How we are co-designing for care minutes
March 9, 2022 | AN-ACC
By Shannon Sanderson, National Business Development Manager
Mirus is currently working with over 40 providers on their transition to AN-ACC. One of the most significant changes will be the connection of the funding associated with AN-ACC classifications to the minimum care minute requirements. Compliance to care minutes will change over the next few years with the following schedule being currently written into legislation:
- 1 Oct 2022 200 mins including 40 mins RN – compliance to star rating only
- 1 July 2023 24/7 RN becomes mandatory
- 1 Oct 2023 mandatory 200/40 mins
- 1 Oct 2024 mandatory 215 mins including 44 mins RN
Whilst care minutes are not mandatory until October 2023 we are now in the timeframe where providers’ care minutes have a 22% weighting towards their star rating to be published on My Aged Care by the end of 2022. Quarterly Financial Reporting (QFR) will be the mechanism that the Department will use to track the conformance to the minimum care minutes. The first QFR period began on 1 July 2022 and so it is not surprising that one of the key questions we are getting at the moment is about how to track care minutes. The answer is, the least manual process possible! The key systems will be your rostering platform (or your payroll system if you do not have costed rosters) and your finance system. Between these systems, most of the data should be captured.
The first consideration is understanding your care minute definitions and making sure as many rostered roles as possible will be in your rostering platform. Any roles that sit outside, including agency, will be much harder to track. When we move into a more regulated care minute world (which may practically start sooner than we think) then the ability to have a “source of truth” will be key. Any manual processing will ultimately rely on individuals and tracking files and versions which are okay for a point in time analysis (like once a year) but once quarterly it will be increasingly hard to trace back to.
At Mirus, we are all about co-designing solutions with the aged care sector. We have listened to our clients concerns about the logistics of putting care minutes into practice. In response to this, we have been working hard to refresh our funding and workforce technology so that providers can easily receive the minimum care minutes, direct from Medicare, by resident, daily. Added to this we can translate the minutes requirement into demand templates for a roster and we can even measure rostered/worked hours against the targets in real time.
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The AN-ACC funding model will bring several important changes to your finances, people, processes, data, and systems. Our team has been focused on the aged care sector for over a decade and we bring this experience, coupled with the combined experiences of our clients, to help you plan for these changes.
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