the poll on your screen you can click the ‘Polls’ button. It’s in the top menu and you can open it from there. And the question is what do you want to see in Tech Talk in 2025? Just add anything you want to see. For some of you it might be details about Support at Home or NACA or the new Aged Care Act I should say. For others it might be AI or more time for Q&A. Whatever it is you want to hear about drop it in here. So I can see we’ve got a healthy number of responses there.

This will be really helpful in planning our agenda for next year.

Fay Flevaras:

Amazing there Janine. I can see definitely Support at Home is front and centre. That’s very understandable given the focus for 1st of July next year. I think people are going home services, there’s a bit of digital systems in there, home care. What else have we got?

Janine Bennett:

AI and innovation. That’s a good one. Integration is another one coming up. Reporting.

Fay Flevaras:

Lovely. Just the changes in general. I get that. People are saying what’s changing, so we’re definitely going to be making that front of mind. Services Australia. Yes. We’re definitely partnering with them. So the roadmap we shared today actually is being discussed with them in consultation. They have promised to come early next year and present at Tech Talk and also to the sector partner community on some of their work. So that’s a great one.

Janine Bennett:

And we’ll try and get a little bit more into the Services Australia channels as well. So there’s a couple of forums that we’ve presented at this year but we’ll work on broadening that out next year as well. Great.

Fay Flevaras:

And while everyone’s doing this – and we’ll put the results in – I do want to take the opportunity to thank everyone for connecting with us and providing their valuable time to provide us feedback. The sector partner community, they’re so engaged. You guys are really providing insight into how things work or don’t work and so we really appreciate that. So maybe we move to our bit of an end of year celebration on what we all accomplished together. Digital transformations are really difficult and we do need to stop. It’s been about three and a half years that we’ve been on the reform and we do need to stop and take stock of what we’re achieving to keep re-energising ourselves for the next ways of change. So over to you guys to press the play button and play back some of our achievements.

[START VIDEO PLAYBACK]

§(Music Playing)§

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘Digital Transformation for Aged Care: 2024 Achievements’, ‘Digital Transformation and Delivery Division’]

Janine Bennett:

Hello. At the Department of Health and Aged Care we’re delivering real world digital solutions to enable aged care reform, introducing better technology to improve the experience of Australians navigating the aged care system, releasing digital capabilities that are better connected, human‑centred and modern. In 2024 we’ve delivered over 30 project outcomes across nine major releases bringing enhanced features and new tools to the aged care digital ecosystem. We’re continuously enhancing My Aged Care, your gateway to the Australian Government funded aged care services.

We’ve added finance and operational information for residential and home care providers to the Find a Provider tool. We’re improving the processing of residential care notifications from Services Australia to include respite care recipients. We’ve updated system rules for palliative entry to streamline the palliative care classification process. We’re laying the groundwork for key initiatives, the ‘Assign permanent residential aged care places to people’ initiative which allocates residential aged care places directly to older Australians rather than providers, the single assessment system, essential for the success of the new Aged Care Act and Support at Home in 2025, and for the My Aged Care Hospital Portal expanding access to public and private hospitals to improve information sharing between hospital staff and aged care assessors.

To support AN-ACC assessors, residential service providers and Departmental staff we’ve enhanced referral management and streamlined the reissuing of referrals. We also introduced the Integrated Assessment Tool, IAT for short, for aged care assessments offering a consistent, evidence-based experience. This tool will reduce the need for reassessment with an improved triage function that captures and retains better data throughout registration, screening and assessment. The Government Provider Management System, GPMS, is our cloud based provider portal offering easy access to essential information and tools for regulatory reporting and compliance. This year we’ve launched new functionality to support and enhance Quarterly Financial Reporting, 24/7 registered nursing, care minutes, star ratings, the Stakeholder and Emergency Management System and much more.

Electronic signatures are now enabled for the Provider Operations Form. The new Manage Your Organisation tile allows aged care providers to submit digital forms to the Department and the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, simplifying organisation and personal information maintenance and regulatory reporting. As of November 2024 this tile has supported over 330 provider organisations and streamlined the processing of over 320 forms to the Commission.

With exciting developments in our own platforms we’ve also started to talk with other Government partners to see if we can leverage our investment for use across the care economy. For software vendors Business to Government or B2G’s catalogue of application APIs will streamline information exchange between provider and Government systems. In 2024 we launched four APIs to automate the exchange of data for authentication and registration, provider management, quality indicators and nurses 24/7. Using the B2G developer portal vendors can start their software conformance journey and start testing their own software against the Department’s APIs. 

We’ve got a big job ahead in digital transformation and we know we can’t do it alone. In 2024 we again prioritised connection and collaboration with the sector. We held six Digital Transformation Tech Talk webinars featuring 14 diverse speakers discussing a variety of topics from across our Department, across Government and from the sector. This year we’ve seen an average of 700 registrations per event and fielded over 200 questions from our very enthusiastic audiences, earning a satisfaction rating of 92%.

Our digital transformation sector partners group held 15 meetings this year celebrating our 50th meeting in October.

Fay Flevaras:

Today marks a magnificent milestone, significant in our journey together.

Janine Bennett:

We showcased 19 projects and 13 targeted codesign initiatives to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing across our community. Membership has nearly doubled from 119 members in 2023 to our current 225 members representing 151 unique organisations across the sector. We’re immensely grateful to our group for their ongoing commitment to co-create, co-design and co‑deliver this sector wide digital transformation. We literally couldn’t do it without them. 

Imtiaz Bhayat
Chief Information Officer, Regis Aged Care
Sector Partner

I haven’t seen an opportunity like this in the past where providers have been asked the question about what their needs are and then subsequent the building has delivered to some of those needs.

Jo Hammersley
Director, Digital Transformation and Delivery Division
Sector Partner

We’ve actually got 739 out of 740 residential organisations have got at least one enabled user using the platform.

Wayne Stoddard
General Manager, Southern Cross Care
Sector Partner

I was involved in giving feedback on the design of the GPMS system. We were actually testing the system before it went live and identifying issues and working with the Department of Health on those issues before it was put live out to all the providers.

Janine Bennett:

This year our guest speaker series received over 130 invitations to speak and participated in more than 52 national and international events. We held targeted deep dive sessions on our new digital solutions and launched our aged care digital maturity research workshops with key sector groups. These interviews help us understand the digital maturity challenges in the sector, gathering the insights and evidence to support the sector’s digital growth.

We’re committed to sharing our story with the aged care community, industry and with Government, exploring themes like technology, innovation, leadership and more. 2024 has been another big year. At the Department of Health and Aged Care we’re continuing to deliver real world solutions to enable aged care reform, understanding that our work directly supports older Australians and those working hard to support them to live their best lives for their whole lives.

§(Music Playing)§

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘For more information contact:’, ‘DTDDEngagementOffice@Health.gov.au’, ‘Produced by: Digital Business & Sector Engagement Branch (DBSE)’, ‘Digital Transformation and Delivery Division’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’]

[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]

Fay Flevaras:

Well there you have it folks. That was the year in review for 2024. Hopefully you guys should be all very proud of yourselves. We couldn’t have done it without you in the sector. And there has been a lot of change and I think we did it all very well together. So a big shoutout to everyone, to my team, Janine and the team in the Department but also out there in the sector. You guys have done an amazing job so thank you very much.

So of course we come to that time now where we move to the Q&A. And I’ve noticed there’s a few questions in the list. And Janine I think some of our presenters back to the panel. We’ve got a few subject matter experts in the wings just in case we need them as well. So with all of that in place I’m going to throw to you Janine I think and you’re going to moderate some of the questions for us. Is that right?

Janine Bennett:

Yep. That sounds great. So welcome back to our panel today. So in addition to Fay we have Katy, Steven and Amanda joining us. And we’ve had a good number of questions so we’ll jump right into it. I might just start by giving a couple of heads up. Just bear with me one sec. My text just dropped off. So if we can start by giving a stage warning to Dustin Pham and Steven Stenton. So if you guys can go ahead and join for me. And while we’re waiting on setting those guys up in the background we’ll start with an anonymous question. And this one is one of our most popular questions. It’s had a number of votes up.

Q:        So when will Support at Home technical specifications, requirements, expectations be available for providers and vendors to be worked on to update the software to support the new funding model?

I’ve sort of mashed that a little bit but I think we’ve got the gist. Fay I might send that one to you. 

Fay Flevaras:

Sure. Look as soon as we have it we’ll be sharing. As you saw today for the first time we did share what the roadmap looked like for next year for the February and the June releases. We will start to then using those packages of functionality start sharing that in our sector partner community I think next Friday to be honest. So it’s in that sector partner community where the detail happens first and then as we summarise it up we bring it back to Tech Talk as well. So really we’ve already started. We’ve already shared what the service categories look like. We’ve shared the roadmap and we will continue to share more detail. If there’s any particular piece that you need sooner rather than later please provide that in the feedback or in a question and we can take that offline and make sure we’re prioritising what information you guys need first. But hopefully we’ve already started. There’s going to be a lot of conversation and communication over the next six months.

Janine Bennett:

Great. Thanks very much Fay. And we’re just still waiting on bringing Dustin to stage. So I will just answer another anonymous question. So someone asked:

Q:        Will this be recorded?

And the answer is yes. We record all of our Tech Talk webinars. They are available on the Departmental website and they’re also available on YouTube. So feel free to check it out later and share with your friends. How are we going with Dustin?

Speaker:

It looks like we’ve lost Dustin from the session Janine. Perhaps you could do the honours for us.

Janine Bennett:

Yep. No worries. Thank you very much Matt. Okay. So this one’s in relation to GPMS integration.

Q:        Is that integrating GPMS with providers’ CMS?

I’m wondering if that gives our tech experts enough information. Amanda do you want to have a crack at that one?

Amanda Smith:

I’m not sure I have enough information. It sounds a little bit like a B2G specific question in terms of integration. Could we get a big more info?

Fay Flevaras:

I think you’re right Amanda. So the only way you can integrate into GPMS is through the open APIs. You’re so right. And so those APIs are the ones that we deployed on our Business to Government gateway. So I think if I read the question correctly – and it might be a different one – but it was about instead of using the Excel spreadsheet to upload you can actually then use the API instead. That would require either yourself, you have your own IT shop, or your software provider connecting to the developer portal and going through the conformance process. And that way when you update your systems you can then press a button – and I’m over simplifying folks but press the button to say ‘Report to Government’ and you can automatically send that information via a system to system connection. 

So we’ve started that journey with B2G APIs. As we spoke about earlier there’s four of them. We are prioritising another set for next year, more around the support at home parts to help with automating that part of the aged care ecosystem. So hopefully that helps folks. What’s next?

Janine Bennett:

Great. Okay. So we have a question from Steven but we haven’t been able to locate him. I’m not sure if some of us are having technical issues in the background. So I’ll go ahead and ask the Steven question as well.

Q:        As we prepare the service list for Support at Home will we be provided standard terminology bindings for each service type, ie national standard, SNOMED codes or equivalent? If so will these be issued with the care services model or the Support at Home services list on the roadmap?

Fay Flevaras:

That might be one we might need to take on notice I think. Definitely we’ll be putting out care services information, the care service model. Specifically what you’re asking for there folks, we’ll take it back, with the SNOMED data and so forth, and we’ll bring it back to you guys. So didn’t quite answer that question but we’ll have to take that one away and come back.

Janine Bennett:

No worries. Can we ask Elaine Dunn to raise her hand. We’re just having some technical problems identifying people in the background who are in the room. So Elaine if you can hear us if you don’t mind raising your hand we’ll come to you next. And Peter Cooper who has also raised a question if you can raise your hand as well that will help our team identify you in the background and we’ll be able to bring you to stage. In the meantime GPMS integration.

Q:        Does that mean we will be able to submit our reports reasonably smoothly from our SQL server database systems to GPMS without having to use the Excel middle step? 

They would rather not use the Excel middle step. That makes sense.

Fay Flevaras:

And that’s that open APIs piece. So in that particular – and I can’t remember exactly which one. It might be quality indicators. There’s three ways of providing your quality indicators to us. The first one you can go into GPMS and use the screens. The second one is you can use the Excel spreadsheet to upload. And the third one is go and connect with your software using the API on B2G. It’s one of those three.

Janine Bennett:

Okay. Great. Thanks for that. Okay. I think we’re still having trouble queuing. 

Fay Flevaras:

I notice one there around care statements. Why don’t we give one to Katy and Steven.

Janine Bennett:

We’ve got a couple about the care statements.

Q:        Is it expected that monthly care statements will become mandatory for community care?

Katy Roberts:

Thanks Janine. And apologies. I probably didn’t make that clear enough in my slides that the monthly care statements is a requirement – well we’re still involuntary but it is for residential aged care not home care. And we know that in home care there are monthly statements which are financial statements. So that’s a sort of different model which is about sort of care recipients being able to reconcile where their package has been spent. Whereas the care statements for residential care is really about the care that’s been delivered over the previous month with the idea of sort of improving communication and transparency about what’s happened in the last month.

Janine Bennett:

Great. So we answered a couple of questions there in one so that was useful. Thank you very much Katy. There’s also a question around monthly statements.

Q:        Will this apply to home care providers current model, CHSP, HCP, STRC?

Katy Roberts:

So no. These monthly care statements are targeted specifically to residential care.

Janine Bennett:

Great. All right. A question about My Aged Care Find a Provider website. We’ve got an anonymous person wondering if the website will become simpler and more user friendly, fewer mouse clicks to open a provider.

What do you think Fay? That might be a you one.

Fay Flevaras:

Maybe. But I thought I’d check in with Katy first if she knew anything, otherwise - - -

Janine Bennett:

We’ve lost your audio.

Fay Flevaras:

How about that? Trying again.

Janine Bennett:

That’s better.

Fay Flevaras:

Excellent. Thank you. Sometimes the speaker decides to not connect. On that one I’d really like to get some feedback on that one. If the person who’s put the question up is prepared to actually show us the way they do it and what they think they should be doing. This is that codesign aspect of something’s been created but you feel maybe there’s too many clicks to get to the right provider. So I would really love for you guys to drop us an email with some of that feedback. Send it to our DT Engagement Office. I’ve just got to get the right email address there folks. 

Janine Bennett:

We’ll drop it in the chat.

Fay Flevaras:

And please provide some feedback to us. Because there will be quite a lot of work that we’re redesigning now for the 1st of July and so we would love to hear that. And we can look at it from a user experience perspective to say is there a better       UX that we can do. Thank you.

Janine Bennett:

Great. We’re still having trouble queuing people so I’m afraid you’re stuck with me. I shouldn’t have mentioned it earlier about the first Tech Talk because I feel like I’ve mozzed us now. Okay. So this question is from Elaine Dunn.

Q:        Will the results of the digital maturity survey be released to PHNs?

Fay Flevaras:

We’ll make the results pretty transparent to everyone. So we’ll start off by doing all of the workshops and presenting it back to the sector partner community who participated in that. Then we will be packaging up the results and sharing it on Tech Talk. If you as PHNs want a specific voice in it again please reach out and become part of the workshop participants. We would love to see and hear your perspective. Absolutely.

Janine Bennett:

Thanks very much. And we can drop a link and an email into the chat as well for people that are interested in following up on that study. Just on that one too Fay while we’re talking about it somebody did mention in the chat that the Aged Care IITC, so the Tech Council had done some digital maturity research. Are you able to talk a little bit about how this aligns to that?

Fay Flevaras:

Yeah. So we’re aware that there’s been a couple of digital maturity assessments. There’s that one there which is from the – I keep getting the acronym wrong, but the ACIITC group. They’ve done one in ’22 and ’23 that we’re aware of and we do have a copy of. I do know that ADHA have also done one. It was either early this year or late last year. I guess what we’ve done here which is a little bit different – and we will try and use that data where we can. Some surveys, they have not asked permission to be able to use the data again. So sometimes when you collect data you can only use it for the purpose that you’ve collected it for unless you’ve given consent for it to be reused again. So to that effect we will be asking for permission to reuse again in this survey and we will be making it a digital framework or methodology that we’ve shared out with many and who have contributed to it so that it becomes a consistent digital methodology and assessment framework that we can reuse again. So yes. Reusing where we can because we have checked what we can and can’t reuse and then we will be making it available to all.

Janine Bennett:

Great. Thanks very much. Okay. This is a question from Peter Cooper. And I think it’s probably one for Amanda.

Q:        We have lots of incorrect information on the GPMS Manage Your Organisation tile for key personnel. We have submitted forms to ACQSC, so the Commission notifications office up to five months ago but they have not been actioned.

So I know this isn’t specifically about your tool Amanda but what would suggest we do in this scenario?

Amanda Smith:

Yeah. Look it is probably a bit more of a business specific question but I’m happy to give it a go. So when we first launched the portal we were aware that the Commission had a bit of a backlog of updates to make in the system. So when we did send out the launch comms I think it did sort of note that it would take a few months for those changes to be actually processed and to show up in the self service portal. But certainly you can either wait for that or you’re more than welcome to jump in there and make updates yourself. So there is another similar question about end dating key personnel. And you can certainly go in there and just update your information if that’s a bit quicker or give us the information about your form and we can follow up on your behalf.

Fay Flevaras:

But isn’t that actually the benefit Amanda why we did the self-service, so you don’t have to fill a manual form or don’t have to ring up and - - -

Amanda Smith:

I didn’t want to be presumptuous for the business call Fay because obviously if the information’s been sent and we’re asking it to be redone I didn’t want to make that call.

Fay Flevaras:

And there might be some scenarios where it can’t be redone. So let’s be honest folks. I think not all the self-service use cases are 100% covered. But where you jump in and you can update it for yourself now going forward, please do so. However if you feel that you can’t and you have submitted it before yes please reach out to the Helpdesk and we’ll follow that up for you. But I feel like it was a miss if we didn’t call out the benefit of self-serve, that you get to do it in real time and you see it straight away. Excellent.

Janine Bennett:

Great. Okay. Next question. Thanks for that one. So this is a question about the quality indicator terminology.

Q:        Is it changing?

Do we know that yet?

Fay Flevaras:

I think there were some changes that I did talk about at the beginning and it is changes I think to line up with some of the new legislative changes. Let me just double check. Yes. We’re updating terminology in GPMS and B2G to reflect changes in terminology for the quality indicators. The actual detail I don’t have at hand but we’ll take an action on that and we can definitely put more of that out there as it comes to hand.

Janine Bennett:

Great. Thank you. There’s a question about the tech conversation being all about residential care, however some aged care providers are providing for home clients.

Q:        How will all this tech planning and data be of use or guidance to the home sector? Also any technology that is for at home providers will need to be assessed for the participants that would be the users or receivers of such data and many of those user clients may not be tech savvy.

So two part question there. First part, a lot of it sounds like it’s for residential care. What do we have to say about home care?

Fay Flevaras:

I think because we’ve focused a lot on residential care in the last sort of 12 to 24 months, but if you look at where we’re going in the next 12 to 24 months it’s all about in home care. So watch this space. You will see a lot more on that. I think the key to understand is underlying foundational platforms will remain consistent. So aged care gateway, integrated assessment portals and tools, GPMS and B2G. But now the functionality that we’re going to be enhancing on it will be more in home care. Different things will happen at different times especially around when policy hits. So Katy for example the care statements, that may not be something that’s today in in home care. It’s very focused on residential. Who knows in the future if that changes with Support at Home being the focus. Not putting anything out there folks. I’m just saying as the policy looks towards more support in the home you will hear more of the digital and the tech following that as well. So hopefully that helps to answer some of your questions or the question around that.

The second part of it which was the digital part.

Janine Bennett:

Tech savvy.

Fay Flevaras:

Yeah. And so there is an element of a baseline introduction on how to leverage the tools. I know the Department has learning material out there. Part of the digital maturity assessment is talking about how ready the workforce is for that and then by using that information we can then put new initiatives in place on how to help uplift the community. So we do recognise that there is a little bit of a gap around are people digitally ready to adopt some of the new tools and we have to work out how to get us all there. So hopefully that answers the question. 

Janine Bennett:

Thank you. We have invited Marina Muttukumaru to stage. Hi Marina. We’re calling in our phone a friend because we have a question that’s specifically about B2G and APIs. So the question is:

 Q:       What APIs are being refactored? Why are they breaking changes? 

Marina Muttukumaru:

So we are looking to refactor each of the APIs that we’ve got out there at the moment to align with the changes that are coming through GPMS. Are they breaking changes? No. So it will be a transition process that will align with the changes as they come through GPMS and provide any of the people who are currently looking and developing against the current APIs to adopt them with sufficient time available. I hope that made sense.

Janine Bennett:

Made sense to me. Yep. Sounds good. Thanks very much Marina. Appreciate you dropping in.

Marina Muttukumaru:

My pleasure.

Janine Bennett:

Feel free to hang around if you’d like to.

Marina Muttukumaru:

I can hang around if there’s any other questions.

Janine Bennett:

We can’t bring anybody else to stage.

Marin  a Muttukumaru:

Happy to hang around for any other B2G questions that might come through.

Janine Bennett:

Awesome.

Marina Muttukumaru:

I do know that Fay got all of the answers. She was spot on before.

Fay Flevaras:

Did I get them right Marina? Did you want to add anything else?

Marina Muttukumaru:

No. So I think you were right on track with all of that. So thanks.

Janine Bennett:

Great. Okay. Change of pace. We’re going to go to monthly care statements. 

Q:        Monthly care statements look like an administrative regular activity. What’s in it for the healthcare receivers? How much would such projects improve the healthcare and wellbeing of the aged care resident healthcare receivers?

So we’ll put this one to Katy or Steven.

Katy Roberts:

Thanks Janine. I’ll take that one. Look I mean I think there’s a ring of truth in that around what the monthly care statements are really trying to do is perhaps put some consistency out there around communications that we want providers to have with residents. And we know that a lot of providers are already doing this but essentially what we’re doing is I guess providing a bit of a baseline around what residents should be able to expect. I think in terms of what’s the benefit to a healthcare receiver there’s a written statement which captures some core indicators of their health and wellbeing which can be used to spur conversations with the provider and also to communicate with their family as well, to open up a dialogue with the family. But I’d probably also say that if indeed a resident doesn’t find that the statements are adding anything because they’re finding that their provider’s doing a fantastic job of communicating already or they’re just not interested then they can choose to opt out from those statements as well. So there’s no obligation that a resident would have to receive them. So I think we’re trying to make it a useful add on to the communication processes but there’s no element of compulsion that a resident would have to receive it if they didn’t find it useful. 

Janine Bennett:

Okay. Great. Well I think we’ve basically hit time. So we have a number of questions still outstanding. As always we’ll collate those. We’ll send them back to the relevant SMEs and we’ll come back to the audience with all of the really popular questions and answers to those. Thank you to our panel. Thanks Amanda, thanks Katy, thanks Steven, thanks Marina for dropping in. That was great. And we’ll get the slide deck back up if we could please folks.

So that’s it for us for 2024. This is the conclusion of our Tech Talk number 20. So happy 20th birthday everybody. Thank you for joining us today. We really appreciate your patronage not just today but right throughout the year. Please take a moment to take our quick survey. It helps us make sure that we’re giving you useful and relevant updates. The QR code is on the screen now and that will give you quick access to the survey.

As we’ve mentioned the recording of today’s webinar will be available on the Departmental website in the next few weeks. We’ll let you know when that’s available. In the meantime you can access all of our previous Tech Talks using the QR code on screen online. Feel free to share those with your colleagues, co-workers, and to rewatch them yourselves. Until then that’s goodbye from me for 2024. And over to Fay to take us out.

Fay we don’t have your sound.

Fay Flevaras:

What about now? Am I back? 

Janine Bennett:

Yep. We’ve got you.

Fay Flevaras:

Excellent. So thanks Janine and thanks everyone for joining us. We’ll be back in 2025 for another big year. And so keep an eye on our website and in your inbox for the first Tech Talk in February next year. Any agenda items or topics you’d like to see please drop us a line. And thanks for your interest and contributions in 2024. It’s an open forum. We love the diversity of views and opinions we see at Tech Talks. We look forward to welcoming you back next year. And if you know others with an interest in these kinds of topics please pass the invite along to them. 2025 will be the biggest year yet we’ve got coming. So I hope you have an opportunity to get some downtime with family and friends and enjoy the holiday period and take pause between now and then and just get some respite and care for yourselves.

For now that’s it from us and until next year thanks for your company and goodbye.

[Closing visual of slide with text saying ‘Thankyou!’, ‘health.gov.au/tech-talk-webinars’, with image of QR code, ‘Tech Talk post-event survey’, with image of QR code’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘DTDDEngagementOffice@health.gov.au’]

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