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“I look at this as a transformation for the nation,” said Fay Flevaras, First Assistant Secretary, Digital Transformation and Delivery, Australian Department of Health and Aged Care. “We're all only getting older so it's just as important to the individual as it is to the community that we look after our elderly.”
The Australian Department of Health and Aged Care is responsible for delivering an affordable, quality aged care system and better outcomes for older Australians as well as the people who care for them. This work relies on three key groups working together: (1) the customer at the heart of the mission, which includes family or caregivers/advocates, (2) wider government network, tasked with making procedure and policy decisions that affect everything from service eligibility to resource availability, and (3) the ecosystem of care providers (senior living facilities and home support, for example) who need the tools to efficiently operate as they work to deliver connected care. Which is where Flevaras and her team come in.
“We work to give care providers a way to operate as one team, and create a space where clients can get transparency around the services they need,” Flevaras continued. “This means we've had to reimagine our approach, embrace human-centred design principles, and make it easier for clients and providers to interact with the government so that they might take better advantage of all that we have to offer.”
What Flevaras and team are delivering serves as a change management example for any department, agency, or ministry looking to: (a) define success in a way that is transparent, objective, and ever-improving, (b) empower people to make more informed decisions about the services they are looking to receive, and (c) create a connected experience across the government ecosystem.
This strategy has enabled us to free up time for people delivering care to focus more energy and attention on that critical work. That’s what it means to deliver a human-centred design. That’s what it means to transform the mission and enable the whole of government.
Fay FlevarasFirst Assistant Secretary, Digital Transformation and Delivery, Australian Department of Health and Aged Care
In its annual government trends research, Gartner identified 10 trends that are poised to not only impact organisations as we move into a post-digital era (where digital processes and operations are the new normal), but also serve as a call-to-action, such as:
In other words, AI, data, and CRM trends are calling for a more advanced IT strategy if departments, agencies, and ministries are to stay relevant.
For organisations like Aged Care that are doing things like defining what quality care plan looks like based off historical best practices (AI), holding care providers accountable for delivering safe and quality care (data), and sharing it all in an actionable and transparent manner (CRM), requires “a platform capable of supporting this level of change, a platform capable of making this all actually happen,” said Flevaras. “We had a royal commission into the sector, and they had 148 recommendations for upgrading the system we used to support interactions with the aged care sector. We prioritised the list and then tackled them one by one, asking ourselves ‘what problem do people need solved first in order to make the administrative work as frictionless as possible?,’” and what they came up with is a portal environment with the potential to reform care at an industry level.
Prioritising plans around a human-centred mindset is just one of four best practices Flevaras and team demonstrate in this work — best practices that make for a great starting point for any digital transformation to-do list.
Flevaras and team launched the Government Provider Management System (GPMS) — a platform using Salesforce for Public Sector to enable (amongst other things) a provider star rating system not unlike a digital, Yelp-style community portal. It enables service providers to share critical compliance and reporting data with government and, in doing so, helps people make more informed decisions and helping Aged Care derive more value and insights from those touch points. It also offers extensive interoperability with AWS, thanks to it being deployed on Salesforce’s Hyperforce instance.
Here’s how it works:
Self-service community environment
Care providers are invited to sign up by logging into the portal with their government-issued digital identity via an online log in page built using Public Sector Solutions.
When the care provider clicks confirm, it automatically triggers an email with a verification code, granting them access to set up a profile. A dynamic form guides the care provider through the profile set up, presenting only the fields that are relevant to their profile type based on a set of “if this, then that” workflow rules.
Once the care provider’s profile has been created, they are directed to the main portal, built on Experience Cloud. Here, they can receive messages and announcements from the government, manage users on behalf of their organisation, or “view calculated star ratings” which is where the informed decision making aspect really comes into play.
Data accessibility and transparency
“We collect and bring together a minimum of 356 data elements per service provider. Things like quality of the service, customer satisfaction, compliance with industry regulations, and so on. We analysed the data from our service providers across these data elements, and developed the star rating system that defines what acceptable care looks like,” said Flevaras.
These ratings are published in a report, which service providers can explore via the View Star Ratings tile. Care providers can search by name, filter by recency, and click into subcategory details.
Advanced analytics and platform-level services
Tableau and CRM Analytics pull details about services rendered into visualised reports and dashboards, which the team is using to spot patterns, surface trends, pinpoint catalysts, and refine or update the star scoring system as needed.
MuleSoft enables GPMS to automatically integrate with third-party systems which providers use to share data automatically. Enabling a future where no paper forms, no spreadsheet uploads, and no manual data entry is required.
Sandbox was also layered on, giving the team an offline environment to test new features before pushing them live. Shield offers an additional layer of security through features like platform encryption, event monitoring, and two-factor authentication. And with the next release the team is launching a three month training and work experience program on myTrailhead designed to develop staff’s digital skillset.
The team received 12 months of funding initially for GPMS, had it set up in development environments three months later, pushed the first pilot live five months after that, and delivered MVP to production by the end of that year. “We rolled it out to our residential aged care community first, and are introducing two new functions every quarter,” said Flevaras. “We’re also starting to work with our counterparts across the whole of government to see how we might onboard other agencies as well, which will only help improve our continuum of care.”
Now, the team can:
Aged Care has also had over 100 private sector companies volunteer their time to co-design with the team, a testament to a strong strategy worth time, energy, and resource commitment. Flevaras and team meet with these companies every fortnight, which has given them a much-appreciated support in developing digital solutions that are human-centred and built for real-world success.
“Improved care relies on a technology enabled environment,” said Flevaras. “This strategy has enabled us to free up time for people delivering care to focus more energy and attention on that critical work. That’s what it means to deliver a human-centred design. That’s what it means to transform the mission and enable the whole of government.”
