Aged Care Funding Instrument or ACFI is a means of allocating a subsidy provided by the Australian government for residential aged care services. ACFI was introduced to the public back in March 2008 and was implemented by the Australian government with the aid of the Department of Health and Aging (DoHA) and Medicare Australia. Its primary goal is to address the care needs of local residents, to reduce required documents and to create a more defined agreement between aged care providers and department review officers.
ACFI includes 12 questions for the residents to answer and each question have 4 various ratings and are divided into 2 parts. This assessment is used to determine the specific needs of the residents of aged care establishments which are subsidized by the government. Residents are given a corresponding fund based on their needs. About $5 billion is allotted by the Australian government each year to help take care of the needs of older citizens of their country.
ACFI is divided into 3 parts which are Activities of Daily Living, Cognition and Behavior, and Complex Health Care. Questions regarding nutrition, personal hygiene, mobility, continence and toileting would belong to Activities of Daily Living. Questions pertaining to cognitive skills, wandering, depression and verbal and physical behavior are part of Cognition and Behavior. Questions about medication and complex health problems are all under Complex Health Care.
The submission of ACFI application could either be done electronically or paper-based. You will select from 3 different choices if you're to send the application electronically. It could be sent through the Business to Business (B2B) channel, the web form channel or the file upload channel. If you do not have access to those three ways, paper-based submission is the way to go. As much as possible, residents are encouraged to have the application sent electronically so that it could be processed instantly and there would be no funding delays. All applications are sent to Medicare Australia and they're the ones to do the assessment.
Medicare Australia created a training environment to help residents in processing their ACFI application on line. Aged Care On line Claiming Training is a website made to help residents familiarize themselves with the procedure. Among the other processes taught to residents are steps how to register, view their payment statements, utilizing appropriate codes and viewing their profile.
There are about 3,000 aged care providers taking care of about 150,000 residents in Australia. To ensure that their needs are provided for, ACFI was created. It replaced the last system, Resident Classification Scale (RCS) as it no longer meets the requirements of the residents nowadays. To make ACFI better and more efficient, there are studies which are still ongoing.
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