Aged Care Solutions

There is a question I ask every aged care facility manager within the first five minutes of a consultation: “How many hours per week does your care coordinator spend on the phone chasing allied health providers?” The answer is almost always the same — somewhere between eight and fifteen hours. That is an entire day, sometimes two, spent leaving voicemails for physiotherapists, emailing occupational therapists about visit schedules, and manually updating care plans after each visit.

Australia’s aged care sector is under more scrutiny than ever. The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety fundamentally reshaped expectations around care quality, documentation, and transparency. The Aged Care Quality Standards require facilities to demonstrate that residents receive coordinated, person-centred care — and that means documentation, scheduling, and follow-up that actually works. For most facilities, especially smaller residential care homes running 30-80 beds, meeting these standards relies heavily on manual processes that break down under pressure.

The operational reality of running an aged care facility in 2025 looks something like this: a care coordinator manages relationships with fifteen to twenty external allied health providers — physiotherapists, occupational therapists, speech pathologists, podiatrists, dietitians, psychologists. Each provider has their own scheduling preferences, invoicing processes, and communication styles. Referrals require GP approval. Visit schedules need to align with facility routines, meal times, and other appointments. After each visit, the provider’s notes need to be incorporated into the resident’s care plan, which then needs to be communicated to nursing staff on all three shifts.

Most facilities manage this with a combination of spreadsheets, email chains, a wall calendar in the care coordinator’s office, and institutional knowledge that lives entirely in one person’s head. When that person takes leave or changes roles, the system collapses. Providers miss visits. Families do not get updates. Compliance documentation falls behind. The new Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards, effective from July 2025, will only intensify this pressure — with explicit requirements around allied health integration, clinical governance, and resident outcome tracking.

The financial model compounds the problem. Aged care operates on thin margins — the average residential aged care facility in Australia runs at 1-3% EBITDA, and roughly 60% of facilities operated at a loss in recent years according to StewartBrown survey data. Every hour spent on administrative coordination is an hour that cannot be spent on direct care, and staffing is already the sector’s most acute crisis. The mandatory care minute targets (200 minutes per resident per day, including 40 registered nurse minutes) mean facilities cannot afford to have clinical staff pulled into administrative tasks. Yet that is exactly what happens when the coordination systems are manual.

Family communication is the other area where small facilities struggle disproportionately. Families expect regular updates — and the Aged Care Quality Standards require meaningful engagement with residents and their representatives. But a facility with 60 residents might have 120-180 family contacts, each with different communication preferences and expectations. Sending personalised updates, notifying families of incidents within required timeframes, and documenting all communication for audit purposes is a full-time job that most facilities do not have the headcount to support.

The facilities I work with do not need a new platform. They already run AlayaCare or CareSmartz360 for care management, Xero for invoicing, Gmail for communication, and Google Calendar for scheduling. What they need is for these systems to work together — so that when a physiotherapist confirms a visit, the calendar updates, the nursing staff are notified, the family receives an update, and the care plan reflects the latest assessment. That chain of events currently requires a care coordinator to manually perform six to eight steps across four different systems. Automation reduces it to zero manual steps with the coordinator reviewing exceptions.

The articles below address the specific coordination challenges that consume the most administrative time in aged care facilities — starting with allied health coordination, which is consistently the single largest administrative burden outside of rostering. Each article includes real workflows, actual time savings, and the compliance context that makes these automations essential rather than optional.