Australia's aged care sector is undergoing the most significant reform in its history. New legislation, new funding models, new quality expectations and growing demand are reshaping how care is delivered. Behind each of these reforms sits a less visible challenge. Information.
Every aged care provider collects data: assessment, care planning, medication, workforce, quality indicator and financial data. Yet many providers, clinicians, consumers and policymakers continue to struggle to access the right information at the right time. The problem is not simply a lack of technology. It is a lack of connection between information, systems and people.
This was the motivation behind The Australian Aged Care Data Landscape, a project undertaken through a collaboration between the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre and CSIRO's Australian e-Health Research Centre. As a contributor and co-author, I worked alongside researchers, providers, clinicians, consumers and government stakeholders to understand how information is collected, shared and used across the aged care sector.
Data exists throughout the sector, but information often does not flow effectively between those who need it.
Why the project was needed
The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety highlighted significant shortcomings in the collection, use and availability of information across the aged care sector. Four years later, substantial progress had been made through digital transformation initiatives, new policy directions and increased investment in aged care technology, but what remained unclear was how these changes had altered the overall information landscape.
The project examined the sector from multiple perspectives: older Australians and their carers, residential and community care providers, clinicians, allied health professionals, researchers, software vendors, and government agencies and policymakers.
Understanding the aged care information ecosystem
One of the most important findings was that aged care should be viewed as an information ecosystem rather than a collection of standalone systems. Assessments inform care planning. Care delivery generates observations and outcomes. Providers report to government. Clinicians rely on the same information when providing healthcare. Researchers and policymakers seek insights from aggregated datasets.
Many aged care systems were originally designed around administration, claims processing and compliance reporting. Interoperability was often a secondary consideration. The result is that information is frequently re-entered, reconciled manually or transferred through inefficient processes.
The challenge of interoperability
The aged care and healthcare sectors share many information requirements: accurate identification of individuals, consistent care information, assessment data, clinical observations and coordinated care planning. Yet information exchange between aged care and healthcare remains limited, creating challenges during transitions of care, hospital admissions, discharge planning and multidisciplinary care delivery.
The report identified opportunities to improve information sharing through common data languages, national standards and more consistent approaches to information governance.
More than a technology problem
Aged care data challenges are rarely technology challenges alone. Workforce capability shapes data quality; governance and policy settings shape how willingly data gets shared; and standards adoption decides whether systems can actually talk to each other. Even good data goes unused if staff don't trust it or know how to read it. Improving outcomes means looking past the software and at these harder, slower-moving factors.
Conclusion
The Australian Aged Care Data Landscape was, on its face, a study about information. But it landed on something bigger: real progress had been made across the sector, and there was still plenty of room to improve how information gets collected, governed, shared and used.
Connected information leads to connected care, and connected care tends to produce better outcomes. That was the report's central message, and it's a problem the aged care sector is still working through today.
Read more about the report at CSIRO and the Digital Health Cooperative Research Centre.