Aged care software under the new Aged Care Act

What changed for aged care systems on 1 November 2025?

Three things at once: a new rights based Act, a new in home care program, and strengthened Quality Standards, all from the same date. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing says the new Aged Care Act started on 1 November 2025, aligned with the launch of Support at Home. Support at Home replaced the Home Care Packages Program and the Short-Term Restorative Care Programme that day. The Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission says the strengthened Quality Standards are part of the new Act and applied from 1 November 2025.

Change	What it means for provider software
Aged Care Act 2024 commenced	Rights based obligations need to show up in care planning, consent, complaints and records
Support at Home replaced HCP and STRC	New funding classifications, budgets, services, pricing and participant contributions in client, billing and claiming systems
Strengthened Quality Standards applied	Evidence mapped to 7 new standards rather than the previous 8
Serious Incident Response Scheme continues under the new Act	Incident systems need Priority 1 and Priority 2 handling across residential and home services

The Commonwealth Home Support Program continues as a separate program on the department’s site; check its current status before planning changes that affect entry level home support.

Build, buy or integrate?

Buy the core platform, and spend custom budget on the joins between systems and on reporting. Aged care platforms for residential and home care absorb regulatory change for all their customers, and a provider building its own clinical and care management system takes on that burden permanently. Few providers should.

Where custom work tends to pay off:

• Integrations. Rostering, payroll, accounting, clinical systems, pharmacy and family communication tools that don’t talk to each other properly.
• Reporting. A data warehouse that combines platform data with rostering and finance to answer questions the platform’s reports can’t, such as budget use across a Support at Home portfolio or care minutes against rosters.
• Workflow gaps. A specific intake, assessment or quality process the platform handles poorly.
• Bounded AI. Drafting and summarising for staff review, described below.

Our data analytics and workflow automation services cover most of this work.

What reporting do provider systems have to support?

Residential and home care providers report through different programs, and the quality of what you submit shapes how you are regulated and how families see you. At the time of writing (November 2026), the main reporting streams that touch software are these.

Reporting stream	Who	What your systems need to produce
Serious Incident Response Scheme (SIRS)	Residential and home services	Incident records with priority, notification within 24 hours (Priority 1) or 30 days (Priority 2), and follow up
Quality Indicator Program	Residential aged care homes	Data on 14 quality indicators, submitted through the Government Provider Management System; the department publishes recording templates
Care minutes and 24/7 registered nurses	Residential aged care homes	Minimum care minutes per resident per day and evidence of a registered nurse onsite and on duty at all times
Star Ratings	Residential aged care homes	Published by the department overall and across Residents’ Experience, Compliance, Staffing and Quality Measures
Support at Home claiming and contributions	Registered Support at Home providers	Services delivered against each participant’s classification and budget, provider prices and contributions collected

The practical lesson is that reporting should be generated from operational data, not assembled by hand at the end of each quarter. Manual assembly is slow, and it is where errors creep into figures that end up in Star Ratings.

Why is incident management harder in home care?

Because the worker who sees the incident is usually alone in someone’s home, and the clock for a Priority 1 notification starts when the provider becomes aware, not when the paperwork reaches the office. In a residential home there is a nurse on duty and a manager down the corridor. In home services, the first report often comes from a support worker on a phone between visits, or from a family member ringing the office.

That changes what good software looks like. Recording an incident has to take minutes on a phone, work with poor reception and save a draft if the connection drops. The record needs the time the worker became aware, captured automatically, and a route to a person who can decide the priority quickly, including after hours. Calls from families and the public need a way into the same incident record, so a concern raised by phone isn’t lost in someone’s inbox. And because the same older person may receive services from several workers in a week, the system should link related incidents and flag patterns, such as repeated falls or missed medication, before they become serious.

What does Support at Home mean for billing and budgets?

Support at Home moves providers from package balances to classifications, budgets, set services and participant contributions, and billing systems have to reflect each of those. According to the department, participants accessing ongoing services are assigned one of 8 funding classifications based on their assessed needs, and some may receive interim funding. Providers are responsible for setting reasonable prices, collecting participant contributions and helping participants understand them. Participants contribute to independence and everyday living services, but not to clinical supports such as nursing care.

For the software, that means:

1. Each service delivered is recorded against the right service type, so contributions are calculated only where they apply.
2. Budgets are tracked in near real time, so care managers see what is left before booking more services.
3. Prices are maintained in one place and versioned, so an invoice can always be traced to the price in force on the day.
4. Statements to participants are clear enough that a family member can check them.

Your platform vendor will handle much of this. Where billing, rostering and accounting are split across systems, an integration that keeps them consistent prevents the most common errors.

How do you evidence the strengthened Quality Standards?

By keeping the evidence where the work happens, and mapping it to each standard’s outcomes. The Commission lists the 7 strengthened standards as The individual, The organisation, The care and services, The environment, Clinical care, Food and nutrition, and The residential community. Each has an intent, an expectation statement describing what the older person can expect, and outcomes describing what providers must do.

A simple evidence map, maintained in software rather than a spreadsheet, makes audits less painful:

• For each outcome, list the records that show it is met: care plans, assessments, consent records, complaints, incident reviews, training, menus, audits.
• Link those records automatically from the systems that hold them, rather than copying documents into a folder.
• Show gaps: outcomes with no recent evidence, overdue reviews, expired training.
• Keep the history, so you can show improvement over time, not only the current state.

What should you ask an aged care platform vendor?

Ask how the platform handles the new rules today, how it gets your data out, and what it costs to connect other systems to it. The answers decide how much custom work you will need later. A short due diligence list:

Question	Why it matters
How does the platform model Support at Home classifications, budgets and contributions, and when did it ship those features?	Shows whether the vendor kept pace with the 1 November 2025 changes or is still catching up
Can it produce QI Program, care minutes and SIRS records directly, or does someone rebuild them in spreadsheets?	Manual rebuilding is where reporting errors start
Does it have a documented API, and is API access included or charged separately?	Integrations and reporting depend on it
Can you export all your data, including history and attachments, in a usable format?	Protects you if you change vendors
Where is data hosted, including backups and any AI features?	Health information should stay in Australia unless you have assessed otherwise
How are role based access and audit logs configured, and can you review them?	Needed for privacy and for showing who changed a record
What does the vendor do when the rules change again?	Aged care reform is ongoing, and you want the vendor carrying that load

If a vendor can’t answer the API and export questions clearly, budget for the integration and reporting work that will follow, or keep looking.

Where can AI help in aged care, and where can’t it?

AI is useful for reducing documentation load, with a qualified person approving every output, and it must stay away from clinical and safety decisions. Reasonable uses include drafting progress notes from a carer’s dictated summary, summarising a resident’s recent notes before a care plan review, reading hospital discharge summaries to prefill fields for staff to confirm, and answering staff questions from your own policies with citations.

The red lines are clear. AI should not decide whether an incident is reportable or what priority it is, change a care plan, give clinical advice to residents or families, or be trained on resident data unless that use has been assessed, disclosed and approved. The controls on our AI in healthcare page apply directly: clinician sign off, links back to source records, and testing for omissions as well as errors.

Privacy of health and care information

Most of what an aged care provider holds is health information, which is sensitive information under the Privacy Act, and a business that provides a health service and holds health information is covered whatever its turnover. That means role based access, a full audit trail, Australian hosting for records, backups and AI processing, retention rules and a tested breach response. Our Privacy Act and AI guide and the data residency explainer cover the detail.

How AWLabs approaches aged care projects

We start by finding out what your current platform already does, and recommend configuration or vendor support where that is enough. Where custom work is needed, every build starts with our Discovery Audit, a fixed fee credited in full against the build, and after two strategy sessions you receive a fixed price Schedule of Work with three options: The Minimum, The Recommended and The Complete. Senior engineers lead every build and review every change, updates arrive every Tuesday and Friday, Sydney time, and the code and IP are assigned to you as they are paid for. We haven’t yet delivered a project for an aged care provider and hold no approvals specific to aged care; your clinical governance and compliance leads own the regulatory interpretation. Disability providers should also see our NDIS provider software page, and the healthcare page covers the wider sector.