On 1 October 2026, every personal care service under Support at Home moves from the Independence contribution category into Clinical Supports. The Government funds it in full and participants stop contributing. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing has been unusually direct about what providers should do about it: engage your ICT vendor early, and update your systems and claiming processes before the date.
That single sentence is the most useful procurement test in the sector right now. A change was announced, it is mandatory, it has a date, and it touches budgets, claims and participant statements. Your vendor either shipped it in time or did not. If you are currently weighing up a platform change, ask every shortlisted vendor what they did about 1 October, and you will learn more in five minutes than in an hour of demo.
Most buying advice in this sector stops at the feature list. But providers rarely come unstuck because they picked the wrong feature set. They come unstuck because nobody decided who was actually making the decision, the finance lead saw the contract after it was signed, and there was no exit clause. This is a guide to the part nobody writes about: running the procurement itself.
Key takeaways
- From 1 October 2026, personal care services under Support at Home move to the Clinical Supports contribution category and are fully funded by the Government, with no participant contribution. This is mandatory for all Support at Home providers delivering personal care.
- The Commonwealth Home Support Programme will transition into Support at Home no earlier than 1 July 2027, which means CHSP providers are buying software now that must handle a funding model that does not yet apply to them.
- Eight Business-to-Government (B2G) APIs are currently published by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, allowing provider software to exchange data directly with government systems including GPMS. Whether a vendor uses them is a legitimate procurement question.
- An aged care software procurement typically runs 10 to 16 weeks from requirements to signature for a small-to-mid-sized provider, before implementation begins.
- The two contract terms providers most often discover too late are data extraction on exit and the annual price escalation mechanism.
What does aged care software procurement actually involve?
Procurement is the decision process wrapped around the evaluation. Evaluation asks whether a platform is any good; procurement asks who decides, on what evidence, against whose requirements, and on what commercial terms. It has five stages: requirements, market scan and shortlist, structured demonstrations, reference and contract checks, and approval.
The distinction matters because the two get collapsed. Someone scores three platforms against a feature matrix, presents a winner, and the organisation treats that as the decision. Then the payroll officer points out the award interpretation does not match the enterprise agreement, the board asks what happens to the data if you leave, and the process restarts three months in. If you have not scored anything yet, start with a structured scoring framework and come back here.
Who should be on an aged care software selection committee?
Five roles, minimum: an executive sponsor who can approve spend, an operations or care lead who owns the day-to-day workflows, a finance lead who owns claiming and budgets, someone who will actually use it on shift, and whoever owns your data and privacy obligations. Six people is workable. Twelve is a stalemate.
The frontline seat is the one most often skipped and the one that most often predicts failure. A platform that operations approves and support workers quietly refuse to use produces worse records than the system it replaced.
| Role | What they own in the decision | The question only they can answer |
|---|---|---|
| Executive sponsor | Budget, timing, final approval | Can we afford the transition year, not just the licence? |
| Operations / care lead | Workflow fit, rostering, care planning | Does this match how we actually deliver services? |
| Finance lead | Claiming, budgets, payroll interface | Will this claim correctly under Support at Home? |
| Frontline representative | Usability on shift, mobile reality | Will staff use it without being chased? |
| Data / privacy owner | Hosting, access control, retention, exit | Where does the data live and how do we get it back? |
Write down, before the first demo, who has a vote and who has an opinion. Both are valuable. Confusing them is how procurements stall.
What should you ask aged care software vendors before shortlisting?
Send a short written requirements brief rather than a formal tender. Ten to fifteen questions is enough: current funding-model coverage, how they handled the 1 October 2026 personal care change, Support at Home and CHSP readiness, award interpretation, data hosting and extraction, integration method, implementation scope, pricing structure and contract term.
Written answers do two things a demo cannot. They create a record you can compare side by side, and they surface the questions a vendor will not answer in writing. A vendor that will happily say “yes, we handle SCHADS” on a call and will not put it in an email has told you something.
Three questions worth including that most briefs miss. Ask how the vendor found out about the 1 October change and when they shipped support for it — you are testing their regulatory monitoring, not their feature list. Ask whether they consume the Department’s B2G APIs or rely on manual portal entry, because that is the difference between reporting that flows and reporting someone rekeys. And if you deliver CHSP, ask what happens on 1 July 2027, because the transition into Support at Home will land inside the life of the contract you are about to sign.
Payroll deserves its own question. Award interpretation is where aged care software most commonly disappoints, so confirm in writing whether interpretation happens in the platform or in a separate payroll system downstream.
How do you run a demo that actually tells you something?
Send the vendor three of your own scenarios a week in advance and require them to run those, not their script. Use a real rostering problem, a real claiming scenario under current funding rules, and a real compliance record. Give every vendor the identical three. Score immediately afterwards, individually, before the committee discusses anything.
A vendor demo is a sales asset: designed, rehearsed and built on clean data. Watching one tells you what the software does at its best, which is rarely the question you need answered. The scenarios that reveal most are the awkward ones — a split shift crossing a public holiday, a participant whose budget is nearly exhausted, an incident that needs to reach the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission inside the notification window. Ask the presenter to do it live. How they handle not knowing is itself information.
Scoring individually before discussion matters more than it sounds. Committees converge on the first confident opinion in the room, and the most confident person is seldom the one who will use the system daily.
What contract terms matter most in an aged care software agreement?
Five: data extraction on exit and in what format, the annual price escalation mechanism, what “support” contractually means in hours and response times, whether implementation is fixed-price or time-and-materials, and who pays when a regulatory change requires a system update. Negotiate these before the licence fee.
| Term | What to insist on | What happens if you skip it |
|---|---|---|
| Data extraction on exit | Full export in a documented, machine-readable format, at no charge, within a stated timeframe | You pay a five-figure extraction fee to leave, or you cannot leave |
| Price escalation | A named index or a capped percentage, not “as notified” | Double-digit increases in year two with no recourse |
| Support definition | Response times by severity, business hours stated, named escalation path | “Support included” means a ticket queue and no commitment |
| Implementation scope | Fixed-price with a written scope, or a capped estimate | Time-and-materials overruns land in the same financial year as the licence |
| Regulatory updates | Included in the licence, delivered ahead of the compliance date | You are quoted for a change you had no choice about |
The last row is the one 1 October 2026 makes concrete. A mandatory funding change arrived with a fixed date; whether the update is a line item in your maintenance agreement or an invoice is a contractual question, and the time to settle it is before you sign. Retention deserves a clause of its own too — aged care records carry statutory retention obligations under the Aged Care Act framework that do not end when a contract does, so ask what the vendor keeps, for how long, and what they destroy.
We should declare an interest here: FlowLogic is an Australian aged care software platform, so we sit on the other side of these questions regularly. The providers who ask them early are consistently the ones whose implementations go well, whoever they end up choosing.
How long does aged care software procurement take, and when should you start?
For a small-to-mid-sized Australian provider, allow 10 to 16 weeks from writing requirements to signing: two to three weeks on requirements, two on the market scan, three to four for demonstrations, two to three for references and security review, and two to four for contract and approval. Implementation starts after that.
The common mistake is timing procurement to end at a regulatory deadline. It should end well before one. Signing in September to go live before a 1 October change is how providers end up cutting over during the exact fortnight their claiming rules change.
Board approval cycles are the most underestimated variable. If your board meets every second month, that single constraint can add six weeks, and it is the one thing in the process you cannot compress. Work backwards from the board calendar before you work forwards from the requirements.
Where this is heading
The procurement questions worth asking are shifting from features to connections. With CHSP transitioning no earlier than 1 July 2027 and B2G APIs steadily expanding, the differentiator is moving from what a platform records to how cleanly it exchanges that record with government systems. That is a harder thing to demo and a more important thing to ask about.
Run the process properly once and you get more than a platform. You get a written record of what you needed and why you chose what you chose, which is exactly what the board will ask for in three years, and exactly what nobody can ever find.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between evaluating and procuring aged care software?
Evaluation assesses whether a platform meets your requirements, usually through scoring against criteria. Procurement is the decision process around it: who sits on the committee, how requirements are gathered, how demonstrations are run and compared, what references are checked, and what commercial terms get negotiated before signature.
Do Australian aged care providers need a formal tender to buy software?
Generally no. Private and not-for-profit providers are not bound by government procurement rules and a formal tender adds months. A written requirements brief of ten to fifteen questions, sent to three or four vendors, gives you comparable written answers without the overhead of a full tender process.
What should we ask vendors about Support at Home readiness?
Ask how they handled the 1 October 2026 personal care contribution change and when they shipped it. Ask how individualised budgets, quarterly allocations and rollover are handled. If you deliver CHSP, ask what their plan is for the transition into Support at Home from no earlier than 1 July 2027.
Who should have the final say on an aged care software decision?
The executive sponsor who owns the budget, informed by the committee’s scores rather than overriding them. Clarify before the first demo who holds a vote and who holds an opinion. Committees that leave this ambiguous tend to stall at the shortlist stage or reopen the decision after approval.
What is the most commonly missed clause in aged care software contracts?
Data extraction on exit. Providers routinely sign without confirming they can retrieve their own records in a usable format, at no charge, within a defined timeframe. The cost and difficulty of leaving is usually discovered at the moment of leaving, which is the worst possible time to negotiate it.
How much should we budget for aged care software procurement itself?
The direct cost is mostly staff time, roughly 60 to 100 hours across the committee for a 10 to 16 week process. Budget separately for legal review of the contract, which is the one external cost worth paying for and the one most often skipped.
Ready to start?
Building a shortlist? Book a demo with FlowLogic and bring your own three scenarios, we would rather run yours than ours.
