Digital Transformation Tech Talk – 19 February 2025

Tech Talk 

Digital Transformation for the Aged Care Sector 

Wednesday, 19 February 2025 

 

 
Presented by: 

 

moderator: 

 

Janine Bennett 

Assistant Secretary, Digital Business and Sector Engagement Branch, Digital Transformation and Delivery Division, Department of Health and Aged Care  

 

Speakers: 
 

Fay Flevaras 
Chief Digital Information Officer, Digital Services, Corporate Operations Group, Department of Health and Aged Care 

Marguerite Gandini 
IT Project Director, Aged Care Funding Reform & Systems Branch, Department of Health and Aged Care 

Andrew Dome 
Chief Digital Information Officer, Uniting Care 

Daron Chambers 
Services Australia 

Catherine Veitch 
Services Australia 

 

 

 

[Opening visual of slide with text saying ‘Tech Talk’, ‘Digital transformation for the aged care sector webinar series’, ‘Digital Services’, ‘Within Corporate Operations Group’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘Tech Talk #21’, ‘19 February 2025’] 

[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: 

Hello everyone. Welcome back to our first Tech Talk for 2025. As always we’re here to talk about digital transformation for the aged care sector. My name is Janine Bennett. I’m the Assistant Secretary and Engagement Lead for the Department’s Digital Transformation Program as well as your moderator for today’s webinar. 

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Welcome’, ‘Connect by phone’, ‘Dial-in 02 8318 0010 PIN 8633 07152#’, ‘Session is recorded’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’] 

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

Some quick housekeeping before we start. As always if you run into any connection issues during your time with us today we have dial-in details that are on the slide here and also in your meeting invite. So go ahead and use those if you run into any technical troubles. Today’s session will also be recorded and the video will be shared on our Departmental website in the coming weeks. So if you or your colleagues would like to watch it again you can refer back to it there. 

The purpose of these webinars is both informative and to have a two-way conversation which is why we do our best to leave plenty of time at the end for questions and discussion. If you have a question please share it by opening up the Q&A tab at the top navigation bar on your Teams window. You can type in your question and so when we’re ready to start the Q&A they’ll be there ready and waiting for us to go to. If you’d like to ask your question live on camera we’d love you to join us on the Tech Talk stage. To do that please just make sure that your name is used when you type your question rather than using anonymous. And then when the time comes I’ll ask you to raise your hand in Teams so we can find you in the virtual room and bring you up to stage. From there we’ll make sure your video and audio is on and then you can go ahead and have your conversation with the panel. If you prefer not to appear on camera I’ll ask your question on your behalf. Those ones just post anonymously or write ‘No stage’ in your question and we’ll go ahead and present those questions for you. 

Keeping in mind that our focus here at Tech Talk is on our technology and delivery work we’ll answer all the questions that we can on the spot and where we need to we’ll take questions offline. I’d also like to quickly welcome any media representatives who are attending today. We appreciate your ongoing interest in our important work and in the aged care sector more broadly. 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 assist you with these formal requests. But we appreciate you coming along and staying in touch with the digital transformation work. 

And now onto our agenda. So first up is Fay Flevaras with an update on the digital delivery roadmap and some other short but important updates. Next we have a guest presenter who is being welcomed from Uniting. Andrew Dome will talk to us about how his provider organisation is integrating AI into their care services. Following that we welcome our colleague Catherine Veitch from Services Australia who will be talking about Support at Home integrations between our agencies. And lastly we’ll get an update on the status of the single assessment system from Marguerite Gandini who is one of our leads in the Digital Transformation and Delivery Division. And then we’ll wrap up with our live Q&A. 

So with all that it’s my pleasure to introduce your host for today Fay Flevaras. Fay leads the Department’s digital transformation work and has recently been appointed as the Department’s Chief Digital Information Officer. Fay is a 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. Great to see you again and over to you. 

Fay Flevaras: 

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

Just get myself off mute. Welcome. Thank you Janine. Hello everyone and welcome back to all our regulars. And for all of you joining us for the first time today we welcome you. I think I say this every year and I’m going to say it again. 2025 is going to be another big year, a bumper year of exciting changes in the aged care reform space. And in that spirit we have a lot to cover today so I’ll just get on with it. 

Let’s start with the digital transformation roadmap for aged care. This is the forecast of our current work plan. Now as per usual I share this with the usual disclaimer this is our technical delivery roadmap. What you see here is the digital delivery plan that my team and I are working on in the Department. It is important to note this timeline supports the aged care reform agenda but it should not be considered an official commitment from Government. That happens elsewhere outside of our Tech Talks, usually through Ministerial announcements and other formal mechanisms. But you will notice that our roadmap has changed since our last update but as I say at every Tech Talk we make a point of sharing this roadmap early and often so that we can be as transparent and open with you as possible on the work we’re doing and what we’re planning for which allows us then to codesign these activities with you. But sometimes things change and the policy decisions evolve or the priorities shift or work gets delayed. And when that happens we call it out here, so we let you know where things have moved and changed. 

Now if we look to the details the main addition you can see in the release in March to April. That’s new information. This has been added to prepare internal procedures and systems to be ready to operate under the new Act. So when we last spoke to you that kind of wasn’t there. Our delivery window for February is well underway with the highlights being that we’re making changes to the My Aged Care Portal to allow care recipients’ exceptional circumstances to be captured. This includes information like Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander status, homelessness or at risk of homelessness, family connection reasons and urgent residential respite and so on in other examples.  

In preparation for the new Act we’re making further changes to My Aged Care to support the rollout of the new supported decision making framework. Enhancements are also 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 new processes. The My Assessor app will also be decommissioned to support the new single assessment system. So you can see lots of things on the move folks. We’re enabling the submission of the 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 we’re enabling First Nations clients to specify their preferences to be assessed by First Nations assessment organisations. 

We’re also implementing a new case management system to support the new Aged Care Act and manage complaints, compliance and serious incident cases in an integrated manner with the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission. Additionally we have the three new staffing quality indicators will be added to the new Aged Care Mandatory Quality Indicator Program with the focus on enrolled nursing, allied health and lifestyle officers. And then the Business to Government Gateway APIs will be updated to incorporate these new quality indicators as well. For star ratings the staff rating will be updated to reflect the combined care minutes for registered nurses and enrolled nurses. So providers and consumers will be able to view the new combined care minutes in various portals. And we’re also adding an explanatory note section alongside the staffing rating and the overall star rating. 

So lots of new enhancements as you can see. And we will continue to update you on the changes for the coming March and July releases in future Tech Talks. 

Now onto some of the new sector resources that have been published. Across the Department there has been numerous resources being produced to help the sector adapt to all the new Aged Care Act changes. This is not just for providers but for individuals and their supporters, for software developers and more. When it comes to digital we’ve linked a few resources on this slide for you to consider. There’s rules for the Quality Indicator Program, there’s Support at Home claims and payments if you need more information on those two reform measures specifically. Additionally the Support at Home provider transition guide outlines key readiness steps ahead of the 1st of July in a nice table for you to check off within your organisations. We’ve just cherrypicked a few of these for the selection for Tech Talk audience today. For all the available resources, more is available on the Department’s website. And if it doesn’t exist now it will be released in the coming weeks. 

We also don’t want to overwhelm you with too much information so if you’re looking for a quick way to cut through all the noise we highly recommend signing up to the Your Aged Care Update Newsletter. It comes out each week with handy summaries of what’s happening in the aged care reform space. It’s available on the Department’s website and we’ve added a QR code for that one here as well. 

Okay. So here’s one example of the resources that have been made available recently. It’s the GPMS Guide to Digital Changes for Providers. It was produced by our colleagues in the Digital Reform Branch and was published in December 2024. The Guide introduces the digital systems enabling provider operations under the new Aged Care Act. So this Guide is specifically targeted to aged care providers. We understand that providers will guide the design and delivery of digital systems for the new Act so it was important to structure the Guide to show how Government systems can best support their journey. The Guide explains how digital changes support providers and is updated as new information is released. So regularly check back on this one. The goal is for the Guide to eventually include links to key information such as field updates, categories, rules and support software systems development. So where specific data is unavailable it is noted along with the proposed method and timeline for providing it. 

So the next update is expected to come out this month. We use provider feedback from the sector Departmental forums like this one to supply further granularity of information and address areas of feedback or particular interest that need more transparency or explanation. You can access the Guide using the QR code on your screen and then further details will be found in the program handbooks and system guides available on the Department’s website. 

So moving onto the next piece. I want to make a brief mention of a new Digital Transformation Impact Assessment Project that we’re launching. We’ve launched this new initiative in response to feedback that we’ve received from the sector and the Implementation Taskforce. We’ll be looking for providers, assessment organisations, ICT software vendors and suitable experts to join a multidisciplinary team with us in Government and with all the sector representatives and together we’ll work together to identify critical path impacts to providers preparing to adopt changes under the new Aged Care Act and Support at Home Program. So we’ll soon be opening an expression of interest on the Department’s Aged Care Engagement Hub today or tomorrow. Just trying to get through the last steps of the process.  

And we’re inviting participants from the aged care sector with the intent of developing resource guides and solutions and extra information around what the impacts are on you guys in the provider and sector landscape and what you guys need to do for the 1st of July. So less about us in the Department and more about what’s it mean for you in your operations. So this is where the multidisciplinary team will come out to these providers with their software vendors and go what does that mean. Off the back of this we will then create some archetypes around have you considered you’re a large organisation? Have you considered these impacts? You’re a medium organisation. Have you considered this? So the goal is to provide you with the tools you need to better understand how the changes will impact your organisation helping you to become prepared and adapt ready for 1st of July. So please keep an eye out for that expression of interest. 

We’ve also got the digital maturity assessment survey for aged care providers. It’s launching this week. So your organisation might have already received an invite to participate. If not registrations are now open through Aged Care Engagement Hub. Head to the Get Involved page and look for the aged care digital maturity self-assessment or the QR code here. The selfassessment tackles four important questions. What is the current level of digital maturity for aged care providers? What are the key barriers and challenges inhibiting aged care providers from improving their digital maturity? And what are the types of support and enablers that providers need to help to improve that digital maturity? And finally what are the core elements of the digital maturity for aged care providers that you think will lead to success? 

So it’s using an industry methodology. It covers ten domains, it’s a self-assessment, and then the digital maturity across such as strategy, frontline workers and innovation, and we will present those results in future Tech Talks. And looking forward all organisations that complete that can also opt in to receive a personalised report on how they compare to the benchmark. 

Okay. Lastly a reminder about a current grant opportunity that is available. Applications are still open for the one off grant of $10,000 to support Home Care Package and Commonwealth Home Support providers, to help their business side of updating their IT systems. Applications close next Tuesday the 25th of February and you can find out more information on the Health website. Use the QR code here. It’s a quick link to get there. And the link will be up on the Q&A panel in a few moments as well. Sorry. That’s not it. We’ll have it later on in the Q&A as well. That’s for the digital transformation update. There was a lot there. There was a lot of information. 

So let’s get moving onto our next agenda. And I’m very excited about this one. We have a bit of a change of pace to our usual updates. I have the pleasure to introduce this one. Like other care sectors there’s plenty of thinking and innovation happening out in aged care. And while we’re still relatively early in some of our maturity lifecycle exploring AI to enhance how aged care services can be used is a hot topic. And so I’d love to introduce you to Chief Digital Information Officer Andrew Dome. He is with us today to talk about their AI journey. And I welcome you Andrew and over to you. 

Andrew Dome: 

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘AI for your non-profit organisation’, ‘Andrew Dome’, ‘Chief Digital Information Officer’, ‘Uniting’] 

Thank you Fay. And I would just like to start by saying congratulations to you Fay for your appointment as the Chief Digital Information Officer – great title by the way – for the DOHAC. And I know it was announced last month so well done to you. Very well deserved. 

So really excited about having the opportunity to present today around what we’re doing at Uniting New South Wales.ACT. And just a sort of quick run through of the agenda, what I will be walking through is quickly just talking through who we are at Uniting New South Wales.ACT and what we do. I will then give you a bit of an insight into our generative AI journey and the use case that we decided to run with and the reasonings why we chose that one. I’ll then talk about the proof of concept we created, how we created it, how we got the business involved at the very outset, and also the executive buy in and the board buy in. I’ll talk about implementing our security controls and governance that absolutely needs to be part of that process to make sure it's a successful implementation. And then I’ll finish off with a little bit of an insight I guess into how we got our executives and our board on board for this journey and some of I guess the techniques that you can use in your own organisations to make that happen. 

So if we can just go onto the next slide if we can. So Uniting New South Wales.ACT. Who are we? Well we are a service provider that is providing community services and senior services throughout New South Wales and the ACT. So in our aged care space we provide home and community services as well as aged care services. Mental health, mediation and counselling services and early learning services are provided via our communities directorate. Overall we have a mission and that is to disrupt entrenched disadvantage. And that really is about what it says on the slide there, is looking at disadvantaged communities and people and providing a much better life for them. So that’s our overall mission. 

And as you can see from this extract here from our ten year strategy – and we do have a 2032 strategy – you can see people are actually at the heart of everything we do. And when we talk about our people we talk about our employees and we also talk about the customers that we serve every day. 

So if we can go onto the next slide it will give you an idea of the size of the organisation and what we do. So we’re fairly large. We currently service about 146,000 clients per year. 118,000 of those are in communities, 27,000 are in senior services. We’re 13,000 employees. 11,500 of those are full time and then we have a large number of volunteers as well which we are very, very thankful for. We are a not for profit. We’re one of the largest in Australia. We have $1.3 billion in terms of revenue that we bring in every year and of course we spend $1.3 billion in outgoings because we are a not for profit. We have a ten year strategy that began in 2022. I came board in 2022 and at that time we were servicing about 110,000 clients per year and as you can see by that figure above we’re at 146,000 clients now. So we’re well on track to be servicing 200,000 clients by 2032. If we can go onto the next slide please. 

So what are we building? What are we doing and what are we actually creating in this generative AI space? Well look we’re really, really excited about this. We’ve got some great foundational pieces here at Uniting in terms of the core platforms that we’re running on. And because we’ve got that and we’ve had some really good investment in that space it’s enabled us to really look at innovation and look at AI and how that can add some value into our organisation. And what we’ve created is something called Digital Assistant. And that Digital Assistant is a persona based AI Copilot assistant that is going to add real value to our employees.  

And what do we mean by that? What we’re trying to do is we are trying to take the administration burden for our employees particularly at the coalface, at the point of care, and taking those sort of 15 to 20 minute activities that they might have to do many times a day and make them into one to two minute activities, thereby returning that time back to our customers. And we have a mantra or a comment here that we like to use which is we want to hold the hand and not the pen. And that’s quite self-explanatory. We want to remove those administration activities and tasks and we want to hold the hand of our customers. So taking those 15/20 minute activities and make them one to two minutes. And by doing that that’s returning 13 to 18 minutes back for our employees to actually look after our customers every day. 

Now I’ll give you some examples of what that actually looks like. And as you can see on the slide there’s a couple of screenshots down on the left hand side and that’s the persona Sarah. Sarah works in our aged care environment. We have 7,500 aged care workers in that sector. And that first screenshot there is Sarah asking a question and that question is what is my leave entitlement. And you can see it’s a very simple screen. It has a kind of Google/ChatGPT field. And Sarah can just type into that field by text a question, what is my leave entitlement? But better yet what she can also do is use voice to text to speak into her phone, her smartphone. She can do it in a native language. We have a high percentage of Nepalese people that are working in our aged care sector so they can speak in Nepalese, it will convert that into English. And at the point of care when she needs it on her smartphone she’ll get that content retrieved pretty much instantly. It’s like a ChatGPT experience where it comes through. 

How does that work? Well that front end will connect into our back end systems and in this particular case it’s HRIS system, and it will retrieve that content. And you can see there she’s asked the question what’s my leave balance and it’s returned her annual leave balance, her long service leave, sick leave etcetera. The second screenshot there we’ve now got Sarah with a separate use case. She’s seen an incident in the aged care environment or the site that she works at and she wants to report it. So again she can use her voice to text. She can then ask or add content into our QASA system which is our incident system. Now traditionally how she would do this is she would go away, she would sit down at a kiosk machine, and we might have three or four on each of out sites used across 120 people. She would logon to that machine. She may not have to use QASA very often. She may forget her logon details. You know what happens. She rings the service desk. She has to spend some time there. Again it turns into a 15 to 20 minute activity and then she finally completes it. By using that smartphone as the new device of choice for Sarah it’s again making this into a one to two minute activity returning time back in the day again to look after our customer. 

The third screenshot there, that’s where Sarah is now looking after a customer in Westmead, one of our sites there, called Susie. She’s been away for a few weeks and she just wants to know what is the care plan for Susie. So she’s asked that question. It’s returned that care plan back for our particular customer and she can move on. So again she doesn’t have to go to a kiosk machine, spend 15/20 minutes of doing that. And in future she’ll have the ability to actually create the case note for Susie again at the point of care without having to go to a kiosk machine later on in the day where some of that content is actually lost. So very, very powerful tool. 

So that’s what our digital assistant is really all about. It’s reducing administration burden. It’s uplifting that experience for our employees, ultimately allowing them to spend more time with our customers. And if you can imagine this times by 7,500 aged care workers every day the amount of time that we’re going to get back for our employees is going to be significant. So if we move onto the next slide. 

What did we do? How did we work out this and what was our use case that we decided to start with? Well the first thing we’ve got to point out is this is not IT by any means saying we’ve got some gen AI and we’ve got some great use cases and we’re going to push it on the business. What we’ve actually done is we consult with our organisation. So we went out to all of our directorates, senior services, aged care providers, communities, even our back office functions and said ‘What are your pain points? What are the pain points that you need us to resolve?’ And out of that consultation we came up with quite a number. We then evaluated those pain points and what we decided to do was go with the least risk one that was easy for us to scale and easy for us to bring to production. And the first use case that we used was policies and procedures. And we have quite a large number within Uniting. And the reason that we decided on that is the use case was easy, the data that was in those policies and procedures we knew because we created them. We knew that they were up to date. We knew there was no PII and we knew that the risk was very, very low with the security controls that we put in place. So that’s what we did. We evaluated that and then we chose that particular use case to run with.  

So if we go onto the next slide you will see we went into our build phase. So this is now creating our proof of concept. So we developed our proof of concept around that policies and procedures, use case number one. We have a very, very good network of friendly users, change champions, SMEs, whatever you want to call them, and we ran this past them. But what we were very conscious of again was making sure that we had a cross section of our users across all of our directorates, our aged care, our communities, property, finance. And the really, really important thing about this is we provided a feedback loop to them so that they could as they started using this digital assistant for policies and procedures and asking the questions get the feedback through so that that LLM, the digital assistant tool could learn. And the really interesting thing in this whole procedure or process was the questions that IT thought they would ask were very different from the ones that they were actually asking. Because they’re at the coalface and they were asking questions like what is the policy around having animals coming into an aged care environment? And that was different from what IT was saying which was things like what is my leave entitlement? So very, very important to provide that feedback loop for your people that are testing this in a proof of concept.  

And then the last part of that process was around adapting. So we tweaked that large language model, that digital assistant to make sure that we’d listened to what our employees were using it for and scaling it out and adapting it for the end result. So if we can go onto the next slide. 

Here’s a really quick timeline of what we actually ended up doing. So we obviously did our discovery in advance. We ran those workshops with all of the areas within the business and got their buy in around those use cases. But what I really want to call out now is you can see there executive buy in. Do that right at the start of this exercise and this process. So when we had those use cases or those pain points that we were trying to solve using generative AI we had the conversation with our executives and also our board and we showed them. We showed them what this digital system could do. We showed them the benefit of that and we got the executive buy in right in advance.  

We then went to the next stage which was creating that proof of concept. We built the environment. We kicked off the activities, got in our testers from the business. We then completed that proof of concept, put it into production, providing feedback to our executives and the board all the way through there. And then I guess the final part of that was we’ve now expanded it out. The way we actually created that digital assistant originally was hiving off our 441 policies and procedures and our Azure instance pointing the digital assistant to that to make sure that we lowered the risk as we were implementing our security controls and data classification in parallel. We’ve now gone back to the more traditional model where we now can put that digital assistant right across our SharePoint online sites and it can get the right data, the right content without us having to hive off our policies and procedures. 

So if we go onto the next slide. This was kind of a one pager that we created. Again very useful when you’re having conversations with your executives and board. You can see on the left hand side those were our 441 policies and procedures by area, by directorate. And on the right hand side what we’ve got there is this is the verbatim comments that we got back from our employees, those people that were testing the gen AI tool. And you can see at a high level it’s all positive. It’s very good. Easy to operate. Confident it’s going to add some value there. Great for our frontline support workers. It’s going to enable a self-service approach. It’s available 24/7 when perhaps the service desk isn’t around to answer questions. It’s fast. And it really is like a ChatGPT type experience where the content is being retrieved to our employees at the point of care within seconds and negating the need for them to go and sit down at a kiosk machine and spend 15/20 minutes doing it. So if we can go onto the next slide. 

Now great callout here. Key callout is you could have the greatest generative AI tool out there that you’ve created, you’ve developed. You may have parked it up. But really you’ve got to make sure that you do this safely, securely and ethically. So make sure that whilst you’re doing this and looking at proof of concept you’re implementing the right security controls and governance in parallel. So when you start off small – and we went with that use case which was around understanding our data, knowing that we had policies and procedures which were publicly available on the intranet but difficult for our employees to find. We knew the data. We knew that there was no PIIs so the risk was low. And that’s why we could get the buy in from the executives. We brought in the experts. We brought in some gen AI partners in conjunction with Microsoft. And that was all around ensuring that they could bring that knowledge around AI to the party. We certainly don’t have AI experts in the organisation. It is obviously a fairly new technology and platform. I know it’s been around decades but where we are now in terms of the technology you need to partner up with people that have got experience in this space.  

You have to create and develop your gen AI policy in parallel. So when you’re speaking with your board members they’re all about risk mitigation. They’ll want to know that we’ve got some robust gen AI policies and guidelines for our employees. And a really interesting thing that we did is we brought in the Ethics Centre. We had a professor come in. We had a session with our board and our ULT and we really ran through some use cases to them to say what level of gen AI and how much will we allow gen AI to do things within our organisation. We gave a number of use cases. I’ll tell you about one of them. And that was would we allow generative AI to create a care plan for our customer? And whilst gen AI could do that right now ethically the consensus was no it’s not the right time. There could still be bias. LLM, the model is still learning. That could be something that we could do in the future with a human in the loop obviously to QA the actual content. But that was really, really important, an ethical conversation around the safe use of AI. So make sure you start to have those conversations with your board to help develop that policy around the use of gen AI. 

And if we can go onto the next slide which I think is the last. So really how did we go through this cycle and what did we do to get all of our executive and board on board? So the first thing was you need the buy in from the outset. You need to get them to understand the value. Show them the value. Get them on board very early on in the piece as you saw on that timeline I showed before. The easiest way to do that is to present that low risk use case to them where risk is mitigated, PII might not be involved, and you’ve got your security controls in place. Talk to them, have that conversation around that responsible and ethical AI use. Show them that you’ve got your AI guidelines that have been created in parallel. Show them and present it when those AI guidelines have been completed and get their buy in and their approval to do it. Leverage the board member advice. You need to remember your board are sitting on other boards probably across your sector but also across other sectors as well and they are having the same conversation around AI, around use cases and around the ethical and responsible use of AI in those other organisations as well. Ask them what they’re hearing. Ask them what their other organisations are doing and get them to input into those conversations. Because that’s what they’re there for. They’re there to steer, mitigate risk. So have that conversation with your board. 

And then finally obviously make sure that your security controls are in place. If you’ve got a program like we do which is constantly running and implementing security controls make sure that they are in place ahead of a wider productionising of your generative AI tool. 

So in summary if I can kind of just cover off that quickly, what I would say is start with an easy use case, understand your data and how to control it, get your executives on board and very early on in the piece, explain the benefit and the value of what it’s going to give to your employees and ultimately your customers, build and improve your POC, show that back to your executives and board, create your AI policies and guidelines in parallel, implement your security controls. You do all that and I guarantee you’ll have a successful AI journey. You’ll have your first use case done and then you can just build on that for the future. That’s what we’re doing at Uniting. It’s exciting times for us. And yeah can’t wait to show you the other use cases that we bring on board in the future. And that’s me. That’s my update for Uniting. 

Fay Flevaras: 

That was an amazing summary. Thank you so much Andrew. It shows innovation in action. You’re thinking big about it but you started small. And while you were doing the small bit you thought about what are all the other foundational pieces you need to get in place so you can continue your journey. You brought all your stakeholders along with you. And I really want to thank you for sharing with us and the community. It’s always good to see how other people have walked the path and we learn from you. So thank you very much and I’m sure we’ll have you back on a follow up later on. 

Andrew Dome: 

Thanks Fay. My pleasure. 

Fay Flevaras: 

Okay. So without further ado we move onto Support at Home. Very thrilled to welcome our second guest speaker today as a big part of our audience has been asking how the different Government agency systems will interact with each other. Each of our agencies has a different scope of work but of course we work closely together to make sure as much as possible we have a one Government and ICT journey for all of our users. So as many of you will know Services Australia has a large remit supporting the services associated with Support at Home.  

And before I hand over to our Services Australia colleague I’d like to mention that many of you may have attended their webinar on the 10th of February around the Support at Home requirements. So this may be a useful recap for some of you but hopefully you’ll pick up some new things as we discuss it with others. So with that in mind now I’d like to welcome Catherine from Services Australia to take us through it. Over to you Catherine. 

Catherine Veitch: 

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Support at Home’, ‘Catherine Veitch’, ‘Aged Care Projects Branch’, ‘Older Australians and Veterans Division’, ‘Services Australia’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’] 

Thanks Fay and hello everyone. It’s really great to be with you today and most importantly to be able to provide an update from Services Australia. My name is Catherine Veitch and I’m the Director with responsibility for the Support at Home Project. With me today I’ve got my colleague Daron Chambers. We also have some members of our ICT team in attendance and they may be able to help out with some relevant questions later on. 

As Fay’s mentioned Services Australia does indeed have a significant remit for the Support at Home Program and has responsibility for implementing broadscale changes ahead of 1 July implementation. I’m aware that today we have a very diverse audience and for that reason I thought I’d touch first on the role that Services Australia plays within the aged care space. 

So onto our next slide. I think we’ve got that one up. Thank you. In the aged care delivery context our service delivery teams have responsibility for calculating consumer contributions and assisting consumers who may be experiencing financial hardship. We also play a key role responding to enquiries from providers and their staff and we have responsibility for managing user access to relevant Services Australia systems. 

Another role we play is to host and maintain software to integrate Services Australia systems with provider systems. We work with software developers to ensure that software specifications and APIs are in place to support the changes. And this has been a really key focus for our ICT and business teams this year. I also wanted to acknowledge and callout the role of our aged care specialist officers. We refer to them as our ACSOs. Our ACSOs play an important role educating and supporting older Australians and their representatives to navigate the aged care journey. Our ACSOs and financial information service officers or FIS provide specialist services by appointment either face to face, over the phone or virtually. Services Australia also provide telephony support for consumers, nominees and aged care providers. 

So what’s changing under Support at Home? Well our teams are very busily working on the technology solutions that will enable the aged care means assessment and payments to be made in line with the new legislation which will take effect from 1 July. We’re making the necessary changes to process subsidy and supplement payments to approved aged care providers. And most importantly to support consumers, nominees and aged care providers with the changes our specialist ACSOs and FIS and our service delivery staff will be trained to support the changes from 1 July. Next slide. 

Many of you in the audience today may work in the software developer space and if so it’s possible as Fay mentioned you might have attended the Services Australia quarterly software developer information session webinar that was held yesterday or you may have attended our aged care specific webinar on the 10th of February. Both of those webinars provided content that we will touch on today. 

Recently Services Australia released draft technical specifications for Support at Home Program. We talked through these changes at the webinar last week. I guess I wanted to convey today that we know how vital it is to share the information we have as early as possible which is why documentation is being released in draft to allow developers as much time to prepare as possible. We also take developer feedback provided to us via our webinars and use that feedback to make updates and refinements. Information will continue to be made available as information comes to hand and as policy settings are finalised. 

Once versions are final Services Australia will communicate that information with software developers and share the updates via the Health Systems Developer Portal which is Services Australia’s Developer Portal. I should add here that the Health Systems Developer Portal is different to the Department of Health and Aged Care Business to Government or B2G Developer Portal. So our Health Systems Developer Portal is the go to place for all technical specifications and information to support integration with Services Australia systems. We might move to the last slide. 

So before I wrap up today I just wanted to point out the best way to get information on our changes. For software developers Services Australia will continue to communicate with developers to help prepare for the implementation of Support at Home and other aged care reforms. We have a range of forums and communication channels available to provide information and gather feedback and these include our monthly aged care webinars, email updates from our developer liaison team, updates to our FAQs on our Health Systems Developer Portal, we have a quarterly newsletter, and our quarterly information session webinars. All developer information can be found on the Health Systems Developer Portal which is shown on the screen and you can just follow the pathway shown there to find the information you need. It’s also where software developers can find webinar recordings and Q&A from previous webinars. 

As updates to our specifications and Q&As are made we will make developers aware via an email from our developer liaison team. They’ll simply advise there is new or updated information available so that you don’t have to check back constantly to see what’s new. 

For any providers in our audience today information to support providers will be updated on the Aged Care Provider Portal Education Gateway. This is the place to find any aged care provider professional education resources. The information available on the Gateway will be updated over the coming months as policy settings and changes are finalised. 

So thank you everyone. I really appreciate your time today. It’s been great to be able to provide you an update on Services Australia’s role in Support at Home. Back to you Fay. 

Fay Flevaras: 

Thank you Catherine. Really appreciate you guys coming and joining us here. And we thank you for working closely with us in the aged care reform work. Okay. So what do we have next? Welcome to Marguerite Gandini. She’s one of our Acting Assistant Secretaries for the Aged Care Funding Reform and Systems Branch. Today Marguerite will take you through the single assessment system overall I think Marguerite. I will hand over to you. 

Marguerite Gandini: 

[Visual of slide with text saying ‘Single Assessment System’, ‘Marguerite Gandini’, ‘IT Project Director’, ‘Aged Care Funding Reform & Systems Branch’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’, ‘Australian Government with Crest (logo)’, ‘Department of Health and Aged Care’] 

Thanks Fay and thanks for the invite. This is my first Tech Talk so I’m a bit excited for the opportunity to talk about both the single assessment system as well as providing a bit of an update on the Aged Care Assessor app. I think that’s of keen interest to quite a few people attending today. 

So my colleague Catherine from Services Australia has actually given you some really great information I think on the changes ahead at Support at Home but I’m sure as many of you would already have experienced we’ve actually been on the transformation journey for Support at Home I’d say for well over two years. So today I want to focus in on bringing together the key changes implemented under the single assessment system, what will be delivered through a staged rollout, because they’ve actually set us up for the introduction of Support at Home and the new Aged Care Act on 1 July. 

So you’ll remember last year in July the first lot of capability we introduced was an improved assessment process. So we replaced the National Screening and Assessment Forms known to most people as the NSAF with the new Integrated Assessment Tool, so the IAT. So they’re available on both the Assessor Portal and the new app. The new IAT contains over 950 different configurations and questions and it includes features like prefilled data, triaging processes and streamlined workflows. So those improvements have helped us actually capture and retain data better and I think importantly it’s reduced the need for clients to repeat their information multiple times. The system’s structured questions and guides the assessment process in a way that’s more tailored to take into account the complexity of care needs and circumstances of clients. 

As part of the Support at Home changes being introduced on 1 July they’ll also actually be enhancing the logic that sits behind the IAT and making it more efficient for assessors and lining up with that assessment outcome from an in-home aged care perspective, so Home Care Packages, to align with the new Support at Home model. The IAT was also supported by the introduction of the new Aged Care Assessor app. That app replaced the AN-ACC and My Assessor app and it’s core function is to help with the workflows of the assessment. So it’s got the capability for offline assessment, has automated data uploads into the health systems as well. 

I am going to just say here that the Aged Care Assessor app is more than the IAT. So I think we’ve all been a little bit guilty over the time of using IAT and Aged Care Assessor app interchangeably but with the integration of the AN-ACC app what it actually means is that it provides this mechanism to also support the assessment of residential aged care funding. So that’s in direct support of the establishment of the single assessment workforce. So for providers with workforces in both the in-home aged care space and the residential aged care space we’re actually now able to use one consolidated app instead of two products.  

The app itself is built on the .NET MAUI platform App UI, which is quite a mouthful, and that’s better known as MAUI. We’ve been an early adopter of MAUI and introduced it in October 2023. And that was a really deliberate choice as it’s provided us with a lot of upfront and early benefits. As I’ve just talked about it’s paved the way for us to create a single app to support the single assessment workforce and it’s allowed us to build apps for multiple platforms, so Windows, IOS, Android are our main users, from a single code base. So for us it’s saving us significant development time and allowing us to be a little bit more responsive to changes. And of course it’s saving us maintenance costs. I think most importantly for users it ensures a consistent experience across both that Assessor Portal and the mobile app. 

Now it would be fair to say that there were some teething issues after the initial release. Developing new technology does take time and while we try our very, very best to produce a high quality product as with any new technology there’s always going to be a few initial bumps in the road. And I just wanted to take a minute to acknowledge and thank everyone who provided feedback. In the early days it was invaluable in helping us identify some of those key causes for the app crashing. 

So as I mentioned the IAT has over 950 questions and it also has a complex logic flow underpinning it. So it was one of the key contributors inflating the memory usage within the app. Using the feedback provided from this cohort and our other users we’ve been actually able to narrow in on some of those very specific workflows and screens that were creating some of the data crash issues and memory loss issues. In the background we’ve been actively making our code as efficient as we can using that feedback and addressing some of those gaps while Microsoft matured their product. 

So we did deploy two fixes, so one in the first week and then four weeks directly after launch to address some of those early issues that were escalated. And since then our focus has been on improving the performance and stability of the app and we’ve seen really significant improvements in memory usage and decrease in the crash rates since the last version was released in October last year. I’m very acutely aware that adoption is going to be driven by those first few experiences of users and while understandably some users are still a bit gun shy I’m really pleased to see – I was having a look at the uptake stats the other day and we’ve seen big improvements since we introduced the version in October last year. We’ve seen a steady uptake of the app across IOS, Android and Windows. So it seems to be that every day users’ confidence is growing in that product. 

We do appreciate your patience as we make these enhancements to provide a better experience for everyone. If you experience some teething issues and have been a little hesitant to take up the app I really would encourage you to try again next week after next week’s release. The team have been working really hard through all of the feedback that’s been sent in to date. 

If there is one point I want to make it’s please don’t stop giving us feedback. We’re not done yet and we really do need that continuous loop to help us improve the product. There are feedback channels highlighted within the app. I’ve also got the email address just shared on the screen at the moment. 

All right. I’m conscious I’ve spent a bit of time talking to you about the new app as I know it’s been a pain point and hopefully I’ve been able to address some of the concerns or give you some updates on how we’ve been working to improve it. Before I do move on to talk some more about the single assessment system I will just flag that we will be decommissioning the legacy apps as part of next week’s release. I know my colleagues in Business have been providing supportive comms and information to you all but to confirm from next week the legacy mobile apps, so that’s your My Assessor and AN-ACC apps, will be removed from app stores and the sideload distribution channel and interface links from the legacy mobile apps to [0:52:47] back end will also be removed. And while we’re talking about sideloading we are also working on streamlining that process and providing an executable version for the July release. That’s as a direct result of some of the feedback that we got from the R30 and R31 sideloading processes. So we’ll be keen to work with stakeholders to help us understand how we can make that sideloading process easier. And the sector partners team is going to be facilitating some conversations for us so if you’re interested in participating in those discussions just reach out to them and they’ll coordinate that for us. 

Okay. So let me wrap up quickly just to talk about the remainder of the changes that we’ve introduced under the single assessment system. So in December the system change that we rolled out under the single assessment system workforce allows organisations conducting aged care needs assessments to do both your home support assessments for CHSP as well as comprehensive assessments. And then next week the final changes to the single assessment system will be delivered to focus on enhancements to the triage delegate role and the assessment delegate form. And that’s to align with the broader single assessment system structure and functionality.  

So bringing those two components together for users the single assessment workforce is going to provide a single assessment pathway for older people so they don’t have to change assessment providers as their needs change. It’s also ensuring access to assessments in regional, remote and rural areas and reducing the wait times to access an aged care assessment with a broader workforce availability. To complement this in December last year we also broadened the aged care ecosystem to work with our colleagues in Services Australia and the Australian Digital Health Agency to introduce the capability to upload support plans to My Health Record. So using a consent model clients are now able to have their support plans stored on their Health Record allowing healthcare providers to also see the assessor’s report on client needs. So that’s giving them an insight into assessor observations and recommended aged care services. And going back to that point that I talked about earlier one of our critical priorities is making sure that we’re reducing the need for clients to tell their story multiple times and I think this is a really great tool for that. 

So from the Department’s perspective it’s allowed us to successfully establish that foundation capability while managing operational and strategic risks associated with privacy, data integrity, cybersecurity and of course business continuity. So this is a first step in exploring the broader interoperability across aged care and My Health Record but for us it’s been a really significant milestone. And I’ve just got a couple of little fun facts for us to hand. Since we went live in December in the first week we had 4,500 My Aged Care assessment support plans successfully shared to My Health Record. And that was in the first week. As at last week we had nearly 50,000 matched clients that have consented to their support plan to being shared to My Health Record. That’s to date. Now that’s about a nearly 85% success rate, passthrough rate in terms of consent. So not only is there a great adoption of support plans into My Health Record but a consent to do so and connectivity, and it’s a really great outcome. 

Speaking of milestones we are approaching our ten year anniversary next month in aged care gateway and I’m sure some of you have been along the journey with us which has been one of continuous innovation and improvement. As we reflect on the significant strides we’ve made in enhancing our systems and launching new applications we really did just want to acknowledge the important role that the Tech Talk and sector partners have had in helping us address these challenges head on. 

So looking ahead we’re all systems go focusing on the implementation of Support at Home and the new Aged Care Act on July 1st and we’re really looking forward to working with you throughout this transition. So I hope this has been useful in helping bring together some of the changes over the last 12 months and bundling the single assessment system changes, but also to address some of the questions about the app and do a little bit of myth busting. So I might hand back to you Janine or to you Fay. Thank you very much. 

Fay Flevaras: 

It’s me. And thank you so much for that Marguerite. Now I think you might be hanging around with us for Q&A. 

Marguerite Gandini: 

I am indeed. 

Fay Flevaras: 

Lovely. And I can see there’s lots of Q&As. And so I’ll ask Janine and some of our panellists to come online with us. We might see if we can shrink the slides so we can get us people there instead. 

So I think over to you then Janine. 

Janine Bennett: 

Great. Thank you Fay. Hi again everybody. Welcome to our panel for today. So we have all of our speakers on screen, Fay, Andrew, Catherine and Marguerite. We’re going to be joined by one of our business contacts as well who unfortunately had a conflicting meeting but is running from that to us. So we’re hoping to have Emma Cook here as well to give us some of the more policy focused answers to questions that we have. For my team when Emma arrives feel free just to pop her up on screen and we’ll go from there. Okay. We also have a bunch of subject matter experts and standbys ready to help as our phone a friend if needed. So we’ll get through as many questions as we can in the time we have left. And it looks like we’ve got a good half hour for questions so that’s great. 

I would like to start just by giving a bit of a screen warning to a couple of folks who raised questions with their names. And if I could just ask these people if they wouldn’t mind raising their hands in the Team ribbon that way we’ll be able to find you easily. So Kerryn from Alchemy Technology if you could raise your hand. Leanne Bradbury, if you could raise your hand we’ll bring you to screen as well. And Sophia Markwell. Some really good questions there that were popular. If you guys could all raise your hand that would be great. 

In the meantime I’ll start with an anonymous question. So we had a question regarding the Support at Home claim upload file. 

Q: Will this be accepted in CSV format as it is currently for HCP claim upload file? 

And I’m thinking that one might be Catherine. 

Daron Chambers: 

I can talk to that. Cat I’ll jump in there. Daron Chambers here from Services Australia. So in answer to that question the simple answer is yes. I think the question was asked probably based on how that function exists within Services Australia for home care claiming at the moment. So certainly that will be maintained for Support at Home in terms of uploading. So I’ll leave it there. I think that’s the short answer for that one. 

Janine Bennett: 

Great. Thank you Daron. And sorry for not welcoming you to stage as well. I didn’t realise we’ve got two folks from Services Australia. That’s awesome. Very lucky. Okay. How are we going with Kerryn? Can we move Kerryn to the stage so she can ask her question? 

Hi Kerryn. We’ll just get you to turn your video on if possible and come off mute and feel free to ask your question to the panel.  

Online Participant: 

Hi. Thank you for that. Just wondering what avenue we would be expecting to hear about the changes for CHSP and the DEX reporting. It seems to be a space that’s not being communicated in many avenues. 

Fay Flevaras: 

That one would be a new one for me. Does anyone on the panel have any insight on that one? Otherwise we might need to take it on notice. 

No. I think it’s a take on notice I’m sorry. Can you give us a bit more insight on the question though to make sure that we get – and we can actually ping in the background and see if we can get one in the next sort of 25 minutes.  

Online Participant: 

Yeah. No worries. So going by the Department website for the grant extension for 2025 to 2027 there’s proposed changes to the CHSP service list and also to the DEX reporting. Those documents haven’t changed since December or November and so we’re still waiting on information there as to what’s happening in that space. 

Fay Flevaras: 

Okay. So I do have the standard line that I’ll give which is the design principle that we’ve tried to take on is that we keep as minimum change as possible. So if you haven’t seen a change that means there’s no change yet. But what I’ll do is in the background we’ll just ping one of our policy colleagues and see if we can get an answer. If we can’t get it in the time period we’ll definitely put it in the Q&A follow up that comes after the Tech Talk. Do you have any other questions while you’re with us? 

Online Participant: 

Just that one. Thank you. 

Fay Flevaras: 

Thank you. 

Janine Bennett: 

Thanks Kerryn. And we’ll keep monitoring that one. If we can bring Leanne to stage that would be great team. 

Welcome Leanne. If we can have you turn your video on and turn off mute. 

Online Participant: 

Apologies. Don’t know if my camera’s going to work. There’s a few storms. No it’s not.  

Janine Bennett: 

It doesn’t matter. No worries. We can hear you. That’s the main thing. 

Online Participant: 

So my question was just more regarding clinical. So I find that the AI and everything is fabulous and the My Health Record is awesome but the main challenge I find in home care is trying to get GP updates for medication, recent medication changes, health changes. If clients go into hospital, they’re discharged, and the hospital change their medication or they’ve had a serious event, and it’s not communicated. Then the nurses in community care are expected to go out, and yes we discuss it with the clients but they’re not always aware. And personally it took me six months to get one GP’s medication list and health summary. So my question is if we can get a GP health summary and medication list and the hospital discharge list all on My Health Summary. I think yes it’s great to have the carers and the coordinators having reduced load but then nurses for clinical also need a reduced load for chasing clinical need. 

Janine Bennett: 

So this speaks a little bit to the interoperability agenda Fay. I might direct this one to you. 

Fay Flevaras: 

It does.  

Online Participant: 

Sorry. I know it’s a big thing and I’ve asked the question before so I do apologise. But it’s just - - - 

Fay Flevaras: 

Don’t apologise. It’s actually really good that you guys raise these things because I think it helps to highlight where the big pain points are and the friction points are. Yes it is a big problem statement to solve for but there is a couple of things happening. There’s the broader interoperability agenda that Janine just referenced which is we are trying to get information models and standards in the way we all communicate together. To that effect, and it’s probably hot off the press, is that I believe this week legislation was passed to mandate sharing by default. So it’s no longer going to be optional for GPs and others to not share or rely on consent of the individual. So that’s a recent change. We might see if we can grab the link to the announcement that happened. I think it was on Tuesday. 

Online Participant: 

Sorry. I might interject there. And that’s great but we actually send to the GPs a consent form from the client that is signed. And the GPs still don’t provide that information. So it’s not a consent thing. It’s just the lack of resources at GPs or what not. I don’t know but it’s challenging. 

Fay Flevaras: 

The new legislation that was just approved means that they are legislatively – tongue twister sorry. They are legislatively obliged to now share that by default in My Health Record and that will now become available to you guys through that mechanism. Now I can’t exactly tell you when. I’ll take that on notice. 

Online Participant: 

But I know that was approved for RAC in the facilities. Is that approved for home care now as well as the aged care facility? 

Fay Flevaras: 

This is approved for all digital health legislation. So it goes beyond aged care. This is a much broader sharing by default legislation for clinical care. I’ll find out the details and send it through. It may not address your use case in the short term but it will in the long term. I think pathology results are a first start. There’s a much broader agenda there as well. But I’ve noted your pain point. 

Online Participant: 

Sorry. Yeah. I did raise this question prior and they said that yes it was being introduced to RAC but it wouldn’t be home care. So don’t actually have access. The nurses for aged care – let me get my words out. Home care aged care do not have access to the My Health Records for our clients. And that is a challenge. 

Fay Flevaras: 

So we’ll take that insight. Thank you very much Leanne. And we’ll follow it up and hopefully give you a little bit more of a summary after the Tech Talk. 

Online Participant: 

Yeah. Sorry. I know it’s a big question. 

Fay Flevaras: 

Don’t apologise. All good.  

Janine Bennett: 

It’s a big one but we take the big questions here. It’s fine. Thank you very much Leanne. Appreciate you coming to stage. We’ll move Sophia up onto stage if we could. And Andrew I think this is a good question for you. And just to note we’ve got a couple of questions that sort of follow this similar message, one of which is an anonymous question. And the anonymous question is: 

Q: How can a not for profit standalone organisation afford that without funding? 

And I think they’re talking about some of those great solutions you’re introducing with AI. And if at the same time we can move Sophia to stage and she can do a follow up for her question which is very similar. 

Andrew Dome: 

Yeah. Look it is a great question and what I can tell you in Australia certain organisations have a real not for profit focus and Microsoft as an example has the technology for social impact for empathy area which gives us the ability to partner up with them and deliver solutions. So that digital assistant in that first use case policy and procedures we created, that was absolutely cocreated in conjunction with Microsoft. And there is probably the capability for that to be rolled out to smaller organisations moving forward. It is a conversation that’s been had within that circle about how do we leverage that technology with some of us who have put some investment into for smaller. So I’m happy to take that offline and work with the TSI team within Microsoft to see what can happen in that space. And I think it was Sophia that asked that question. So happy for her to reach out and have that correspondence with her. 

Janine Bennett: 

Great. Thank you Andrew. And we had an anonymous question that was along similar lines as well. Just that idea that smaller facilities don’t have that same economy of scale that you might have and it obviously takes them a lot longer to get on board. So anything they can do to leverage what’s available in the industry I’m sure they’ll really appreciate.  

We also had a very quick question about the licence for the AI app which I might hit you up with as well.  

Q: The app for personal care attendants or AINs, was it app based licencing or Microsoft F1 licences?  

Fay Flevaras: 

That is a hard question. 

Andrew Dome: 

That’s a good question. So there’s a few things happening around licencing and as a not for profit Microsoft have different layers of pricing. And what I will say is they’re very generous in terms of discounts they give for not for profits. Our generative AI toolset was based on their Copilot for Azure which is different from Microsoft 365 Copilot which sometimes people get confused between. They actually result in different outcomes. So Microsoft 365 Copilot, that’s the stuff you’re maybe used to with summarising Teams and doing transcripts and giving you some sort of insight, summarising your Outlook. We are doing that in parallel but that’s not what we’re talking about with the digital assistant. It was the Microsoft Azure licencing model that we used. And I can tell you because they are really wanting to drive this out in the not for profit sector in Australia they essentially went all in on Uniting, which I am really positive about and thankful for. So there wasn’t a lot of investment on Uniting’s side if I’m honest. If you are looking at Copilot licencing for the other side, that Microsoft 365 Copilot functionality, they are offering discounts in Australia for the not for profits but it’s not at the same level yet as the discounts that you get as a not for profit for their other licencing like E3, T1, E5 etcetera. So hopefully that answers the question. But again happy to take it offline and kind of work through what that looks like for anyone that’s interested. 

Fay Flevaras: 

And we might hit up our Microsoft contact as well and see if we can get some clarity on the question and provide an answer from Microsoft through to our community as well. 

Janine Bennett: 

That sounds great. Thank you both. Okay. I’ll give a screen warning to Tracey Buckolt and William Quinert. I think I’ve pronounced that correctly. And Stephanie Klingen if I can please. And in the meantime we’ll do another anonymous question. So this one is: 

Q: Are there plans for the APIs being provided for Support at Home to allow for provider software vendors to access information from the Integrated Assessment Tool to minimise data entry into client management systems? 

So is this one for you Marguerite? 

Fay Flevaras: 

Maybe. Or she might want to throw to me. Either or. She’ll get herself off mute. 

Marguerite Gandini: 

I can’t get myself off mute. I’m in one of the new little rooms and I don’t have my mouses and bits and pieces here. I’m operating off a laptop so sorry I’m a bit slow. So look I think we know, and I actually recall Fay this might have come up at a sector partners when we first launched back in July last year, that there’s an absolute interest in understanding how we can better leverage the B2G, that software portal for us to use APIs to share the information in the client space. I think that is something we’re absolutely committed to exploring and we need to get our foundations right first and get the Support at Home enacted and delivered and then that’s something that I understand is part of our digital roadmap into the future thinking. There’s obviously a lot of consideration that we need to think about from a privacy, security space etcetera for us to do that. So it does need to be a thought through piece but absolutely I know that that’s something on our agenda that we want to engage with people about into the future. 

Fay Flevaras: 

That’s right. And just to add to Marguerite’s comment we did do a bit of a survey towards the end of last year and asked the community what they would like to see in the API catalogue roadmap. That space, the referral space, the client space, that continuity of data through the value chain at the beginning is definitely a focus area. We are currently analysing all of that roadmap prioritisation. So it’s definitely in the list. We just can’t communicate to you when, what date, because we’re just trying to groom it all out with all of the mandatory changes for the 1st of July. So watch this space I guess. And we do know it’s a priority area and a pain point and so we’re trying to get it there as soon as we can. 

Janine Bennett: 

Great. Thank you. And if we can bring Tracey to the stage. Hoping Tracey put her hand up. 

Here we go. Hi Tracey. Welcome. If we can get you off mute at a minimum and if you’ve got a camera. There you are. 

Online Participant: 

Hi. How you going? 

Janine Bennett: 

Great to see colleagues from Ageing Australia. 

Online Participant: 

We’re very happy to be here. I think my question is for Marguerite. We’re just wondering if the Department is able to provide a sample of the support plan that participants will receive under Support at Home. Providers are really unsure about the level of detail that’s going to be provided and therefore what they’re going to have to do when they take on a Support at Home client in terms of their level of assessment and things like that, especially with this principle of trying to reduce the number of times that a participant will have to tell their story. 

Marguerite Gandini: 

Yeah. Look Tracey I know that that’s something that I’ve been working with our business colleagues on in terms of what we can provide in respect to templating, and we are still working away in the background on all the design solutions for some of those elements. I can sort of give you a heads up that there actually isn’t much that has changed in the support plan. There is just one or two additional fields. But absolutely I’ll talk to my colleagues over in business about making sure that once we get through the design and into that build phase that we provide you with a sample of a template. I think that that’s something that should be relatively straightforward to provide. 

Online Participant: 

That would be amazing. Thank you. 

Fay Flevaras: 

We’ll take it as an action item and in our post wrap email we’ll try and put a date to it so you can know when to expect it. Thanks. 

Janine Bennett: 

Thanks so much Tracey. Appreciate the question. And if we can bring William to stage now that would be great. 

How are we going team? I think I have to ask on William’s behalf. So we’ve actually got a few questions from William and he wasn’t able to come to stage so let me go ahead. The first question is: 

Q: Are there any new requirements for the participant monthly statement? What are the legal obligations for the participant’s monthly statement? Will Government provide templates? 

Is this a good question for Emma? 

Fay Flevaras: 

It might be. But if I recall this one here, the monthly statements, there was actually a sector partner design activity for that one. So we might take that one offline and actually again provide a bit of a summary wrap on that one. And so that’s part of the change agenda to come. I might just leave that one there. 

Janine Bennett: 

Next question from William was: 

Q: What is a service group within APIs and how does it differ from other service data fields in the approved services list? 

Fay Flevaras: 

Yeah. So I’m going to redivert that one too. All the APIs, there’s a bit of a helpdesk that you can go to on that. That’s more detail than I’m across at the moment. And so just drop an email to the API support team who look after the conformance process. They’ve got virtual drop in sessions that you can actually register for and get help on the APIs and how you can code for those. So again we’ll just give you a link to the drop in session and you can go and ask the question of the experts there.  

Janine Bennett: 

Yeah. Great. If the team in the background can have a look for the link for registering for the drop in sessions and the details around that and put the information in the chat space that would be great. Okay. The next question from William is: 

Q: What are the expected timelines for NOI testing? 

Fay Flevaras: 

I’m going to guess that’s with the B2G guys. I think we might divert all of Will’s questions that way. They’re all very technical implementation specific questions beyond my current B2G expertise. 

Janine Bennett: 

All right. So just for our B2G subject matter experts that we have in the audience if you want to drop answers into the Q&A for these particular questions please feel free to do so. You can actually comment on specific questions so if you find the ones that are around APIs you can just answer Will directly there. 

Okay. And I think I might have to ask - - -  

Fay Flevaras: 

I can see one for Andrew. 

Janine Bennett: 

- - - Stephanie’s question as well. A quick question for Stephanie and then we’ll grab one for Andrew.  

Q: Hello. What will be the timing for the Services Australia to calculate client contributions? Will providers have to charge an interim amount or a percentage from service commencement? 

Is that a Catherine question? 

Catherine Veitch: 

It is. Unfortunately I don’t have a solid answer for you yet Stephanie. It’s a very important question. I know that people are wanting to understand what’s happening around transitional arrangements. But some of that is still very much being worked through. So as soon as those policy discussions have been finalised we will share that information and obviously work with our colleagues in Department of Health and Aged Care to make sure that information is made available to you and other relevant stakeholders. But it is an important one. We’re very conscious about trying to finalise that as quickly as possible. 

Fay Flevaras: 

I think that discussion is still ongoing. So I’m not sure Catherine. Do we have an ETA on when we think we might close it out to give the audience a bit of a view? Do we think it’s two weeks away, four weeks away? Just to give a bit of an ETA. 

Catherine Veitch: 

Fay I really don’t know that that sits on the Services Australia side. It’s probably one that’s sitting more in Department of Health and Aged Care space just from a policy perspective. 

Fay Flevaras: 

We’ll follow that one up. There’s a lot of detailed orientated questions here today. All good. 

Janine Bennett: 

There are. Great. I’ll give a stage warning for Mona Lisa if I could. Mona Lisa if you don’t mind putting your hand up so that the back stage people can find you. And then also if Chen can put her or his hand up as well. We’ll go ahead and queue you to come to stage. In the meantime we had a question about the aged care digital transformation maturity assessment. So someone said: 

Q: When do we receive invitations? I signed up for this some time ago. 

Fay do you want to take that one? 

Fay Flevaras: 

You can take it yourself. 

Janine Bennett: 

I was going to jump in but then I thought - - - 

Fay Flevaras: 

No. Go for it.  

Janine Bennett: 

Just to blur the lines between moderator and question answerer. So we were planning to release that self-assessment last year but as it turned out it actually conflicted with another survey that is released on a regular basis by the Department, the Pulse survey. We didn’t want to put the burden on the sector to have two surveys going at the one time so we deferred our survey. You should receive an invitation in the next week. So if you haven’t feel free to reach out to us. We can drop an email address, just our external contact email. If you don’t receive it definitely let us know. But for all those people that have nominated to participate you can expect your invite for that self-assessment in the next week. And as Fay mentioned earlier there is a really nice little feature to completing that which is that your organisation will receive a targeted report just for you which benchmarks your responses against the rest of the sector participants. So we would definitely appreciate people opting into that one. 

Okay. How are we going with Mona Lisa? Can we bring Mona Lisa to the stage? Hi Mona Lisa. Beautiful name.  

Online Participant: 

Hi. Thank you. 

Janine Bennett: 

Hi. Jump in with your question. 

Online Participant: 

So I think my question was answered before. It was the same question about APIs and when I guess it will happen to facilitate ease of data transfer to our CRM. 

Fay Flevaras: 

Yeah. We’ll definitely take that one on notice. Sorry Mona Lisa. We don’t really have the exact timing yet. We are prioritising all the critical legislative changes that have to happen for the 1st of July. It is actively being worked on though in the background and I do hope to make sure that we have a view of the timing and the catalogue next month. Fingers crossed. So hopefully that gives you a little bit more of an insight. 

Online Participant: 

Thank you. Appreciate it. 

Janine Bennett: 

Thanks Mona Lisa. Popular question so definitely one we’ll need to get an answer for. And if we can bring Chen to stage. I think we might finish up on that question. Do we have a hand up for Chen? 

No. Maybe I’ll ask the question on their behalf. 

Q: Is this integrated into a digital clinical management system? 

I’m wondering if that’s the same question. 

Andrew Dome: 

I know what the question is. Yeah. So when we were talking about our digital assistant before and I mentioned around our care notes and the ability to do voice to text. Well that’s only one half of it. It needs to go into your clinical system. If it was in a native language outside of English it would convert it into English and then put it into a clinical system. So that use case, gen AI use case that’s being done now, and now we’re looking to integrate it, yes absolutely, into our clinical systems. And we have different ones. We have ones for home and community care and a different system for RAC as well. And both those systems are looking to have that API and integration because the real value is for an employee to be able to do their case note at the point of care, it goes directly into either of those two systems depending on where they work, and the job’s done. And again it’s turning it into a sort of two minute activity, not a 15 minute one. So absolutely that is the last part of it, is integration into those clinical systems. 

Fay Flevaras: 

So Andrew given that we said yes it’s clinical systems – and I’m just picking up a thread in the Q&A from one of our other people, Brandon. He was saying: 

Q: So I know you haven’t implemented gen AI in work that involves PII. 

Well that was your first phase anyway. 

Q: But that is in your pipeline. 

Which you’re just saying now it’s integrated to the clinical systems.  

Andrew Dome: 

It’s not integrated yet. It’s not integrated. 

Fay Flevaras: 

It’s not yet. Okay. So getting there. So he’d like to know what is your thinking of maintaining the privacy of the client information whilst still exploiting the use of gen AI especially using the LLM to help caseworkers with the case notes. What have you guys thought about that link between PII, clinical and privacy? 

Andrew Dome: 

And so that’s why you need your security controls in place as part of your security program rolling out. So the reason we went with that use case which was that policies and procedures, there was no PII, there’s no PHI, personal health information in there. We knew the content in there so that was easy for us to bring it to market and production. We know that there’s PII, we know there’s PHI in clinical care notes and everything else. But we’re implementing in parallel our data classification around all of those and those files and only such time as we’ve implemented those security tools and comfortable that they are going to secure that data, that only the right people with the right access have access to that data, can we then complete that integration via that API into our clinical system. So there’s a number of programs of work happening in parallel to actually finalise that second use case. 

Fay Flevaras: 

And I think that was the key. You said only the right people with the right authorisation. Which means you’re classifying your data, you’re classifying the documents, then you’ve got role based authentication that connects the right people to the right data at the right time so that it’s not just surfacing up all information to anyone. It’s actually only giving the right information to the right person. 

Andrew Dome: 

Yeah. And that’s probably the biggest fear of most executives and board members when you are talking about the gen AI journey. What are you doing, what controls have you put in place, what are they and what are they going to restrict and make sure the right access, data is secure, it’s only going to the right people. 

Janine Bennett: 

There’s a question about in-house or offshore development when you created the app which I think speaks probably to the security piece as well. Quick answer on that one? 

Andrew Dome: 

So we used Microsoft in conjunction with a partner. That partner was majority onshore. And when we’re talking about offshore it was New Zealand. So there was a few people over there that were assisting. But it was predominantly onshore development and the impact on our team was our resource and time to help facilitate and do the Azure work. So combination but most of it was onshore. 

Janine Bennett: 

Great. And one really good question which I’ll just try and sneak in very fast. Are you providing the devices from your organisation or are employees using their own devices? 

Andrew Dome: 

That is a great question. I did see it earlier. So we’ve got an interesting situation in our HAC where we provide the hardware, and that always has been the case. So that first use case where we want to have our case note for a client in HAC is going to be via a Uniting issued device. When we pivot across to RAC where we actually have people using their own devices we’re just working through the process to do that by updating our BYOD policy, making sure that they’re enrolled in Intune so again we’ve got the security and controls around there and it’s done in a safe and reliable way as you can imagine. So it’s actually a bit of a mindset change of Uniting of how we’re going to approach RAC. But if we’re focusing on HAC which is our first use case for this one they’re absolutely provided by Uniting. 

Janine Bennett: 

Great. Thank you very much. I’m going to have to call that. We’ve run right up to the wire. Thank you so much Andrew. Lots of positive comments about the gen AI journey that Uniting has taken. ‘Looks fabulous’, ‘Love your work’ are a couple of the quotes I can pull from the questions. Really popular subject and super interesting. Catherine thank you for coming along from Services Australia. And Marguerite always great to have your branch here and nice to have a first time Tech Talk presenter as well. And unfortunately Emma our policy lead didn’t arrive on time but we have heaps of questions that we can follow up with our business stakeholders later and come back to the group. So thank you very much all. That is our Tech Talk. 
 
Please, be aware that our next Tech Talk is scheduled for Wednesday, the 2nd of April. Please mark this one off in your diaries. If there are any agenda items that you would like to see discussed, we're happy for you to email us, and let us know in advance, and we'll do our very best to cover that material at the next Tech Talk. As always, a reminder that this is an open forum. We love to see the diversity of views and opinions. If you know others who would be interested in this topic, please share the link to the tech talks with them. And with that, FYI, I'll, encourage folks to complete the post event survey available from the QR code and hand back over to you. 

Fay Flevaras: 

 

Thanks very much. Thank you. And thank you, Janine, for a great moderating, as per usual, and to all of you in the audience, it's been lovely to be with you here again. We hope you found the session insightful. We apologize. There's always way more questions than we can get, to you. And sometimes we don't always have the answers at hand, but, we absolutely will take them all away and make sure we get them answered and put them in our post event, item that you can have access to, to our sector partners in the audience today. 
We'll see you tomorrow. And to everyone out there, please don't hesitate to contact us. Have a wonderful afternoon and we look forward to seeing you at our next Tech Talk next month. Goodbye. For now. 

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