A diagnostic tool to help you prepare for AN-ACC

AN-ACC was highlighted in the Health Department’s August bulletin,

“The Aged Care Funding Instrument (ACFI) will transition to the new Australian National Aged Care Classification (AN-ACC) funding model on 1 October 2022.”

Mirus is committed to helping our clients through this transition by providing as much support and guidance as we can. As part of this, we have developed the Mirus ACFI to AN-ACC Pathway (MAAP), a diagnostic tool to help our clients consider key stages of preparation for the required changes across their organisation.

The diagnostic is organised into three phases across five workstreams. 

The three phases are:

1. Maintain focus on ACFI
2. The ACFI to AN-ACC transition
3. Operating in the new AN-ACC world 

The five workstreams are: 

1. Finance
2. People
3. Process
4. Data
5. Systems

The Finance workstream

In this stream, the focus is to understand the impact of the change in the funding model on your finances. In aged care, the funding model provides most of the income, so any changes to it must be taken very seriously.

The AN-ACC model will operate very differently to ACFI in several ways: 

1. The case mix model will focus and fund different attributes of care at different levels to ACFI 

2. The AN-ACC model will fund different aspects of palliative care and care for minorities and remote locations differently to ACFI or current supplements 

3. The model will operate with a National Weighted Activity Unit (NWAU) which can be adjusted by a governing body 

4. The underlying diagnostics will not be the same as those in common use today 

5. The assessment of the AN-ACC classifications will be done externally not by internal staff with validations. 

There are several steps you can take over the next 12 months to prepare for AN-ACC with respect to your finances

• Keep focused on your ACFI process, the training of your ACFI staff and the review of residents on a timely basis. 
• Consider capacity support for ACFI from external providers such as Mirus, to ensure your ACFI programs continue to fund all the care you are providing. 
• Review and transition your 12.4b programs over the next 12 months because the treatment and funding of pain management in the new AN-ACC model will likely be reduced. Alternative wellbeing programs can be considered or self-funded physio programs.
• Understand how AN-ACC will affect different facilities and resident cohorts and adjust budgets for potential changes in income scenarios.
• Make plans to have support for optimising AN-ACC processes in a similar way that you optimise your ACFI processes now.

Next month, we will bring you more on the People workstream.

The Mirus ACFI to AN-ACC Pathway (MAAP) tool is available for you to start using.

At Mirus Australia, we are committed to helping our clients through a smooth transition to the new AN-ACC world.  We will continue to bring you insights and tools to help you navigate and prepare your people and your organisation. As your organisation gets ready for this transition, please visit our dedicated AN-ACC Resource Hub page, to see tools, insights, and advice to help you prepare and manage the change with confidence.

Further reading:

AN-ACC Essentials Academy course

Key updates to AN-ACC and the Mirus AN-ACC calculator