The leader of the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), Australia’s national health and welfare information and statistics agency, Dr Zoran Bolevich says that better use of data can accelerate aged care reform, with the agency wanting to collaborate and codesign to jointly deliver a better model for the future.

Speaking at ITAC 2026 last week Dr Bolevich said, “It means lifting capability, including capability around how data is used well and used for improvement beyond claims and compliance, building nationally consistent data infrastructure and co-designing outputs with the sector that solve real service and business problems.

“It should look like two-way data flows provided to AIHW and back again, and then using that data for benchmarking, in modelling that providers can use to improve their services, and finally, reporting that is meaningful to providers and to consumers under strong safeguards,” he said.

Dr Bolevich gave the example of a partnership with Primary Health Networks. “Primary care has had some strong digitisation over the years and PHNs in recent years have made a lot of progress increasingly collecting data from general practice, but what we are doing with them now is setting up a joint governance mechanism so that we can really bring this together into a national primary healthcare data collection that can then become a joint asset that can be used for improvement in that system.

Following the journey

Dr Bolevich said the “big step change” comes when we can follow the person’s journey across settings, not just connectivity within individual silos and individual programmes.

“The royal commission made it clear reform needs better data, quality, coverage and availability, and the key is doing this in a way that’s person-centred, interoperable and standardising – while at the same time reducing burden and filling gaps like those we have with workforce, data, diversity, care, needs and outcomes.

“That was the commission’s view and since then we have seen some real momentum.”

He noted the improvements in various provider facing systems, interoperability work “that is starting to connect the whole ecosystem,” strengthened minimum data sets, new assessment and quality reporting mechanisms.

Dr Bolevich said with over 150 data sets managed across many domains of health, aged care, disability, housing and other social services, AIHW had a unique vantage point to look across all those sectors.

“Good data lets us see demand and capacity pressures clearly, enables understanding of excess and flow, supports workforce planning and makes transparent evidence-based conversations possible.

“Demand is shifting rapidly toward in-home support and that really changes everything about planning and capacity.”

He added, “We know that viability and investment are now core issues for this sector, so tracking of expenditure trends is important. But what would be even more powerful is if we could connect spending to outcomes and experience, which we can’t currently do, so the decision makers can see value and not just cost of service provision.

The collection ‘burden’

“The good news is that many quality indicators have significantly improved over time. But we know that these indicators have limitations because they aggregate service level indicators without person level context. Some indicators are hard to interpret. And also, collection burden is a real issue for the sector, because many of these measures sit outside your routine clinical system, so there is a duplicated dialogue.

He said, “The direction of travel here is right, but the opportunity now for the sector is to mature this with more granular and comparable data, which is collected as a by-product of day to day clinical care, and then providing feedback to services on a regular basis – because that’s where the innovation and improvement happens, not in the department or the AIHW.

“People don’t move in a straight line. They move across home support, respite, short term care – and sometimes back again, and when you can see those flows, you can plan for demand, you can understand pressure points at different junctures in this pathway, and you can design interventions that match real journeys for people.”

“Right now, the sector feels burden and fragmentation, unclear purpose for some types of data collection. There is also uneven capability across the sector, and feedback loops back to providers are weak, and so data feels like compliance and cost rather than improvement and opportunity. And that’s the gap that we need to close going forward, shorten the path from collection of data to value to customers, to consumers and to businesses.

Dr Bolevich said the sector was seeing trends which would “help us on the journey” such as maturing linkage methods, improving analytics, AI making a change in how data is prepared and analysed, and stronger governance models making data projects safe.

Dr Bolevich was appointed the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in June 2024. Prior to this, Dr Bolevich was the Chief Executive of eHealth NSW and the Chief Information Officer for NSW Health.

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