Hospitals are among the most complex organisations in our healthcare system, yet the digital environments they rely on remain fragmented. Admissions, clinical notes, billing, referrals, community outreach, and research all run on separate systems, patched together with varying levels of interoperability. The result is inefficiency for staff, frustration for patients, and barriers to delivering true continuity of care.
Australia’s Digital Health Blueprint (2023–2033) highlights a clear direction: person-centred, connected and sustainable care.
Yet a recent AIHW report showed that unplanned readmissions remain stubbornly high in certain specialties, particularly mental health and chronic disease. The link is clear – without effective digital pathways to support continuity of care, patients risk falling through the cracks. The solution is not a collection of IT systems, but a single strategic platform that can be deployed hospital-wide, across day hospitals, outreach programs, outpatient clinics, or even academic and research partnerships.
Deployment scenarios
CareRight has been successfully deployed at South Pacific Private Hospital where it is being used as an integrated ecosystem for their out-patient, in-patient, day programs and patient engagement activities.
The deployment connects securely with My Health Record and streamlines admissions, billing and claiming, day programs and clinical documentation, enabling more coordinated and efficient care for patients with addictions and mental health needs.
Fullarton Clinic, a new hospital, is implementing CareRight from day one. By designing modern digital workflows around best practice rather than retrofitting legacy systems, Fullarton is building a cutting edge model of mental health care that combines online engagement, AI-supported bed management, automated referral pathways, and unified electronic care plans.
Allowah is rolling out CareRight to create a unified digital platform for children with complex medical and developmental needs. It enables real-time observation charts, NDIS billing workflows, and interdisciplinary care planning.
Why integration matters
When hospitals, day programs and community providers operate on disconnected systems, patients are left to carry their stories between providers. By contrast, an end-to-end ecosystem:
- Improves patient experience — by reducing the handover burden and creating a consistent digital record.
- Drives organisational efficiency — through automation, standardisation, and elimination of duplicated workflows.
- Enables clinical best practice — by giving care teams longitudinal visibility across all episodes, providers, and disciplines.
A statistical snapshot
- $2 billion annually: Estimated cost of avoidable hospital readmissions in Australia.
- 4.3 million Australians received mental health services in 2022–23 and demand is growing faster than supply.
- 610,000+ participants are now supported by the NDIS, driving new complexity in funding, compliance, and care coordination.
These pressures underscore why hospitals need modern, integrated systems that can flex across care settings and funding models.
Beyond the four walls
The next phase of hospital modernisation is not just about digitising forms or automating billing. It’s about creating a platform that follows the patient, not the episode. Hospitals should not be constrained by legacy silos. They need to scale across settings, integrate with partners and adapt to new models of care as policy and practice evolve.
If healthcare is to move beyond episodic silos, hospitals need more than incremental fixes. They need fully integrated, end-to-end ecosystems that connect the entire patient journey across wards, outpatient services, community care, and even into education and research.
