Project Overview
Choosing an aged care home is a significant decision for older Australians and their loved ones. Knowing that a provider can deliver high-quality care is critical to making the right choice. The introduction of Star Ratings in December 2022 has made this choice easier for older Australians and their families.
One of the key recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety (Royal Commission) was the need for measurable information on the quality of care to support older Australians to compare the care across different aged care homes.
To deliver this recommendation, Liquid worked with the Department and various partners to design, develop, and deliver Star Ratings.
Measured against four key areas – Residents’ Experience, Compliance, Quality Measures, and Staffing – Star Ratings are a simple way to show the quality of care at an aged home and how they compare to others.
This project was about increasing transparency and enabling older Australians to make informed decisions about aged care homes they might be considering or are already living in.
Using a human-centered design approach, Star Ratings is the result of extensive consultation, prototyping, user testing, and iteration based on user insights, to create a rating system that is valuable and easy to understand and use. The Star Ratings are easy to find on the award-winning My Aged Care website, designed and managed by Liquid for the Department.
Project Commissioner
Department of Health and Aged Care
Project Creator
Team
This project was delivered by the Department of Health and Aged Care (Client) and Liquid Interactive (Strategy and Experience Design and Technical Delivery).
Project Brief
With more than 4 million Australians now over 65 and expected to live into their 80s, more people are needing aged care services than ever before. However, the aged care ecosystem is complex to navigate with more than 2,000 providers that offer different services with different costs.
One of the challenges for people considering their options was to know if a home provided a good quality of care and if they or their loved one would be safe, happy, and looked after well.
Experiences shared with the Royal Commission and other investigations made it clear the quality of care in some homes needed to be improved. To help address this, the Royal Commission recommended the development of a Star Ratings scheme to allow older people and their families to make meaningful comparisons of the quality and safety performance of aged care providers.
Our goal in this project was to understand how to create a level playing field across all aged care providers, with data presented in a way that was usable and meaningful to older Australians, helping them to make critical decisions and ask the right questions, and know what to expect from a facility.
Equally, those receiving care could use the ratings to compare their service provider to others so that they could make informed decisions about their future. It was also important this information was available to families of older people, advocacy organizations, policymakers, and legislators.
Project Need
Through extensive consultation and user testing, we heard how important but difficult it was to understand and compare the quality of care provided by an aged care home.
Introducing and applying a Star Ratings scheme to all aged care homes was a significant undertaking by the Department. However, the innovation of this project was doing so with the cooperation of the industry, in a short time frame, with available data, and in a way that was meaningful to older Australians.
To help solve this, we started this project with research to understand the customer’s decision-making criteria and process, what older Australians understood and considered as part of the quality of care, and how to frame it in a way that was clear and easy to understand.
Through a process of iterative testing and refinement from conceptual to detailed design, we also tested the level of detail that would be helpful for older Australians in their decision-making process, achieving a balance between full transparency for those who needed it, without overwhelming those who didn’t.
Much of the terminology used by Government and industry didn’t resonate with older Australians. Even the labels used to describe the one-to-five star scale were contentious, with some seeing terms such as “good”, “bad” or “average” as too subjective.
Consumers were looking for certainty in the independence and trust of the star rating and therefore wanted to know if was a Government rating and clarity in what it was rating.
User Experience
How could we introduce performance data in a way that was meaningful for people and easy to compare? How could we bring together the disparate and complex data into one easy-to-use interface?
Our approach needed to be collaborative and steeped in human-centered design.
We worked with the Department and the University of Queensland, PwC, and Accenture to bring together over 50 data points per facility relating to compliance, quality indicators, staffing levels, and residents' feedback.
Our team then conducted prototyping and iterated based on user insights to create a rating system that would be valuable to older Australians and easy to understand and use.
User testing delivered rich insights into the perception of a star rating, including subjectivity and labeling. Our challenge was to ensure we communicated and framed the ratings in a way that was clear and informative but avoided common connotations associated with star ratings, that they’re based on user-generated reviews or relate to the quality or cost of the facility.
We also needed to ensure older Australians were informed but not overwhelmed with information throughout the journey. This helped us to determine not only which health issues were considered important indicators of whether a home was providing high-quality care to its residents, but how much detail Australians needed about each of those indicators.
The Star Ratings user experience is simple in its execution, but it achieves its purpose of increasing transparency and helping older people make informed choices.
Project Marketing
This project addressed a significant pain point for people navigating the aged care ecosystem and made visible the quality of care and treatment of older Australians in aged care homes.
Our team stitched together content from varied, and at times incomplete data sets, to deliver transparency, ownership, and accountability throughout the sector.
It delivered a key recommendation of the Royal Commission and created an online experience with a human-centered approach.
Feedback from users shows that the project isn’t just about providing peace of mind for Australians, it helps people feel more confident about the decision to move into a home and equips them with questions they should ask prior.
“I visited the site as I was looking for the star rating on a nursing home that had been recommended for my husband. My experience was positive… Keep up the good work.” – Carer, 75-84
“The aged care home ratings are a great addition, well done.” – Industry professional, 40-49
Since its launch in December 2022, user engagement with My Aged Care has shown the positive impact of the Star Ratings project. We’ve seen a marked increase and improvement in how people find a provider on the website. From December 2022 to June 2023, 27% of aged care searches included the star rating filter and aged care provider searches improved by 24%.
Through innovative human-centred design and iterative user experience improvements, My Aged Care continues to empower people to make informed decisions about care options.
Project Privacy
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https://www.liquidinteractive.com.au/privacy
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