Australia’s aged care sector is experiencing pressure from all angles. The ageing population drives demand for aged care services with residential and in-home care providers, but there are challenges. Mainly, keeping an eye on costs, occupancies, service levels, managing shortages in skilled staff and being able to respond to the Government’s increased scrutiny, compliance and regulatory oversight. All of this puts increased pressure on providers to have effective governance systems in place that better leverage technology, namely data and analytics in aged care, to improve care levels, operations and reporting.
The establishment of the Australian Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (the Commission) has had a massive and lasting impact on the industry with its mandatory reporting requirements and Quality Standards imposed on aged care providers. The aim is to provide regular transparency in quality of care and business performance levels with a view to improving care standards across the board for older Australians. Such sweeping changes to Quality Standards also dictate that it is equally important that providers keep pace and operate integrated data systems that align with the new reporting environment.
While most aged care providers would have some sort of analytics technology in place to report on performance, many also struggle with fragmented data strewn across multiple spreadsheets and systems. These are usually not centrally stored, managed and updated. Recent mergers and acquisitions within the industry has also exacerbated this issue. Too often than not this process involves manual and complex collection, integration and analysis of that data. This puts added strain on already overburdened and understaffed IT teams, meaning many aged care providers are still playing catch up.
In fact, a recent Sector Performance Report by the Commission (April to June 2024) has shown that 81% of residential care providers were fully compliant with all requirements of the Aged Care Quality Standards. Even though this is up from 58% compliance at the beginning of the previous financial year (2022-2023), it still means 19% of residential providers are non-compliant. The biggest concern however is with in home care providers. Only 65% of home services providers were fully compliant with the relevant Quality Standards, compared with a 46% compliance rate at the start of the previous financial year. While this is an improvement, compliance rates for in home services still lag well behind those for residential care and have much work to do to measure up. To assist with this, below are three useful tips that providers can use to bolster their data and analytics in aged care capabilities to help meet these demands.
1. Review Aged Care Data & Analytics Readiness
Assessing your organisation’s data and analytics aged care readiness and maturity levels is a critical first step in identifying problem areas and any gaps that need to be addressed when looking to enhance or embark on a data and analytics initiative. Start by conducting a review of your current data and analytics capabilities across the following six core competency areas to identify where gaps exist.
- Leadership & Commitment – Evaluate the extent to which senior leaders view data and analytics as a strategic asset, as top-level support is essential.
- Business Engagement – The degree and competency to which each area of the business adopts and uses data and analytics today.
- Skills & Competencies – The level of internal data and analytics design and development skills available to understand if external data and analytics partners are required.
- Data Readiness – The degree to which data is accurate, available, integrated, secure and structured for analytics and decision making.
- Technology – The effectiveness of the data and analytics systems to support the evolving needs of the business.
- Data Governance – The level of development of structures and policies to govern and support access to data for those that need it.
This will help to plan for improvements, focus attention on the areas that require attention and serve as a benchmark against which progress can be measured. A project scope area can then be defined, followed by a more detailed project Scope & Design to set out the approach and deliverables for an initial phase of the program.
2. How To Use Data & Analytics To Improve Care Services & Performance
Aged care facilities and providers have access to a substantial amount of rich information about the people they care for and their facilities. With data so readily available the key to harness this, is to use data analytics tools like Microsoft’s Power BI for example. To provide up-to-the-minute visibility into Quality Indicators, care levels and performance in the form of intuitive dashboards and reports that staff can easily access, use and scale cost efficiently. In addition to ensuring compliance reporting needs are met, it should be easy to move from a summarised view of the data to a detailed granular view simply by clicking a filter in the dashboard. At BoomData, we work with aged care providers in the area of data and analytics to deliver visibility into the following:
Quality of Care – Analytics should provide an indepth understanding of:
- Resident / Recipient Health Monitoring across Quality Indicator areas to detect patterns, predict health risks and enable early intervention. Analyse resident or patient behavioural data to predict when more intensive care may be required.
- Care Plan Effectiveness – Are you measuring the effectiveness of care plans based on resident or recipient outcomes and satisfaction?
- Incident Reporting – Monitor and analyse falls, medication errors, infections and other safety incidents to identify patterns and root causes.
- Facility Utilisation – Understand occupancy rates, resident turnover and waitlists to optimise capacity management.
- Service Optimisation – Understand the usage patterns and waiting times for different services offered (eg. Home care, day therapy, telehealth, assistive care technologies) to understand how to align to demand and adjust staffing and pricing.
- Resident / Family / Client Engagement – Track and analyse feedback, complaint data, incident reports and regulatory violations to ensure swift resolution and to prevent re-occurrence.
Financial Performance – Understanding the financial health of the business and providing accurate and timely financial reporting. This should cover accounts receivable, accounts payable, analyse cash flows and understand demand levels to optimise resourcing, know the cost to serve and profitability of residents/clients, facilities and care offerings like nursing, meals and therapies. Track and manage operational costs understanding drivers of high-cost areas like labour at a granular level. What are the revenue and cost variances to plan, key financial ratios and financial position? All should be easy to articulate and find.
Revenue Performance – Maximise revenue efficiency with clear visibility into actual revenue contributions versus targets. Analyse revenue streams (Government subsidies, private contributions and out-of-pocket expenses). What areas, facilities and care services are performing well and where is improvement needed. How does this differ by residents / care recipients and locations. How you are tracking to plan and forecast?
Procurement – Keep an eye on spending and procurement, understanding who is buying from who and are you maximising supplier terms.
Staffing & Capability – With labour as one of the highest contributors to costs for aged care providers, keeping abreast of these costs and matching demand of services to the right resources and levels is critical. Analytics should provide granular detail into training and development, recruitment and workforce management. Understanding employee satisfaction levels, productivity, turnover rates, staff workloads, shift patterns and absenteeism can allow costs to be managed, rosters to be optimised and staff to be kept happy. Predictive analytics can even forecast staffing needs based on recipient care levels.
Regulatory Compliance – With the increased requirement for transparency and regulatory reporting in aged care it should be an easy process to see if your organisation is meeting regulations and compliance standards and providing the necessary reporting for areas outlined in the National Aged Care Quality Indicator Program. If this is a challenge or requires manual data processes or wrangling complicated systems, then it may be time for an overhaul.
3. The Importance Of Good Data Management
To analyse performance and adhere to stringent reporting requirements good data management practices and technologies are critical to implement. This is about having an effective data platform and data governance program in place to support analytics. Data pipelines should be automated, that means data from all sources whether this be from spreadsheets or different systems, should be integrated, transformed and reside in a central data repository without having to manually manipulate the data. This could be a data store for smaller businesses or a data warehouse or data lakehouse such as Microsoft Azure / Fabric, Snowflake or Databricks for mid sized or larger aged care providers.
Many organisations are now using modern cloud-based data platforms as they offer cost, scalability and flexibility advantages. They don’t require investment in IT servers, are highly secure and can provide the foundation for more advanced predictive and AI-driven analytics than on-premise options. This will ensure a single version of the numbers and that data is accurate, reliable, accessible and easy to analyse for decision making. Once the data platform is in place creating a framework of rules and processes around how data is collected, secured, accessed and defined at each stage of the data lifecycle, should form the basis of a data governance program. This will ensure data is of a high quality, secure and can be trusted for reporting on an ongoing basis.
So Where To From Here?
In an era where aged care is becoming ever more critical to the sustainability of entire communities, data and analytics in aged care is surfacing as one of the industry’s most important lifelines. With aged care providers continually under the spotlight it is important that residential and in-home care providers keep pace by unifying their data and better leveraging analytics and insights. This involves reviewing data readiness and maturity to identify gaps, adhering to better data management practices with the use of modern cloud-based data platforms and using analytics systems that provide business insight while also aligning with the new regulatory reporting environment. This will help improve quality of life of those in care, the ability to better manage staff, costs and facilities and ensure compliance with Government’s increased regulatory oversight.
