The DoHAC's chief digital information officer acknowledged that the 1 July deadline is looming too quickly for all that needs to be done.
As aged care providers continue to worry that they don’t have all the information and resources they need to survive the 1 July implementation of the new Aged Care Act, the woman driving the transformation has admitted there’s a lot to get done.
Fay Flevaras, chief digital information officer for the Department of Health and Aged Care, told the audience at the Digital Health Festival in Melbourne yesterday that “it won’t be perfect from day one”.
“We recognise that there’s a lot of change coming … And we acknowledge that it won’t be perfect from day one,” she said.
“We will work together to keep testing and learning. It’s a massive change.
“The bottom line is, for the Aged Care Act to be successful, it requires a really sound digital foundation and a suite of digital enablers in place so that we can start to iterate on it and continue to build and automate as we go.”
Those “good foundations” include the DoHAC’s flagship platform My Aged Care, which is customer-facing.
The second is the integrated assessment tool (IAT) which was rolled out in December 2024 and is intended to simplify and improve access to all aged care settings.
Parts of the IAT are still being rolled out, including the First Nations assessment organisation which will be launched on 1 July.
The third is the government provider management system, a new cloud-based solution introduced as part of the reforms.
The fourth foundation is the business to government gateway.
“This is the solution that works hand in glove with the other systems where we can automate the information sharing we’ve shared,” said Ms Flevaras.
“Only a few short years ago, there was only one of the above solutions – My Aged Care.
“In the last two to three years we have expanded the aged care platforms and ecosystem, readying ourselves, with those good foundations for the 1 July reforms.
“We’ve reimagined how health and aged care systems can be integrated with one another, and so they’re digital solutions for people.”
Ms Flevaras said the department had asked for aged care providers to volunteer to talk about the impacts of the reforms on their operations.
Using a set of 48 “I can” statements, providers were able to say, “if I can answer ‘I can’ to these statements then I’m well on the way to being ready for 1 July”, she said.
Ms Flevaras told the conference that out of the 48 statements there were only “about seven areas of interest that we’ve been speaking to everyone about where to get ready”.
“That’s not too bad,” she said.
The department was also trying to assess digital maturity in the aged care sector, she said.
“We wanted to better understand how much is being invested, what assistance (providers) needed, and to evaluate the impact and the value proposition around that investment,” she said.
” We expect our provider reports to be out by the end of the month and then hopefully in the future we can use this to track digital maturity in the aged care sector.”
Given where the sector was three years ago, Ms Flevaras said “we’ve come a really long way”.