With mandated care minutes now in place, operators run a significant risk: let your occupancy drop and you may be over-spending on workforce. But reduce your staff by too much and you risk being caught out by the regulator. Could Hollywood provide a solution?

This week, we spoke to Rob Covino (pictured below), Co-founder and Partner at Mirus Australia, who will be presenting at the Aged & Community Care Providers Association (ACCPA) conference next Friday morning (27 October) on the lessons the sector can take from the experience he had working at US tech company IBM (SPSS) in the early 2000s.

A baseball team, the Oakland Athletics MLB team, approached them with an idea, and the need for a statistical software package to create a new data-driven approach to baseball. Now known as ‘Moneyball’, this approach inspired both a book and a film starring Brad Pitt (pictured above).

‘Moneyball’ disrupted the traditional player recruitment process by using empirical analysis of play performance to build a competitive baseball team despite Oakland’s relatively small budget.

Rob argues that the residential aged care sector should take the same approach to the Australian National Aged Care Classification (AN-ACC) model introduced 12 months ago.

Quoting Billy Beane, “We need to change the way we think about the game,” he said.

With AN-ACC now hedged to a provider’s direct care minute requirements, operators need to move to a data-driven approach to funding, Rob explained.

“Providers have a very different game ahead of them with what AN-ACC requires in terms of mandated care time intricately intertwined with funding. We still see groups trying to utilise conventional methods, like maximising revenue and not giving enough attention to the workforce side,” he said.

"The sector must reorganise its business units, fostering collaboration among admissions, rostering, and funding teams to effectively develop business scenarios around known and predicted AN-ACC data."

“The key to that is being in control of the empirical data and then adjusting the data points that you need to forward plan operations. That will bring you into alignment on compliance, care time and funding; putting you in control of AN-ACC.”

The SOURCE: Under AN-ACC, providers need to take a data-driven approach to ensure that their businesses are both financially sustainable and meeting compliance demands. How many operators don’t have the systems to deliver the required data?