In 2002, MasterCare supported a clinical program that quietly reshaped the future of our business.
The goal: support the delivery of mental health care across the ACT. The challenge: build a system that could handle multidisciplinary teams, long-term conditions, and patients whose needs didn’t fit neatly into intake–treatment–discharge workflow.
What looked like a one-off project shifted our entire product philosophy.
While most healthcare software vendors focused on perfecting systems for episodic GP or hospital environments (and many still do), our team recognised what would become the future of Australian healthcare: treating chronic, interconnected diseases through patient-centred care.
It turned out to be a turning point, not just in the way we built healthcare software but in how we understood where the industry was heading.
Reading the room
At the time, we didn’t call it chronic care. We just knew the old model didn’t fit.
More care was being delivered outside hospitals. Clinicians were increasingly working in tandem with one another. Australians were living longer with multiple conditions, requiring support over many years.
Fast forward a decade, and by 2022, 50% of Australians lived with at least one chronic condition. One in five had multiple. Nearly half of our disease expenditure is now consumed by long-term conditions.
These aren’t single-episode problems. They don’t slot neatly into a three-step care plan. They’re managed across services and teams over a long period of time.
Our early work in the ACT underscored the inadequacy of siloed systems. Healthcare delivery required platforms that could seamlessly share information among multidisciplinary teams, track patient progress over time, and adapt to the nuanced needs of chronic care management.
We began building solutions prioritising interoperability, flexibility, and a holistic view of patient health.
The evolution of MasterCare
In the years that followed, MasterCare products focused on providing seamless communication and coordination support across teams and services. We set out to develop healthcare software that matches how care is delivered, not how software has historically been sold.
We developed three clinical systems for primary care, hospitals and multidisciplinary teams that manage chronic conditions, but as models of care became even more connected, we entered our new phase of evolution.
That led to MasterCare+: a cloud-based healthcare software system combining three separate products into a single, composable Software-as-a-Service platform.
It’s designed to let organisations assemble the digital tools they need to deliver efficient, quality care, whether in a hospital, clinic or community setting. This includes practice management, patient portals, referral and waitlist management, EMR, data reporting, mobile access and more.
With MasterCare+:
- Each module can be switched on, configured, and accessed based on the care delivery type.
- Clinicians see exactly what they need: no more, no less.
- Care plans, histories and interactions follow the patient and don’t stay trapped in a site-based system.
- You benefit from HL7 FHIR standards and can access built-in secure messaging to share clinical data safely and instantly.
Traditional software vendors still push multi-year rollouts, built for acute care environments and shaped in overseas markets with poorer outcomes and clunkier funding models.
We’ve spent decades building software that reflects how care is delivered today in Australia; across services, over time, and with the patient at the centre. Our approach is flexible, affordable and secure.
The future of healthcare software
Our healthcare system is undergoing another important shift.
Care is moving closer to home. More data comes from outside clinical settings via wearables, remote monitoring, and patient-held records. AI is beginning to shape how teams triage, respond and plan care.
But how well we can harness the next frontier depends on the foundations on which we build – at their core, they must support long-term, multi-source, patient-led care.
With MasterCare+, that foundation is already in place.
Book a discovery call to see how it works in practice.
