Background: Our home care workforce currently provides care to over 275,000 Australians living, aging, and dying at home. With wide-ranging levels of digital competencies, palliative care knowledge, socio-cultural backgrounds and experience, Home Careworkers (HCW) involvement in co-designing and evaluating the ELDAC Home Care App (the App) was crucial in tailoring the user experience for an underserved workforce. 

Aim: As download numbers are an inadequate proxy measure to assess levels of meaningful digital interaction; the research explores the application of user-driven data capture to understand HCW patterns of engagement with digital palliative care information to support their care provision.

Method: Data capture points were coded within the App's back end during development. Accumulating anonymous user activity data seeks to describe i) patterns of user behaviour, ii) passive or active interactions, and iii) HCW intention and motivation to engage specifically with the App's palliative care information and interactive activities as indicators of digital engagement.
 

Results: With over 1000 downloads and a retention rate of 95.1%, point-in-time analysis suggests HCWs are proactively engaging widely with in-app palliative care information and activities. HCWs are motivated, curating personalised learning plans filling knowledge or practice gaps, creating bespoke self-care activity schedules, and accessing resources facilitating difficult conversations with clients around death and dying. Accumulated data patterns highlight HCW’s palliative care information needs whilst establishing extent of the App’s adoption by the home care workforce.

Conclusion: ELDAC Home Care App offers HCWs a practical guide to caring for their client's palliative care needs. Incorporating data capture as a design requirement provides valuable insights into the digital interaction behaviours of HCWs. Further, patterns of use and depth of engagement could help to identify areas where further investments by the aged care sector are needed to increase HCWs' confidence when providing palliative care to older people dying at home.