How we are co-designing for care minutes

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.

Would you like to learn more about this? Hit the Contact us button and we’ll be in touch.

Further resources:   

Maintain funding momentum by preparing for the AN-ACC transition    

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.  

Find out about our transition support service  

Need support with a rostering platform that is ready for AN-ACC?   

Our Mirus Works! workforce management software is a comprehensive rostering tool that provides real-time data and award interpretation which helps reduce unplanned overtime costs, saves you time managing rosters and enables a more engaged, more connected workforce.    

Click here to visit Mirus Works!  

For more information on AN-ACC, visit our AN-ACC Resources Hub.   

The AN-ACC Resource Hub contains tools, insights and solutions to help you prepare your organisation to transition to AN-ACC so that you’re ready for October. Find out more by visiting the Hub.   

Keep updated by joining our mailing list. You’ll be sent two emails a month packed with industry data, trends and insights. Sign up here.