Challenge: Residential aged care facilities (RACFs) in Australia use a variety of software solutions to collect and manage data related to the assessments and care of residents. There is variation in the data collected and representation of such data in these solutions which makes data sharing very difficult and hinders benchmarking of care quality across provider organisations.

Data: The Aged Care Data Compare (ACDC) Project is developing a data hub to assemble de-identified resident assessment data from several RACFs in standardised form and enable benchmarking of the care quality of providers against their peers.

Solution: The data hub will be underpinned by health data standards to support the exchange of resident assessment data and a central repository to store assessment data supplied by participating RACFs. The health data exchange standard will be developed using FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), a HL7 (Health Level Seven) specification. The data items and definitions in the interRAI long-term care facility instrument will be adopted to standardise the assessment items while FHIR will be used to standardise their representations. KeyPoint will be used to benchmark individual provider care quality against other providers using a set of quality indicators, a critical part of the overall solution.

Transformation: The project expects to trial the data hub with data collected from about 30 RACFs.