Novel informatics approach for automated reporting of aged care quality measures

Project description, aims, design and method, findings and benefits

Description

Australian residential aged care providers are required by the National Aged Carre Mandatory Quality Indicator Program (QI Program) to report on eleven quality indicators (e.g., falls); however, reporting processes are resource intensive and lack clear guidelines. This project will develop and test an innovative electronic Residential Aged Care Quality Indicators (eRAC-QI) portal to automate and standardise the QI Program reporting processes. Harnessing extensive electronic data through intelligent data mining and cutting-edge automated reporting approaches, the eRAC-QI portal will minimise manual effort and ensure unified computation of quality metrics. The portal will have immediate application for Aged care providers across the Country.

Aims

1. Develop the eRAC-QI portal, a novel informatics-based platform to automate the data extraction, transformation and computation of the QI Program quality indicators through and open-source system while standardising QI Program reporting process in alignment with sent requirement of QI Program;
2. Examine the accuracy and validity of automatically/electronically calculated indicators data from the eRAC-QI portal to ensure high-quality data reporting;
3. Assess the usability, acceptability and adaptability of the eRAC-QI portal in rel world practices and contexts.

Design and method

Novel automated quality reporting approaches (such as sustainable efficient data linkages, statistical data analytics and machine learning including the computational text mining will be applied in design and developmentof the eRAC-QI portal. Such automated quality metric reporting approaches have demonstrated high accuracy, specificity and sensitivity by minimising manual involvement and business.

This project will utilise routinely collected residential aged care provider data, which provides a broad array of administrative and clinical records that are up-to-date and readily accessible.

This project will develop informatics platform on an open-sourced tool (e.g., RShiny) which can empower all aged care providers to seamlessly incorporate routinely collected data for automating the QI Program reporting.

Findings

The anticipated outcomes of the project are:

1. A prototype of an innovative eRAC-QI portal that can efficiently and effectively automate and standardise the QI Program reporting;
2. Preliminary data regarding the accuracy and validity of electronically/automated generated data by the eRAC-QI portal;
3. Preliminary data regarding the RAC care providers’ user experience and feedback through a small-scale trial in Anglicare

Benefits

This is a highly feasible, applicable and efficient solution (i.e., the eRAC-QI portal), which will reduce the burden on RAC providers in the QI Program reporting and facilitate standardised data processing, contributing to a unified QI Program data extraction and reporting system.