I spoke at the ITAC conference in Sydney and attended a roundtable on IT in aged care hosted by the Aged Care Industry IT Council (ACIITC). There are a few excellent projects going on in aged care.
Len Gray is leading a Digital Health CRC project called Aged Care Data Compare. Len expressed great frustration with the plethora of data collection templates across the sector that makes it impossible to share or compare data. The project is working towards a standardized aged care dataset to promote consistency in data collection across the sector and support multi-purpose data use; improving care planning, decision support, quality, and government reporting.
Johanna Westbrook leads the Macquarie University Centre for Health Systems and Safety Research and has a diverse body of work focused on aged care. She is demonstrating that you can do a lot with the data that is already accessible, including a dashboard for predictive analytics and decision support.
“With the dashboard, aged care providers will be able to monitor quality indicators across their services and identify and support residents at high risk of poor outcomes. This information can also be used to assess the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of new interventions and programs,”
Her team has used EHRs to measure the prevalence of 60 health conditions of aged care residents, which I suspect guided their choice of which conditions to start with on the dashboard.
Greg Alexander was a guest speaker from Columbia University in the US and we remembered we were summer interns together at the National Library of Medicine in 2003. He has linked IT maturity of aged care facilities with clinical outcomes like antibiotic use and urinary tract infections. The premise is that if they can show that quality of care is improved by use of IT systems, they can influence policy towards IT implementation in the sector. So far, they have shown a strong correlation between digital maturity and quality.
I hope you were able to get outside Sunday and enjoy the amazing sunshine. We caught up with our dogs’ best friend Whisky, the Scottish Deer Hound.
Regional Linguistic Quirk (RLQ): I am always excited when I say something Australians haven’t heard (since it’s typically the other way around), and this week it was “going postal”. It’s an unfortunate phrase reflecting workplace rage that ended in shootouts in US Postal Service offices but is used colloquially to describe someone on the verge of breakdown from too much stress at work.
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