In an increasingly complex regulatory landscape, aged care providers across Australia are under mounting pressure to improve care quality while demonstrating robust governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) practices. With the Aged Care Act 2024 coming into force on 1 July 2025, the stakes are higher than ever.
To thrive under this new regime, aged care organisations must shift their focus toward consumer-centric objectives, ensuring safety, accountability, and dignity for every client. Aged care compliance software has become an essential tool in achieving these goals, enabling facilities to manage risk, streamline compliance, and improve outcomes in real time.
This article explores the features, benefits, and strategic considerations of aged care safety and compliance software.
Download our eBook on Understanding the Aged Care Act 2024 to understand what the legislation means for your organisation and how to prepare effectively:
Aged care compliance: Why it matters more than ever
The Aged Care Act 2024, passed in November 2024, represents a significant overhaul of aged care legislation in Australia. Its central goal is to re-centre aged care around the rights and needs of older people, shifting compliance from a provider-focused activity to a consumer-driven mandate.
This transformation places greater emphasis on governance and oversight, timely incident response aligned with the Serious Incident Response Scheme (SIRS), real-time risk reporting, and transparent handling of feedback. Aged care providers must also deliver evidence-based quality assurance and meet heightened expectations from both regulators and the public.
Non-compliance can result in reputational harm, financial penalties, and, most importantly, compromised safety for residents.
At its core, compliance software is not about ticking boxes. It’s a mechanism to proactively manage risks, elevate the standard of care, and empower staff at all levels. As Protecht’s Chief Research & Content Officer David Tattam puts it: “Risk management should be called outcome management.”
When governance, risk and compliance are integrated well, aged care providers can focus on what matters most: delivering safe, dignified, and high-quality care.
Core features of aged care compliance software
To achieve these goals, aged care software must deliver more than just standalone tools. Solutions limited to workplace health and safety or contractor management often fall short. What’s needed is a fully integrated platform that reflects the realities of aged care:
- Incident management and SIRS compliance: Effective incident management is foundational. Providers need real-time visibility over events as they unfold, supported by tools that enable swift triage, structured investigation, root cause analysis, and regulatory reporting, with workflows designed to support timely escalation and closure.
- Compliance tracking and legislative updates: With the regulatory environment evolving rapidly, staying on top of obligations is vital. You need single source of truth for all compliance requirements, combining an up-to-date obligations register with automated alerts for changes. It links obligations to incidents and risks, so every compliance activity is part of a broader governance strategy. Dashboards make it easy for executives and auditors to see what’s happening and where action is needed.
- Risk management tools: Understanding and managing risk is essential to delivering quality care. You need customisable assessment templates, preconfigured taxonomies, and integrated control libraries that allow providers to identify and treat risks specific to their care environments. Performance trends and health scores help teams monitor the effectiveness of their risk strategies over time.
- Unified GRC capabilities: Fragmented systems cause duplication, create blind spots, and increase administrative burden. A good GRC system unifies governance, risk, compliance, audit, and feedback into a single, easy-to-use platform. This consolidation supports more accurate reporting, better engagement across teams, and stronger assurance at the board level.
The most effective systems don’t just offer functionality: they make it easier for people to do the right thing. Protecht delivers an intuitive user experience, low-code configurability, and seamless integration with existing systems. Notifications and automated workflows keep actions on track, while role-based dashboards ensure that staff, managers, and executives each have the insights they need.
Cost and ROI: making the business case
Implementing new software comes with a cost, but the right investment leads to substantial returns. Licensing, training, configuration, and data migration should be considered during planning. Over time, gains in efficiency, compliance accuracy, audit readiness, and staff satisfaction will outweigh initial costs.
To help make the case, Protecht provides a business case template that calculates potential return on investment based on incident response time, penalty reduction, compliance reporting improvements, and more.
A smooth implementation is as important as the software itself. Protecht’s team draws on over two decades of implementation expertise to support aged care providers. From early stakeholder engagement and governance planning to comprehensive staff training and workflow design, the goal is to set providers up for long-term success.
Looking further down the line, we expect compliance software to evolve with smarter automation, AI-assisted trend detection, predictive dashboards, and deeper integration with regulatory bodies like ACQSC. The industry will also place greater emphasis on consumer-outcome tracking, moving beyond compliance for its own sake to systems that actively improve care.
Organisations that invest now in scalable, outcome-focused platforms will be best positioned to thrive.
Conclusions and next steps for your organisation
With Protecht, you can manage risk, compliance, and safety in one integrated platform, aligned to the needs of older Australians and the requirements of the Aged Care Act 2024.
It delivers real-time insights, structured incident and feedback management, intuitive dashboards, and scalable workflows, all backed by a team of experts who understand the unique challenges of aged care.
Request a demo of Protecht ERM and see how your organisation can move beyond compliance to deliver quality, safety, and dignity in care:
