The Aged Care Act 2024 and the incoming NDIS registration requirements are forcing providers to reckon with a core data infrastructure question: does your current tech stack support what regulators can now demand? For most providers, the honest answer is no, and HubSpot CRM, configured correctly and integrated with your care management platform, is the solution that fills the gap.
For years, Australian aged care and NDIS providers have managed a difficult balancing act: delivering complex, regulated care with technology that was never quite built for the job. Most organisations ended up running the same patchwork; a care management platform for clinical records, a shared drive for service agreements, email for family communications, and a CRM that either didn't exist or hadn't been meaningfully used in years.
It wasn't optimal. But it was functional enough.The new Aged Care Act 2024 which commenced on 1 November 2025, replacing legislation that had been in place since 1997, changes the requirements.
This legislation has introduced a fundamentally different accountability model:
This isn't a compliance update you can absorb with a policy tweak - it reaches directly into how your organisation collects, stores, and retrieves evidence about the people in your care.
For NDIS providers, the pressure is just as immediate. Under the same act, Supported Independent Living providers will need to register with the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, submitting to independent audits, suitability assessments, and ongoing reporting requirements from 1 July 2026.
The NDIS Commission has been explicit about its direction of travel. It has demonstrated willingness to take tough enforcement action against providers who fall short of required standards. In both sectors, the message from regulators is consistent: demonstrate your governance, or face the consequences.
And this is just the beginning. Personal care, daily living supports, and support in closed settings are also moving toward mandatory registration, with a broader expansion expected from July 2027. The regulatory direction is set, and its placing pressure on data infrastructure.
What all of this requires; the evidence trails, the outcome documentation, the communication records, the audit-ready participant data, comes down to one foundational question:
Does your current technology stack actually support what's now being asked of it?
If you haven't already started reviewing your systems against these requirements, now is the time to do it. Data infrastructure isn't everyone's area of expertise. If it isn't yours, bring in someone for whom it is.
Aged care and NDIS providers are already operating under significant pressure, an ageing population providing high demand, chronic workforce shortages, and the daily reality of increasing administrative burden. The documentation, the evidence trails, the data management can get pushed to the margins, but under the new compliance acts, those margins no longer exist.
The work is getting done. The gap is in how that work is being documented, and whether it can actually be retrieved when a regulator, auditor, or family member asks for it. That's a systems problem. And it's one that now carries real consequences.
Here's what that looks like in practice:
Your participant data lives in too many places
A care management platform like AlayaCare or Leecare holds clinical records and care plans. Service agreements sit in a shared drive or inbox. Referral history lives in someone's email. Family contact preferences exist in a spreadsheet that the coordinator who built it no longer works there to maintain. When you need a complete picture of a participant's journey, you're assembling it by hand.
Compliance reporting is a manual tax on your team
Under the Aged Care Act 2024, you need to demonstrate outcomes, not just document activities. Quality indicator reporting, incident tracking, outcome measurement: all of this requires your team to pull data from multiple systems, reconcile it, and produce something coherent under time pressure. For most providers, that's hours of work each reporting cycle that shouldn't need to be manual.
Consent and communication records aren't audit-ready
The rights-based framework introduced by the new Act means participant communications, consent decisions, and information-sharing records need to be documented and retrievable. If an auditor asks you to demonstrate how you communicated a change in services to a participant and their family, can you pull that thread in five minutes? For most organisations running communications out of standard email and a care platform not built for this, the honest answer is no.
Staff turnover is erasing institutional memory
The aged care and disability sectors have among the highest staff turnover rates of any industry in Australia. When a coordinator or case manager leaves, the knowledge they carry about participants, family dynamics, and service history often leaves with them, because it lives in their head or their inbox, not in a system accessible to the next person.
None of these problems are new. What's changed is the consequence of leaving them unsolved.
Under the old framework, fragmented data was an operational inconvenience. Under the Aged Care Act 2024 and the strengthened NDIS compliance regime, it's a governance liability. Boards are personally accountable. Invoices without supporting evidence can be rejected. The Commission has explicitly signalled it will prosecute providers who don't meet the standard, and it has already done so.
The organisations that treated their data infrastructure as something to fix eventually are now finding that eventually has arrived.
Your care management platform, whether that's AlayaCare, Leecare, Telstra Health, or something else, isn't going anywhere. It does what it was built to do: manage clinical records, care plans, rostering, and billing. The problem isn't the care platform, but everything that falls outside it.
These are the data points that live in inboxes, spreadsheets, and shared drives, and they're precisely what regulators are now asking you to provide as evidence.
A solution to this disjointed data structure is to introduce a connected data layer, which sits alongside your care platform and brings that scattered information into one place. It doesn't replace the clinical system, it fills the gap around it by capturing the communications, consent trails, and relationship data that care platforms aren't designed to hold, and making it retrievable when you need it.
HubSpot CRM, when configured correctly, does exactly this. It operates as a CRM and communications layer that integrates with your existing platforms - pulling data in, pushing records out, and giving your team a single view of each participant's journey that goes beyond the clinical file. Custom integrations can be built between HubSpot and your care management system so that data moves between them without manual re-entry. The result is less duplicated admin, cleaner records, and evidence trails that are built as a by-product of normal operations, not assembled under pressure before an audit.
“HubSpot’s object model is more flexible than most people realise, and that flexibility is exactly what makes it well suited to health and care environments. You can structure the data to reflect how your organisation actually operates; participants, their support networks, consent records, communication trails, and your teams work out of one place instead of jumping between systems to piece together a picture. Because it’s cloud-hosted in Australia, that data stays where it needs to stay. When an auditor asks for something, you’re not assembling it by hand. It’s retrievable, it’s structured, and it’s held to a standard the sector can trust.”
- Ralph Vugts, Development Director, Engaging.io
This approach isn't theoretical. Engaging.io has applied it across some of Australia's most heavily regulated health and care environments.
For TriCare Retirement Living, the challenge was a paper-based admissions process that left sensitive resident data unprotected and created significant compliance exposure.
For Achieve Australia, an NDIS provider supporting people with disability, the problem was a data model that couldn't reflect the complexity of how care is actually delivered.
For Kind Medical, operating in one of Australia's most tightly regulated healthcare sectors, the challenge was automating credential compliance without creating friction for practitioners.
All of these use cases have a common thread: complex, regulated environments where data infrastructure isn't optional, and where the cost of getting it wrong is measured in compliance exposure, staff hours, and operational risk.
The complexity of what's required depends entirely on where you're starting from. A provider on a modern platform with reasonably clean data has a different task ahead than one running legacy systems with years of inconsistent records. Both are solvable, but the shape of the solution, and the timeline, is different for each.
Getting an expert view early matters. Not because the work is necessarily difficult, but because understanding your current state before committing to a direction saves significant time, cost, and frustration. The organisations that struggle most with data infrastructure projects are usually the ones that scoped them without fully understanding what they were starting with.
The goal is to make it as easy as possible for your team to deliver great care, and meet regulatory requirements without data gaps and admin overhead sitting in the way.
If you're not sure where to start, that's exactly where a conversation with EIO begins.
Can HubSpot integrate with care management platforms like AlayaCare, Leecare, or Telstra Health?
It depends on what your care platform supports, and most of the major ones do support integration.
Where a native connector doesn't exist, a custom middleware integration can be built to bridge the gap. EIO has built complex integrations across some of Australia's most demanding regulated environments - if the API exists, or a webhook can be configured, we can generally find a path. The right solution depends on your specific platform and what data needs to move where.
Do aged care and NDIS providers need a separate CRM from their care management platform?
Not necessarily, but most find they need one once they look at what their care platform doesn't hold. Clinical systems like AlayaCare, Leecare, and Telstra Health are built to manage care records, rostering, and billing. What they don't hold well is everything outside the clinical record: referral history, family communications, consent decisions, service agreement tracking, intake and onboarding flows, and outcome reporting. Under the new regulatory framework, that's precisely the data you need to evidence. A CRM configured correctly alongside your care platform gives you a single source of truth for the relationship and compliance layer, not a replacement for the clinical system, but the connective tissue around it.
What evidence does the Aged Care Act 2024 require providers to be able to produce?
The Aged Care Act 2024 has moved compliance from a policy-and-process model to an evidence-and-outcomes model. Regulators now expect evidence that facilities are maintained, risks are managed, contractors are compliant, corrective actions are completed, and governance oversight exists. In practice, assessors look for three things: documented policies, demonstrated practice, and captured evidence. Having a policy manual that doesn't match what staff actually do is one of the most common failure points. Specific reporting obligations include quarterly financial reports, care time data, quality indicators, serious incident reporting, and refundable deposit balances, all of which need to be retrieved and reconciled under time pressure. The organisations that struggle most are those whose evidence is scattered across platforms, inboxes, and spreadsheets.
What does mandatory NDIS registration mean for SIL providers from July 2026?
From 1 July 2026, all Supported Independent Living (SIL) and NDIS digital platform providers must register with the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission. All SIL providers will be subject to high quality standards, independent audits, suitability assessments, reporting requirements, and worker screening checks.
Audit evidence comes from four places: documents, records, what an auditor observes in the service delivery environment, and what workers and participants say when asked, policies set the foundation, but there must be additional evidence that those policies reflect how the organisation actually operates. The certification pathway is a two-stage audit process that typically takes 8–12 months from application to final approval, meaning providers who haven't started are already behind.
How long does a HubSpot CRM implementation take for an aged care or NDIS provider?
It depends on the scope of work and the complexity of your current systems. EIO delivers implementations that range from around two months for a focused configuration through to longer engagements where data migration, custom integrations, or significant structural work is involved. The platforms you're running, the state of your existing data, and how many systems need to connect all affect the timeline. Reach out for a scoping conversation, we'll give you a realistic estimate based on your actual starting point.
What's the difference between a care management platform and a CRM, and do I need both?
A care management platform such as AlayaCare, Leecare, Telstra Health, manages the clinical record: care plans, rostering, medication management, billing. A CRM manages the relationship record: who you're in contact with, what's been communicated, consent trails, service intake, referral history, family connections. Under the new compliance framework, both types of data matter. The care platform evidences what care was delivered. The CRM evidences how it was communicated, consented to, and governed. For most providers, the gap isn't in the clinical system, it's in everything that surrounds it.