While there is wide consensus that clinical and care related data should be concise, accurate and collected once to meet multiple care and administrative functions, the reality in Australia is far removed from this aspiration.

In residential care, the majority of homes record clinical information using a combination of risk screeners, scales and bespoke data items, that are often unique to software suppliers or even to individual homes. Some continue to use paper-based assessment protocols.

This arrangement has important consequences:
• A different ‘language’ is utilised in each home.
• Staff must be ‘retrained’ when they work in a new facility.
• Semi-automated links to care planning are difficult to design and expensive to create.
• Software vendors are reluctant to invest in clinical decision support systems as each facility requires a unique solution.
• Data is not configured in a format that facilitates sharing with other software systems that have an interest in the clinical information (e.g., general practices, hospitals).
• Data is not configured to enable automated calculation and reporting of quality indicators.

interRAI systems comprise robust, standardised clinical observations and sets of algorithms that interpret the data to produce a wide range of clinical and administrative applications. These include risk screeners (falls, pressure injury, functional decline), diagnostic screeners (under-nutrition, cognitive impairment, depression), prompts to drive care planning, outcome scales (ADL, life expectancy) and quality indicators.

Together, these data and their derivative applications, within a single assessment, are able to support a wide variety of functions that include care planning, clinical monitoring, quality improvement, casemix analysis and service planning. In jurisdictions where governments have mandated interRAI systems (e.g., Belgium, Canada, Finland, New Zealand, Switzerland), regulatory reporting (for planning, payment and quality monitoring) makes use of the very same data that is utilised for day to day clinical care. This increases data integrity and reduces documentation burden dramatically.

interRAI systems are consistently judged by independent evaluators to be best of breed. Their introduction into the Australian environment will solve many of the information problems currently endemic in the industry.

Note: interRAI systems are produced by a not-for-profit research collaborative and distributed under licence to governments and software vendors around the world.

interRAI systems are consistently judged by independent evaluators to be best of breed. Their introduction into the Australian environment will solve many of the information problems currently endemic in the industry.