How digital platforms enable support

Welcome to your aged care compass podcast. We help you make sense of the Australian aged care system by having conversations about topics you've asked us about. We're joined by thought leaders, professional experts and people just like you and I, who talk about their experience in the aged care sector. Hello everyone, it's great to have you join me for today's episode of the podcast. I'm Coral, your host and I'm joined by Emma Clark today. When she's not behind the wheel of a racing car or running over to her two kids, Emma is steering attained health tax finance and operations teams. She's passionate about creating strong foundations that help people and systems work smarter, ensuring sound financial management, continuous improvement and excellent customer experiences across the group. Before joining Mabel and the wider attained health tech group, Emma served as the chief financial officer at Redbubble, where she led the finance, investor relations, M&A and company secretariat functions. She's also held a range of executive roles at ANZ Bank, including chief financial officer of ANZ's technology division and previously served as both CFO and managing director of Diner's Club Australia. Emma, absolutely impressive resume and accomplished career, but you know, I've got to stop and say racing cars as well. Hi Coral, thank you so much for having me. Yes, I know, look, yes, I'm assuming that's not what you normally read out in someone's biography. And I think it's just really, you know, I had to prove the point that accounts aren't always very dull people. Absolutely. Mabel was co-founded by Peter Scott in Tony Chirara in 2014. Can you share what inspired them to start Mabel and what personal or systemic gaps they were trying to address? Yeah, absolutely Coral. I love telling a good founder's story. Sometimes you get a founder's story where it's actually they were just sitting around a table thinking that the next good business idea. And other times you hear a good founder's story that's all about their personal connection and things that's happening in their life. And this is one of the latter ones, which is why I like talking about it so much. Really it came from Peter and it was his own family's experience. So while he was helping his aging parents stay in their own home in regional New South Wales, he saw firsthand the shortcomings in the traditional home care model. At the time his mother was living with dementia and his father, primary care was sort of overwhelmed by this revolving door of unfamiliar support workers coming into their home. Each day bought a new face, new routines and little continuity and that felt quite invasive and impersonal to the whole family. And so Peter saw that his parents really didn't have any choice or control over who entered their home or how the care was actually delivered. So he sort of began to wonder like, what if people could actually choose and engage their own support workers? They could pick people they trust who suit their needs and personalities. I always quote the example of what if I'm really into cats and who's coming into my home to deliver my care. I want someone who loves cats too so that we can talk about that. That stuff is important, right? And so then they would also have more control over how their support is delivered. So in exploring that idea, he teamed up with Tony Tarrara. He'd worked with him for various organisations previously and he was a friend that had experiencing technology and finance and business systems. And Tony also shared Peter's belief once Peter had chatted to him about it about how this could actually they could create a company that used technology and would make that care even though we were using technology more personal, flexible and efficient. And so together they sort of envisages an online marketplace that would connect people who needed support directly with independent support workers offering their services. So when they started the business, it was actually called Better Careing back in 2014. And then in 2018 they rebranded it from Better Careing to Mabel. And so we could have a quiz what does How did Mabel come to be, where did the name come from, but I'm going to give you the answer. It came from a turn of the phrase I'm able to. So what we were really trying to do is capture the sense of empowerment and possibility that the platform enabled. Originally it was very much focused on age care, but then as they actually started to get some scale on the platform, obviously the introduction of the NDIS came into being. And that also signalled a shift towards empowering individuals to make their own choices. So now we're a platform that operates across both sectors. It's such a wonderful story. It's one of my favourite founding stories in the sector. And I'm really glad you touched on the rebrand and the philosophy behind the Mabel name as well. I think it's absolutely brilliant. So Emma, how did Peter and Tony's backgrounds in finance and technology shaped the platform's early direction? Look, I think it's, and the proof is probably in the pudding here, but I think it's great to have an emotional spark for a business idea. But you really do actually need some professional experience because then it can provide that idea with structured scale and sustainability, which is what both Peter and Tony's backgrounds effectively enable. And if you think about it creating effectively a marketplace, you need to be able to, it's a more complex type of business as well. And you need to be able to think about not just having lots of clients because if you've got lots of clients and no support providers, then that's not going to work. If you've got heaps of support providers, but you know, no clients, that's obviously not going to work either. So you need to be able to think about the business in terms of both of those lenses and how you're actually scaling, making it attractive to support providers to use at the same time as you're making attractive to clients to use. And like I always say, those kind of two-sided marketplace businesses, there's not great barriers to entry, but to be able to scale them. You need to be really forward thinking. You need to have that business background and knowledge and understanding of taking in all those business signals and then adapting yourself on the fly to keep both sides of that business always growing. And that's quite hard to do. I can tell her passionate how excited you are to be working in this space. I just sense that coming through already in our conversation. So as the CFO and the coup at Mabel, what do your roles involve? I do consider myself to actually be very privileged in working for a company like Mabel and attain more broadly. We'll talk about some of the other companies within the portfolio later on. What I say is every day I get to see amazing people do other things that are amazing for other people. That's just intrinsically go home at the end of the day. And generally I feel quite good about the things that have happened in my work life that day, which not everyone who's working in a corporate environment sort of gets to say. So I definitely do consider that to be a privilege. In regards to my role, I love having breadth. I love, I actually love the fact that quite often I'll get to a Friday, put my feed up at the end of the week and think about my week and pretty much if half of the things I did in that week, well, what I thought I was going to do Monday morning, that was a pretty settled week. So there's constantly lots of things come in from left field, lots of challenge. And it's largely because my role is so broad. So in the Mabel context, my responsibility is for all of the customer operations. So on the client side, anytime someone has finished being on boarded onto the platform and they're starting to have care delivered to them. They've got any kind of questions. They're my teams. On the support provider side, I actually am responsible for the entire support provider business segment. So everything from a support provider wanting to sign up right through to their entire life span with Mabel, I am responsible for those teams. And then all of like legal, regulatory compliance. And obviously in a business like Mabel, which is heavily regulated and at the intersection of independent contractors on the supply side and then age care and disability clients on the client side. There's always lots of government regulation occurring and standards that we need to uphold. So that's a big part of the role as well. And then certainly finally, but not least would be all the finance stuff. So just making sure that we're stuiting the business appropriately that we're investing for growth, that we're using the financial means that we have to create better experiences for people who are using the platform. Absolutely. So what does it mean to be a digital platform in aged care? Obviously everything has recently changed 12 days ago to be precise in the time that we're recording this. And the terminology can get quite confusing. I'll start off by saying we're actually super excited to be regulated, which I know most businesses wouldn't say. But from a Mabel perspective, we weren't regulated officially under the old legislation. And that wasn't for any nefarious reason. It was simply because the legislation, which was 27 years old, didn't envisage digital facilitators at the time that it was written. And so therefore, there just really wasn't a place for a platform like Mabel to fit under that. That's obviously all changed with the new legislation, which is why we're so excited because we get to take our proper place within the regulatory environment. So in simple terms, if you think about it, under the new Age Care Act, there's three different categories of providers that might be involved in someone's care. The first one is registered providers, which were formerly known as approved providers, and every older person who has a support at home package needs one of these. Then there are associated providers. Now these are businesses or sole traders that partner with the register provider, but don't have any obligations themselves. It's actually the register provider that bears all the responsibility for the associated provider. And now what we have is there a digital labor platform operators. And they effectively serve as a sort of a midpoint between register providers and associated providers. So digital providers, Mabel obviously being one of those now, have some obligations, but not as many as the registered providers who have those higher level clinical obligations for the client. The things that a digital labor platform is required to do include reporting incidents and complaints, which has actually always been like this is great to get this clarity under this new regime because historically, if someone had delivered care on Mabel and had observed something in an incident and they had raised it with us, it was quite muddy about will we to directly report or was the approved provider to directly report or will we both to directly report and the new regime has clarified that because we now have reporting obligations around those. We have to provide regular data to the Quality and Safe Guards Commission. We're subject to the penalties regime. So we're quite clear now on what obligations the platform has to maintain, which is great and we make sure that we are well equipped to be able to do those things. Excellent. And with the strength and age care quality standards and the new act, digital platforms now have specific obligations. How has Mabel adapted to meet these, especially around worker screening, credential transparency and information management? So in addition to the obligations that I talked about before, compliance with the age care standards is ultimately the responsibility of the registered provider. But we will actually also have obligations around worker screening in addition to the incident complaint that I talked about before. So responsible digital labor platforms like us, Mabel, will take steps to ensure that registered providers can continue to use this. So the biggest changes are the screening and the training requirements. So moving forward, all age care workers will be subject to the NDIS worker screening check. I know poorly named because it's another segment, can cause confusion sometimes, but obviously is across both sectors. And so this is a gradual transition as the NDIS worker screen check will ultimately evolve into a comprehensive whole of care assessment, which is great. It will replace the age care industry's current approach of conducting criminal history background checks. And so there's obviously a transition period as a support provider on Mabel who might already have a work, might already have a police check. They can still continue to operate with that. But the next time their police check comes up for expiry, they're prompted to get an NDIS worker screening check instead. That's how it's practically working at the moment. And in relation to training, it isn't an actual obligations on platforms per se, but we recognise it is in owls and the registered providers' best interest for us to introduce training programs that make it easier for those registered providers to find support workers that have had the appropriate training. So from a Mabel perspective, we're actually delivering the new training through our learning hub, which is a free to use service for all support workers who provide services via the Mabel platform. And then each support provider has until June 2026 to complete all of those new training competency modules. There's five of them. And then as they complete those, they will actually be shown as badges on their profile on Mabel. So when people are searching for workers, they will be able to immediately see whether that worker has actually done those assessments or not. Wow, that's attractive. So in the home made was launched in 2020 and isn't approved provider within the edge care sector, was launching home made a natural progression in terms of offering recipients of care or participants choice flexibility and control with their government-funded packages or classifications? Yeah, look absolutely coral. We saw it as a natural progression for our business at the time because we knew that we could use what we had learnt to create a new digital first provider, which could then help more of the market access, quality care at an affordable cost. And it was an opportunity to take what we'd learnt about enabling choice and control for customers while providing safeguards and take that through to being a registered provider as well. So what lessons were learnt from building Mabel that informed the creation of home made? I think there's probably three things. One would be we just had a really good understanding of our customers. So by the time we launched home made, we had six years of Mabel operating for the last couple of years at scale. And so we had years of experience in the sector and sort of a really deep understanding by then of our customer needs, including what they were frustrated with existing systems and existing providers. We also had those six years of understanding how technology could act as an accelerator in creating value for customers. And what ways it's valuable to the customer and what ways it's not. Interesting enough what we'd also learnt through our experience at Mabel is that tech itself isn't enough. You actually need to also have really talented and caring people who deliver the service. And so what we wanted to do even though we created home made as heavily digitally enabled, we made sure that the processes around that were still human-led so that the clients experiencing interacting with people is still interacting with people when they need to do so and they're not left to fend for themselves. So what are home made strengths in the marketplace of the in-home service division? You've just touched on one there about human connection. What else? Look, love the people. I mean, I'll listen to calls and just listening to them interact with clients is fantastic. So absolutely that would be number one. I think for home made it's value, I mean home made was effectively created as a self-management option for older Australians. And obviously there's an increasing number of people who are technologically savvy and also wish to continue to have more choice and control in who provides their care as they age. And so what we've been able to prove is that a person who decides to be self-managed, whether it's them themselves putting up their job post-picking their person or it's them being helped by a loved one, in doing that they can actually use a low-cost provider and then they can also get more hours of care fundamentally for their package. And as we know, those packages only stretch so far and so I think value would be something that we're super proud of both from a home made and a mable perspective. They still have choice like much more autonomy over who they're picking. So back to the origin story, are they able to pick the person who comes into their home and provides that care, yes, they are? And then we're obviously from a home made perspective, quite proud of our customer platform and our customer portal and how our customers can actually use our technology to interact with us and clearly see where they're at in terms of their funding at any point in time. And as her made ensures safety and quality for users who are self-managing their packages or classifications. This is something I honestly call that we're super passionate about because it could be tempting to not focus in as much on safeguards as we do, but it's actually something that we are very passionate about. So we've actually got lots of case managers. We have clinical nurses as employees within home made providing that clinical guidance and a quality team that's basically looking over the shoulders of everyone making sure that they're doing the right thing and what they're doing is of quality. And so it's when you pair them, so we have that and then you pair it with our technical and data capabilities and it's the combination of those two. So we've got moderation from a technology perspective, so we effectively look at what's actually happening in the delivery of care and try and identify factors that might be indicating that there's a degradation in the clients well-being and then intervene with that. We have hugely advanced analytics running across the platform, so we actually look at where our clients are actually spending their package and identify where there's either risks where they might be under spending or over spending or like changing trends where they might be needing more of one type of care rather than a different type of care. So we're able to do that. Like we're very data-rich set of platforms and so we're able to actually like to steal those insights. And then when home made clients use Mable, which they're not required to do, but obviously quite a few do because they see the value from Mable, then the home made clients getting the actual shift notes, the health and wellness notes and then Mable's also providing incidents reports and in Mable there's also the ability for a support worker to check in and check out of the shift, so they also have that ability to know that it happened and where it happens as well. Wow, that's super impressive. Emma, end from a consumer recipient point of view, so much easier. And also from a caregiver point of view as well, it makes it easy for them. Absolutely. So what had stopped of the impacts of supported home had on both Mable and home made? It has been huge. I would say it has been the biggest thing that we've worked on across both Mable and Home made across a period of about nine months. The amount of work can't be understated in terms of Mable. As you would know with support at home, there's a whole new service taxonomy, which sounds boring, but basically means the government needs to understand what services are occurring, they're categorisable and then those are used to calculate co-contributions, so that's all new. So Mable had to develop the ability for support workers to lodge multiple services within one shift, so I might come to provide care for a client and it might be for four hours, but I might do three different services. You know, I might do a little bit of domestic assistance. I might take them to the doctor and then I might do a bit of meal prep, for example. So Mable had to develop the ability for a support worker to be able to lodge all three of those in the same shift, potentially with different rates in order to be able to comply with those requirements. All the invoicing has obviously had to change to enable register providers to be able to claim under the new regime because the claiming requirements are far more comprehensive and obviously the development of the competency training modules that we talked about earlier. And then even just simple things like you'd think, well, we just need to update all the references on our website to be from HCP to support at home. It was 700 pages. Like there was literally 700 web pages that needed to change where we had said something about HCP and that obviously all needed to change. So pretty massive. And then on homemade, oh look, homemade was a piece of cake nod. Home made it was just like a full reel of their entire core platform. So once again, that service taxonomy, making sure that we could accommodate the new support at home, funding packages and levels, including the transitional packages. The ability to charge service fees and unit pricing, because as you know, pricing for providers has changed completely under support at home. Every single customer, every single service provided in a new agreement with homemade. Yes. And obviously completely new processes for the homemade team. Huge. Massive. It was like, we still have, it's not done yet. We're obviously 12 days in. It's very early days. Everything's working. So it's sort of touchwood as I say that. But we still have a lot of work to go to make it super seamless. They're still the claiming to come and the quarterly reviews. So yes. So they're still more work to come, but everyone was very happy to see the first of November. Come and go. Absolutely. So tell us some more about the more remote or rural locations that may be in homemade support, because this is what gets, I get really excited about this, because I'm in regional Queensland. I support people in more remote locations as well. Tell us about that. Yes. So we've really been focusing in on rural regional remote areas. Probably for the past, I'm going to say it's probably about five years, because same as you, we started getting stories about it's accessing support is a major challenge and people in those communities often forced to leave the community that they know and love in order to get that care. And so we set up a team that we call community partnerships. And what it does is it enables local people to support others in their community and earn much needed income. And so it is a three way partnership between Mabel, a local coordinating hub and a home care provider. And so what we do is the partnerships team go into a town, they basically have a bit of a town hall. They say, get people who are eligible or have a package to come to the town hall. They get local workers in the community who aren't working necessarily even in the care economy to come to the town hall. They introduce Mabel and how the platform works. And then they help them set themselves up if they decide to use Mabel. And so it's been growing. It's something actually when I talk particularly to local MPs in WA and Queensland, it's obviously a really hot topic of conversation. And after five years, we've now got a presence in more than 60 regional towns where we've delivered more than well facilitated more than 200,000 hours of support. And there's currently 880 clients in those towns that have been connected with more than a thousand support workers to help provide their support. So recently it was recognized by economic development Australia, got a category win. The economic development, excellence in regional and remote Australia, which was great. And there's been so many stories of you're in a town and you do the town hall and then someone comes up to you and says, actually, I'm a qualified nurse, but I'm currently working at the local calls or woolies because there's no other registered provider in town for me to even work with. And then that person can go, be an independent contractor. I'm able to decide they want to work, have many hours that they work. They want to work, kick their clients and provide their support. There was even one town, I can't remember the name of it, but there was a town where they even got to open up like the local pub again because there was so much more economic development happening in like in that community, whereas otherwise it was one of those unfortunately sort of dying rural communities where everyone was gradually moving out of town. So this is definitely one of the areas that I love talking to the people who are doing this work within Maybell and also just chatting away to people like yourself about what's going on there. So at the moment, like to put numbers around it, because I think everyone has great stories, think about all the delivered care that's going through Maybell at the moment. About 24% of it is going into rural regional and remote communities, which is a pretty high point. Amazing. Yeah, amazing. Mike changing as well. Yeah. And then people get to stay. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. Yep. And then tell me what's next for the team at Maybell and homemade. I could take a guess and say you probably only to holiday. So Mike did it. Well, I'll give them the first. We're looking forward to Christmas and while I say that. Look, I mean, obviously unsurprisingly and linking to our prior chat about support at home in the near term, it's just really making sure that we continue to be obligations under the legislation. It's a once in a generation change. And we want to make sure that all of our clients can continue to have confidence in choosing us. For home made, it's super exciting. I think they're even more looking forward to Christmas than the Mabel is are. But while we started that business, the self-management, and as I said earlier, there's heaps of people who increasingly want to manage their packages that way. The majority still either want or need a high level of support. And so we've literally just launched a fully managed product in homemade. It provides that high level of coordination and support. And it's also got that fixed price for an hour of services. Obviously, the different price points for the different services being charged. But it gives clients exactly that transparency about knowing exactly what they're going to get charged for various services. So that's a sort of a new frontier for homemade. And it's super like early days. So we'll see. But that's going to be really exciting for that business as well. So that should obviously continue to see it grow and scale and help out more clients, which is fantastic. Excellent. And that this has been such an excellent behind the scenes episode today and a great opportunity to discuss innovation and unpack the challenges providers who deliver a digital platform service must manage within regulation. Congratulations for this super impressive work that your team is doing. I appreciate the time that you've taken out of your busy schedule to chat with me today. And thank you for joining me on the show. Anytime. Thanks so much, Coral. Thanks for tuning in to another episode. Do you have a topic that you'd like us to cover on an episode? Please reach out and let us know via social media or our website. See me acn.com.au.