Advancing innovation and productivity in the care sector

Australia’s care system is facing significant structural challenges and solving them is essential for long-term economic performance.

There is rising demand from an ageing population with a higher chronic disease burden. There is also a drive to lift the quality of care for the disability, aged, and early childhood sectors to improve outcomes.

Improving sector productivity is a key priority for policymakers because it is essential to the Australian system’s ability to deliver world-leading outcomes.

We find four high-impact, low-risk tech opportunities that could generate over $2 billion in productivity gains in the NDIS alone, or over $13 billion if rolled out across the care sector.

We focused on four innovations in the NDIS that are feasible today, impactful, and able to safeguard against downside harm risks:

• Optimising NDIS matching and scheduling through digital care marketplaces, to make it easier for participants to get the care they need
• Automated NDIS invoice generation and processing, to help service providers generate invoices and plan managers process invoices faster
• Streamlining NDIS specialist and allied health referral pathways through a specialist platform, to improve the efficiency of connections between primary and secondary care
• Improving the efficiency of data exchange between NDIS service providers to make it easier for providers to communicate and reduce the burden on participants in retelling their story

Achieving this mission will require governments to develop four strong pillars in the care sector:

• Reliable digital infrastructure will provide the foundations on which providers can build innovative consumer-facing products that improve care outcomes
• An ingrained culture of innovation in care will create the comfort and social license for providers to introduce new digital tools into care settings
• Coordination between actors, including governments, innovators, care providers, community partners, and educators, to ensure alignment in priorities and actions across the sector
• Sophisticated public sector capability, to ensure the public sector has the skills and resources to deliver on the mission

Read and download the full report here.