Summary of My Aged Care System Changes
24 July 2017
This summary document is intended to assist service providers and assessors in understanding the changes made to the My Aged Care system on 24 July 2017.
The Department undertook intensive consultation with the aged care sector in late 2016 to better understand what is, and is not working well with My Aged Care. Sector participants then had the opportunity to develop solutions across My Aged Care policy, process, system and communications in an accelerated design process with the Department. This included national workshops and 10 two-week focussed workshops.
This release is focussed on delivering a number of high priority system improvements from this process:
· User Interface styling enhancements
· Improvements to the support plan review process for assessors and service providers
· Increased offline functionality for the myAssessor application
· Enhancements to tasks and notifications
· Ability for service providers to generate a workload management report
· Enhancements to the match and refer process for assessors
· Improvements to the printed support plan
· Ability for ACAT assessors and delegates to extend home care package take-up deadline by 28 days on behalf of a client
· Notification of home care correspondence report for ACAT assessors and delegates
· Improvements to corrections functionality for ACAT delegates
· Improved access for assessor and provider staff assigned at the organisation level
· Ability for home care providers to view a history of changes to their maximum exit amount
· Changes to attachment storage in My Aged Care
If accessing this document electronically, clicking on the changes above will take you to further information on each change.
All guidance documentation (including user guides and quick reference guides) has been updated to support this system release and will be available on the DepartmentofHealth’s website shortly.
Accelerated Co-Design system changes
/What? / Why? /
User interface styling enhancements – assessor and provider portals
/ Changes have been made to the user interface of the assessor and provider portals. The new interface aims to:· Make the portals easier to use
· Introduce a cleaner, more modern user interface
· Enable a consistent user experience across all screens, and
· Have a responsible application that can work across various browsers and devices, and is optimised for different screen resolutions.
All user guides and quick reference guides have been updated to reflect the new user interface, and will be available on the department’s website shortly.
Improvements to the support plan review process – assessor and provider portals
/Currently, a large number of support plan review requests are being received by assessors via warm transfer from the contact centre, which created administrative burden for assessors in managing workloads.
· Changes will enable the contact centre to create and submit support plan review requests on system, and assessor team leads will be able to view and manage these review requests from their ‘Reviews’ section.
· The support plan review request functionality in the provider portal will also be enhanced, with a new ‘Review Requests’ tile to improve access to requesting support plan reviews, and enable providers to view and track the progress of any submitted review requests.
Requesting a review is the best on-system way to communicate with an assessor about an existing client and is preferable to the submission of a webform.
· To improve the quality and align the amount of information collected from both the service provider and contact centre, the Review Request function has been enhanced to include more structured information, including the ability to add attachments and indicate whether the review is urgent and should occur within 10 days.
To ensure that assessors are able to effectively prioritise requests for support plan reviews, you should ensure that only those reviews with a genuine urgency have this box selected.
More information on these processes is available in Quick Reference Guide 3 - Managing referrals for assessment and support plan reviews for assessors and Quick Reference Guide - Recording and updating service delivery information for providers.Accelerated Co-Design system changes
/What? / Why? /
Increased offline functionality for the myAssessor application – myAssessor app
/Enhancements have been made to the myAssessor application to significantly improve offline functionality, giving assessors the ability to:
· Fully complete an assessment on the app (aligning with the National Screening and Assessment Form in the portal)· Commence and develop a client’s support plan, including adding and editing client motivations, goals, concerns and recommendations
· Cancel an assessment from within the app
Assessors will still need to upload the client’s assessment and support plan information to the assessor portal in order to submit for delegation and/or complete match and refer for services.
Refer to the myAssessor App User Guide for further information.
Enhancements to tasks and notifications – assessor and provider portals
/A task is an activity that a portal user needs to action (finalise/close). A notification is an activity that informs the portal user of an event.
To improve usability, enhancements are being made to all task and notification functionality, including:
· Improved ability for administrators to configure task and notification preferences between outlets, including the choice to display notifications in the portal and mark tasks or notifications as important
· Changes to the content of all individual tasks and notifications and improved layout in both Tasks and Notifications tabs, including enhanced sort and filter options and additional links that will enable portal users to navigate directly to the relevant section in the portal to action the task or notification, for example, a client’s support plan to issue referrals
· Users will be able to see tasks and notifications for a single client from a tab in the client record
· Notifications will only be visible in the portal for 30 days. This will improve usability of the notifications feature.
Further information on viewing and managing tasks and notifications is available in the updated Quick Reference Guide – Tasks and Notifications for assessors and the new Quick Reference Guide – Tasks and Notifications for providers.
Accelerated Co-Design system changes
/What? / Why? /
Service Provider Workload Management Report – provider portal
/The Service Provider Workload Management Report has been reworked to assist service providers in managing the workloads of their outlets. This report is available for team leads and administrators, and can be filtered on a wider range of fields than previously available.
Staff assigned at the Organisation level will be able to generate a single report for mutliple outlets, for example, all referrals accepted by each outlet within an organisation.
Enhancements to the match and refer process for assessors – assessor portal
/The amount of service information that was available for assessors in the assessor portal during match and refer meant that many assessors use the public service finders to source appropriate providers prior to issuing service referrals. The following changes have been made to the match and refer process:
· A detailed service information page, replicating the information available in the public service finder, will also be available for assessors when searching for providers in the assessor portal
· Enhancement of the overall design as well as improving the quantity and display of provider information for assessors during the match and refer process
· Results will be grouped by relevance, displaying the service sub-types that a match has been made on.
Enhancements to Printed Support Plan – assessor and provider portals
/Previously, the printed version of the support plan displayed client goal information that is no longer relevant. Enhancements made will ensure it only shows goals and recommendations that are currently relevant, alongside general formatting improvements.
Improving My Aged Care assessor portal functionality
/What? / Why? /
Ability for ACAT assessors and delegates to extend home care package take-up deadline by 28 days on behalf of a client – assessor portal
/Currently, where a client has been assigned a home care package and would like a 28 day extension placed on their original 56 day entry period, they can either use the client portal to extend the take-up deadline themselves or are required to call the contact centre to facilitate the extension.
This change enables ACAT assessors and delegates to extend the 56 day entry period on request of the client via the assessor portal, from the ‘Approvals’ tab in the client record.
Notification of home care correspondence report – assessor portal
/ACAT assessors and deleagtes are now able to generate a report at the outlet level to display all the clients that the assessors or delegate from that outlet have nominated to receive notifications of home care correspondence for.
This report is genereated from the ’Reports and documents’ tab.
Improvements to Corrections Functionality – assessor portal
/Changes are being made to improve the corrections functionality for delegates:
· The time period delegates have to submit corrections in the assessor portal is being extended from 14 days to 42 days· Within a single correction, delegates will be able to request replacement of a care type with the same care but a different level, for example, Residential Respite or Home Care Packages
· Delegates will now be able to backdate a delegation date through the correction process
Improving My Aged Care provider and assessor portal access and usability
/What? / Why? /
Improve access for staff assigned to the Organisation level – assessor and provider portals
/ This change improves access and usability for staff assigned at the organisation level:· Service provider team leaders assigned at the organisation level will be able to retrieve referrals codes and select which outlet receives the referral
· There is now a clear distinction between staff assigned at the organisation level and outlet level, including changes to the assignment of roles in Staff administration
· Ability for staff assigned to an organisation to select which outlet they would like to view and easily navigate between outlets
Ability for home care providers to view history of changes to their maximum exit amount – provider portal
/ Currently, home care providers do not have the ability to view a history of the changes they have made to their maximum exit amount.This change will allow for the recording of a transaction history each time a change is made to a provider’s maximum exit amount for home care, and provider administrators will be able to view these changes from the ‘Outlet Administration’ section in the provider portal.
Changes to attachment storage in My Aged Care – assessor and provider portals
/ The Department continuously seeks to improve the performance of the My Aged Care system. As part of this work, in the coming weeks attachments will be moved to a more secure and robust file storage system:· This process will include a full review of all attachments stored in My Aged Care, and will remove files in My Aged Care that cannot currently be opened.
· This is a change to the underlying system and will have no impact to day to day use of the My Aged Care portals.
Further information or support
For more information on these changes, educational material (including user guides and quick reference guides) is available on the ‘Information for assessors’ page and the ‘Information for service providers’ page on the Department of Health’s website.
For technical support and assistance, the My Aged Care service provider and assessor helpline is available by calling 1800 836 799.
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