Elite ServiceNow Partner · Aged Care Specialist

Aged care is being transformed from every direction.

A new generation of older Australians expects dignity, choice, and seamless care across every setting. The sector is consolidating at pace. The care continuum — from home to hospital to residential — is under structural pressure. And through it all, your care workers are spending 30 to 40 percent of every shift on admin, not people. Novabridge builds the operational infrastructure that lets providers respond — whatever the source of change.

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30–40% of care worker shifts lost to admin — not residents

59% of residential homes operating at a loss (StewartBrown, 2024)

780→~100 providers projected in the sector within 3 years (KPMG)

1.4M Australians receiving aged care services annually

What Is Actually Driving Change

Reform is one pressure. There are three others.

The aged care sector's transformation is not simply a regulatory story. Four compounding forces are reshaping what providers must do — and how they must operate — to remain viable and trusted.

Consumer Expectations

The people entering care today expect something different.

Baby boomers are not their parents' generation of aged care residents. They are more vocal, more informed, and less willing to accept a passive role in their own care. They expect dignity, genuine choice, personalised services, and the ability to stay engaged with community, family, and purpose — whether in a home care setting, a retirement village, or residential care.

Innovative providers are already responding. Intergenerational living models like the University of Canberra and Opal HealthCare partnership at Bruce Campus — integrating residential aged care, retirement living, and campus life in a 100-year precinct — reflect the direction the market is heading. Those with the operational agility to deliver person-centred care at scale will lead.

The Care Continuum

The journey from home to hospital to aged care is broken.

As one sector veteran noted from decades of hospital and aged care leadership: hospitals discharge sub-acute patients to free up beds — only to see the same person rebound within days because adequate aged care services were not accessible. This cycle costs the health system, it harms patients, and it exposes a structural failure in how acute, primary, and aged care intersect.

Allied health, rehabilitation, step-down care, GP access, dental, grief and bereavement support — the holistic services that genuinely restore function and dignity — fall through the gaps between funding systems. The providers who can coordinate across this continuum, with clear records, integrated workflows, and joined-up communication, will be the ones who actually improve outcomes rather than managing transfers.

M&A and Consolidation

The sector is consolidating. Fast. And operations don't automatically merge.

Private equity is moving in. Pacific Equity Partners holds a majority stake in Opal HealthCare. Aware Super acquired Keyton. Australian Unity absorbed MyHomecare Group. KPMG projects the number of residential providers could shrink from around 780 to approximately 100 within three years as the financial and compliance burden pushes marginal operators toward exits or acquisition.

Acquisitions bring workforce complexity — different HR systems, different credentialing records, different compliance frameworks. They bring procurement complexity — new supplier relationships, inconsistent contract terms, uncontrolled spend. And they bring governance complexity. Providers who have structured, scalable operational systems in place are better positioned to absorb new sites cleanly, retain staff through transitions, and surface financial risks before they become crises.

Regulatory Reform

The compliance burden falls heaviest on the providers who need it least.

The Aged Care Act 2024 introduced strengthened obligations across workforce governance, incident reporting, quality standards attestation, and board accountability. These are important. But as respected sector leaders have noted openly, the regulatory response has been calibrated to the worst performers — and is being applied uniformly to all. Well-governed providers with sophisticated care and clinical systems find themselves diverted from innovation and care delivery to demonstrating compliance they already achieve.

The answer is not to resist compliance — it is to handle it efficiently. When your incident reporting, workforce credentialing, and quality evidence systems run as structured workflows rather than manual processes, compliance becomes a by-product of good operations. Not a separate, resource-intensive programme.

The tsunami of regulatory compliance reporting and checking should be even more risk-focused and oriented toward supporting and exiting poor providers — not burdening high-quality operators who are already achieving excellent care outcomes.

Stephen Muggleton — Outgoing CEO, Bolton Clarke · One of Australia's largest not-for-profit aged care providers

The Operational Reality

Your people are capable of more. The systems are holding them back.

The average aged care provider is running more than 20 standalone software packages. Every process that crosses a system boundary — onboarding a new care worker, responding to an incident, processing a supplier invoice, coordinating a resident's allied health referral — requires someone to manually bridge the gap.

That is not inefficiency. That is the inevitable cost of fragmented infrastructure. And it accumulates: in minutes taken from residents, in errors made under pressure, in compliance risks that surface too late, and in care workers who came to the sector to provide care — not to navigate software.

Novabridge has spent three years working at the intersection of aged care operations and ServiceNow technology. We understand what the workflows actually look like — not from generic configuration guides, but from having built the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing's own platform, and from live implementations with HammondCare and Uniting NSW.ACT.

Workforce onboarding takes days, not hours Credential checks, police clearances, mandatory training enrolment and equipment provisioning are tracked manually across multiple systems — or not tracked at all until there's a gap.
Incident reporting is reactive, not structured When something goes wrong, the pressure to respond quickly conflicts with the need to document carefully. Ad hoc processes mean inconsistent records and delayed notifications.
Procurement spend is invisible until it's a problem Purchase requests via email, informal approvals, supplier invoices matched manually. In a sector where margins are already razor-thin, uncontrolled spend is a material risk.
M&A integrations expose operational fragility Acquiring new sites or merging workforces surfaces every gap in your systems. Without a structured operational platform, integration timelines stretch and workforce continuity suffers.
Care continuity across settings falls through the gaps Coordinating a resident's transition between home, hospital, and residential care requires real-time information sharing. Most providers are doing this via phone, email, and PDF attachments.

Our Track Record

We've worked inside the sector. Not just alongside it.

Novabridge has built ServiceNow solutions for the organisations at the very heart of Australia's aged care and health ecosystem — from the Federal regulator to frontline care providers at scale.

Department of Health, Disability and Ageing

The regulator's own platform — built by Novabridge

We designed and implemented the ServiceNow ESM platform that underpins how DHDA manages service delivery, workforce, IT operations, procurement, and cyber response. 200,000+ assets under management. This is the department that administers the Aged Care Act and governs the ACQSC. We understand the regulatory intent at source — not from guidance documents, but from having built the infrastructure it runs on.

ITSM · ITOM · ITAM · HR · Procurement · Cyber

Uniting NSW.ACT

Trusted to review and optimise one of Australia's most complex ServiceNow environments.

Platform advisory and strategic recommendations — including AI strategy alignment — for a 9,000-staff, 150,000-client organisation. One of Australia's largest aged and disability care providers, with complex multi-site operations and an enterprise-wide AI agenda Novabridge was engaged to help unlock further value from.

Platform Review · AI Strategy · Enterprise Advisory

HammondCare

Enterprise-grade operations for a values-led provider

One of Australia's most respected not-for-profit aged care providers made a deliberate choice to invest in enterprise operational infrastructure. Novabridge built Hardware Asset Management on top of HammondCare's existing ServiceNow ITSM foundation, going live in 2026. The technology leadership team chose Novabridge because of our sector depth — not our generic IT credentials.

Hardware Asset Management (HAM) · Built on existing ITSM · Live 2026

Canberra Health Services / Calvary

Workforce integration under real M&A pressure

When the ACT Government compulsorily acquired Calvary Hospital in 2023, Novabridge delivered rapid workforce onboarding and system integration under genuine time and care-continuity pressure. Tight deadlines. High stakes. No tolerance for disruption to patient care. A live M&A reference in a care setting that no general IT firm can replicate.

M&A Integration · Workforce Onboarding · Health Sector

ServiceNow for Aged Care

25 pre-built workflows. One connected platform.

Pre-configured for aged care operations — the terminology, the compliance requirements, the reporting structures. Not a generic enterprise template adapted after the fact.

HR & Workforce

HRSD Module

From onboarding a new care worker to managing credential expiry, mandatory training, and offboarding — all structured, automated, and audit-ready.

Health & Safety

H&S Module

Incident reporting workflows built to legislative timelines. When a regulator asks you to demonstrate governance, you open one system — not six.

Facilities & Operations

WSD Module

Maintenance, asset lifecycle, visitor management — the operational rhythm of running a residential site, without the spreadsheets and reactive calls.

Procurement & Finance Ops

Source-to-Pay Module

Full visibility over where every dollar goes — with controls that stop unauthorised spend before it happens. Essential when margins are already under pressure.

Legal & Compliance

LSD Module

Contracts, regulatory tracking, and audit evidence in one managed environment. Compliance becomes a by-product of structured operations — not a separate programme.

IT Service Management

ITSM Module

Enterprise IT operations without the enterprise IT team. A single service portal for staff. A structured queue for whoever resolves it. Cyber response built in.

Where the Sector Is Heading

The providers shaping the future are building differently.

The operational complexity of the next decade is already visible in the deals, models, and partnerships being announced today. The question is whether your systems are built to handle it.

Intergenerational Living

Integrated campus models

The University of Canberra, Opal HealthCare and Pariter announced ACT's first intergenerational retirement and aged care community in November 2025 — 230 independent living units, 180-bed residential care, and a 100-year land lease integrating aged care into university campus life. The operational complexity of multi-use, multi-stakeholder precincts demands connected, scalable systems.

Private Capital

PE and institutional ownership accelerating

Pacific Equity Partners, Aware Super, and Australian Unity are among the major capital players now reshaping sector ownership. Private equity expects financial transparency, operational scalability, and governance infrastructure commensurate with their portfolio standards. Providers operating on manual systems are unlikely to pass due diligence — and unlikely to survive integration cleanly.

Care at Home

The home care growth imperative

Home care package numbers have grown 40% under recent reform. The expectation that older Australians remain at home longer — supported by allied health, reablement services, and community connection — is driving demand for workforce coordination, scheduling visibility, and transition management that most home care operators are not yet equipped to deliver at scale.

Workforce Retention

Losing carers to avoidable admin

Annual care worker turnover sits between 25 and 50 percent in residential settings. The sector needs 400,000 additional workers by 2040. Carers leave because the work is hard — but also because the systems make it harder than it needs to be. Reducing administrative burden is not just an efficiency argument. It is a retention argument.

System Interconnection

The hospital pressure is flowing downstream

State Health Ministers are under acute pressure to free hospital beds. That pressure flows directly into aged care — with providers expected to absorb sub-acute patients faster and support transitions that the health system can no longer manage internally. Without operational infrastructure that spans the transition — care records, referral workflows, intake management — the rebound cycle continues.

Innovation in Care

Person-centred models gaining ground

Dementia care models, community home care frameworks, and integrated living developments based on people, place, and participation are demonstrating what better looks like. As one sector CEO put it: best practice care models in practice define policy settings more powerfully than advocacy. The providers building these models need operational infrastructure that supports, not constrains, innovation.

How We Deliver It

Enterprise capability without the enterprise overhead.

For organisations with 200 to 3,000 staff, the barrier to ServiceNow has always been the same: enterprise workflow platforms built for enterprise-sized budgets and internal IT teams. That barrier is gone.

Novabridge operates a shared, domain-separated ServiceNow subscription platform that we own, host, and maintain on your behalf. You access a fully configured, pre-built aged care operational environment from day one. We handle the platform, the upgrades, the security, and the support. You focus on care.

For larger organisations — 3,000+ staff, multi-site complexity, or M&A integration requirements — Novabridge delivers a tailored implementation drawing on the same aged care accelerators and reference architecture.

The same ServiceNow platform used by DHDA, HammondCare, and Uniting NSW.ACT — accessible to any provider
No large upfront capital commitment. No multi-year implementation before value is visible
Pre-built aged care workflows — operational from day one, not day ninety
Scales from 200-person home care operators to multi-thousand-site residential groups
Built to absorb M&A complexity — new sites, new workforces, new compliance obligations