The Department of Health and Aged Care is rolling out a hospital portal into the My Aged Care system which will allow authorised discharge planning staff to view a summary of a patient’s aged care assessment information.

The portal is being rolled out to over 270 hospitals in the next few months and is aimed at streamlining the discharge process.

Hospital-based staff will be able to search for a client registered in My Aged Care, view a summary of a client’s current aged care services and aged care approvals, their most recent assessment service and latest assessment date, and to add notes to a client record and attachments such as hospital discharge summaries.

DoHAC first assistant secretary for digital transformation and delivery – aged care reform Fay Flevaras told an industry webinar last week that the portal capability will be rolled out to a further 273 hospitals over the coming months.

The webinar also heard that work was continuing on the aged care transfer summary document that is being planned to improve clinical handover as older people move from healthcare providers and their home.

The Australian Digital Health Agency’s branch manager for program and project delivery, Laura Toyne, said the transfer summary was expected to be available in the My Health Record system towards the end of the calendar year.

“We’ve got some vendor workshops and jurisdiction workshops that are underway at the moment,” she said. “And we’ve had quite a large engagement in some of the user design elements of the aged care transfer summary.”

Ms Toyne said the agency was currently working with 14 aged care software vendors to ensure their products were conformant and integrated with My Health Record. There is also a large piece of work currently underway on the development of clinical information system standards for aged care, which are expected to be available in mid 2024.

Ms Flevaras also provided more details of the new government provider management system (GPMS) that the department is building on its Salesforce platform to support the delivery of a number of initiatives already up and running, including the recently released star ratings system, the quality indicators program and new financial reporting requirements.

New quality indicator data will be added to the system from April 1, including six new quality indicators for residential aged care relating to activities of daily living, incontinence care, hospitalisation, workforce, consumer experience, and quality of life.