With funding from the Australian Government Department of Social Services, the AIHW is preparing advice for Australian governments on the changes needed to collect nationally consistent data on government-funded specialist family and domestic violence (FDV) services providing a crisis response to victim-survivors of FDV. A key component of this advice will be the changes required to the existing information technology infrastructure that would underpin these potential data flows. AIHW is seeking an external organisation to consult with key stakeholders to identify current capability gaps and provide options for addressing these.

1. Background

AIHW is aware of around 17 Client Management Systems (CMS) used by service outlets providing in-scope services in Australia to manage their client data, developed by around 13 software developers. AIHW is seeking an external organisation to evaluate the capacity of these CMS systems to collect and extract the proposed national FDV service data and what further system developments would be required to enable this.

2. Context

• Key stakeholders
• AIHW’s family and domestic violence, homelessness and ICT areas
• CMS developers
• Some state and territory coordinating areas
• Potentially some FDV service outlets
• Constraints
• Ensure ease of use and system simplicity
• Minimise data provider burden and avoid duplicated effort
• Out of scope
• Statistical analysis and reporting of FDV service data.
• Developing data standards
• Building or implementing any ICT tool

3. Key Deliverables and Acceptance

Liaise with key stakeholders to:

• Evaluate the capacity of existing CMS systems to support the proposed FDV service data collection and extraction requirements.
• Where CMS systems have capability gaps, investigate their capacity to be further developed by their developers to meet these criteria and the likely timelines, resources and costs involved for each
• Also, where CMS systems have capability gaps, investigate whether an alternate data collection tool could successfully fill these gaps and document what would be the best technical solutions and associated costs for these.

The findings will be presented in a report for the AIHW and will include:

• An executive summary
• Description of the discovery work undertaken including stakeholder consultations and processes for evaluating CMS system capabilities
• Detail on the capability gaps found for each of the current CMS systems and what the likely timelines, resourcing and funding that would be needed to address these gaps.
• Detail on whether any alternate data collection approach(es) would be feasible and any proposed technical solution(s) and associated costs for collating data from FDV service outlets.
• Information on any critical issues and an easy-to-understand, plain-English statement of the recommended way forward
• Presentation of key findings to AIHW staff.

Refer to Attachment A for the Detailed Statement of Work.