A new platform that gives providers access to verified information about employees’ work history and training is gaining momentum across the industry.
The Aged Care Development Network, which launched two years ago, is working with the Aged Care Guild and ACIA to roll out its OnePassport technology to members.
The platform enables providers to know where else staff are working or have worked in the past and what training they have completed.
“Our organisation is very much like the Law Society. We give career pathway information, education opportunities and a member awards program, underpinned by technology to track a worker as they move through their career across the industry. The providers get a benefit from being able to track the workers outside of their organisation,” Founding CEO Michael Maher told Inside Ageing at the Aged Care IT conference in Sydney this week.
“We have just under 11,000 individuals as members now, the majority joining when an employer comes on board, bringing their entire workforce and saying this is their new risk mitigation system internally,” Maher said.
Maher maintains that privacy is the bedrock of the platform and people’s information can only be seen by employers that they ‘connect’ with when they become an employee.
“It’s a private register, so if you have a OnePassport no one can see it unless you say that you work for them. The record maintains most of the stuff that you’d have on a CV anyway,” Maher said.
“In the middle is an API driven marketplace and it tracks people as they work around the different providers, training providers, police checks etc.”
“When you update something the interested parties get notified. Interested parties such as employers and RTOs can also push information in to the central system, over time creating a record of verified data,” he said.
Individuals can sign up for free, but providers wanting to access the data will soon be asked to pay a membership fee of about $500 per year.
“We have a whole lot of services to the employer around the data. API connectors cost about $70,000 per site if you go with a commercial API provider. We provide one through CareHQ at a fraction of the cost but it covers our costs,” Maher said.
The network offers a human resources platform and cloud-based statistical analysis software, and helps organisations meet the existing aged care standards.
“We have a growth roadmap. We have connections with a number of RTOs, TAFEs and universities in Melbourne. We want to replicate that around Australia so everyone who graduates with a Cert III in Individual Support they automatically get a OnePassport.”
This then becomes the first piece of verified information in a person’s OnePassport, showing their qualification, duration of study and from where they graduated.
Maher admits that not all courses are the same or equal, but said while the network does want to move into advocacy, it will not be reviewing or assessing courses.
“We do a lot with the education side and I’ve met with some great educators in aged care. For example in Melbourne the aged care providers in the south east put together a white paper and said that if you want to send your students to us for practical placement we expect this many weeks of classroom 3-4 days a week, this many hours of practical placement et cetera,” Maher said.
He said that when the RTOs pushed back, the providers said too bad – if you want to put your students in our homes for practical placement with the potential for employment, this is what we expect.
“So there are groups out there like that who have a much better understanding than we do to be able to do that. It’s not reinventing the wheel, it’s about partnerships,” he said.
Maher said the Network is in early discussions with LASA about partnering but it has not gone down that path with ACSA as yet.
Note – an earlier version of this article reported ACDN has signed LASA on to roll OnePassport out to its members. ACDN has retracted this statement and clarified it with the above information.
