Are you ready for the AI revolution?

Data Maturity is the Answer

  • December 24, 2025

This article was originally published by Aged Care Today in their Summer 2025 digital magazine.

Data is now integral to aged care operations. Reporting requirements have increased in recent years, and the Aged Care Act 2024 continues to raise expectations around data and reporting to government. Meanwhile, leveraging data assets can provide insights that improve participant outcomes, optimise your operational efficiency and reduce reportable incidents.

However, data is often cited as a key challenge for providers. This includes the lack of maturity in data, analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to utilise your data assets effectively. Are you well-positioned to leverage your data into actionable insights, and is your data ready for the AI revolution?

What is Data Maturity?

Data maturity refers to how much you leverage your data in decision making. For providers, data maturity can be assessed on a five-point scale:

  • meeting mandatory requirements
  • collation of data
  • analysis of information
  • predictive and prescriptive analytics
  • AI solution development.

What is Your Data Maturity Level?

As a quick assessment, your data maturity level is the highest numbered statement you can answer ’yes’ to:

  • We meet our mandatory data reporting requirements.
  • We can easily find the data that we reported for the last 12-month period.
  • Everyone in our team goes to the same place and gets the same results if asked to find the same metric.
  • We use our data analytics to predict future performance – and it’s quite accurate in key areas.
  • We trust our data and information implicitly and use it to inform all aspects of our organisation’s performance.

Most providers are at Levels 1 or 2, indicating that data assets are not considered a key contributor to participant outcomes and operational sustainability. As such, there is an opportunity cost to not leveraging the valuable data and information that you hold.

It’s important to note that this is a spectrum, and not all areas of your organisation will have the same level of maturity. A good test is to see if your clinical and non-clinical teams have access to (suitably aggregated and anonymised) information about each other's performance metrics.

How Does Data Maturity Relate to AI?

AI is a buzzword, a potential transformative force and an area of massive investment across the sector. To tailor AI solutions for your organisation, challenges and unique operating environment, you will need quality data and organisational insights. Put simply, AI is prone to the ‘garbage in, garbage out’ principle.

This leaves providers with two options. Option one is to use generic, off-the-shelf AI solutions that support general problem-solving but are not tailored to your environment. Option two is to work towards AI solutions that understand the uniqueness of your organisation and can help decision makers with tailored, specific issues that will make a difference. This second option relies on having good data to train that AI solution, and a high degree of data maturity across the organisation to realise that goal.

Can You Improve Your Data Maturity?

The good news is it’s possible to improve your data maturity. Other aged care providers have done this, and here’s how you can too.

  • From Level 1 to 2: Publish your key performance metrics for all staff, showing the historical trends, even when they’re not positive.
  • From Level 2 to 3: Create an enterprise data lake to hold all of your performance data, create a single source of truth for performance reporting, and make that available for any staff member to access and query the data.
  • From Level 3 to 4: Build a model that forecasts the likelihood of pressure injuries for patients, using the patient data that you already collect, so that clinical staff can prioritise interventions for those patients at greatest risk of these events.
  • From Level 4 to 5: Train a custom AI large-language model solution, using your own data and information, to support clients and families with their questions about entering the aged care system. Tailor it to the datasets of each of your sites, so it is specific to each home and gives the most accurate information.

Reprinted with permission from Aged Care Today.

Related Insights

Related Information

Published

December 24, 2025

temp Key Contacts

Daniel Buzacott

Managing Director

Most Popular Insights

  1. Navigating Tariffs: 10 Strategies to Protect the Bottom Line
  2. The Hidden Risk for Data Centers That No One is Talking About
  3. It’s La La Land Again in Financial Markets
  4. Geopolitical Risk Management: No Longer Just a “Nice to Have”, But a Corporate Imperative
  5. Corporate Sustainability Report

Sign up to get access to FTI Consulting Insights

Subscribe