This week, the Aged Care Industry Information Technology Council (ACIITC) released its report on digital maturity in Australia's aged care system. The aim of the project was to give providers an idea of how their digital maturity compared to other providers in the sector, and provide them with a tool for improvement.
Improving technology in the aged care sector was a recommendation of the Aged Care Royal Commission (Recommendations 68 and 109).
To gain a measure of the sector's digital maturity, ACIITC conducted two surveys which were answered by 165 residential aged care and home care providers, representing 56,000 residents - or 9.6% of the sector and 30% of residential aged care consumers.
ACIITC attributed the "low response rate" to "the significant pressure and survey fatigue that the sector is experiencing".
The surveys identified a wide spread of digital maturity, from small organisations with almost non-existent digital maturity to large residential providers who scored well across a range of measures. However, there was not necessarily any strong correlation between an organisation's size and their digital maturity.
They found both strength and weakness in the digital maturity of Australia's aged care providers, measured on a scale of 0 to 6, as shown in the table at the top of this article.
Cybersecurity measures, communication technology, and digital leadership at a board level all scored relatively well.
However, a significant lack of innovation, low usage of predictive analytics, and almost zero client access of digital systems were weaknesses revealed by the surveys.
However, there were improvements on the results of a similar survey conducted in 2020. There was an increase in the use of Phishing Protection Software, more staff had access to records, there was greater use of technology for communications, more organisations had cyber insurance to cover all aspects of disaster situations relating to technology, and there was greater ownership of technology at board level.
As a result of the surveys, ACIITC has developed two toolkits for providers to help them improve their digital maturity - one distributed to organisations that took part in the digital maturity survey, and one, proposed, to be made permanently available to aged care organisations.
The report is available here.
