Key Insight
Client
BedSearch
Website
The Australian aged care placement process is one of the most complicated transactions a family ever has to navigate, often at the hardest possible moment. A care coordinator working with a family is trying to find an available bed in a facility that meets specific clinical, geographic, financial, and cultural needs. Aged care providers are trying to fill vacancies efficiently while screening out enquiries that aren’t a fit. Both sides have been working from phone calls, emails, and spreadsheets, and both sides have been carrying the cost of that fragmentation.
BedSearch was built to fix the connection between them.
The Challenge
For care coordinators and the families they represent, finding the right residential aged care vacancy meant working through opaque, fragmented information.
There was no central place to see what was actually available, where, and at what price. Each enquiry meant phone calls and emails to individual facilities, and the resulting comparisons happened in spreadsheets and notebooks rather than in any structured system.
For aged care providers, the same fragmentation was costing time and operational focus. Vacancies were filled through high-volume enquiry handling, with much of that volume coming from people whose needs the facility couldn’t actually meet. The team time spent qualifying out unsuitable enquiries was time not spent on the residents already in care.
The market needed a structured way for the two sides to find each other. Coordinators with specific patient needs on one side, providers with specific vacancy profiles on the other, with the matching, qualification, and workflow happening in a single platform rather than across hundreds of disconnected conversations.
The Solution
BedSearch is a web-based platform that connects care coordinators with residential aged care providers, structured around the actual mechanics of how aged care placement works in Australia.
The platform is built around three core capabilities.
- Map-based vacancy search. Coordinators search for available beds by location with an adjustable radius, filtered by the criteria that actually matter in aged care placement. Room type, accommodation type (permanent, respite, dementia care), gender, government subsidy eligibility, and cultural or service-group preferences. Results appear on a clustered map that expands to individual facility locations as the user zooms in, so a coordinator can see at a glance where the genuine options are for the patient in front of them.
- Automated placement workflow. Once a coordinator submits an enquiry, BedSearch runs the entire placement process as a structured, stage-gated workflow rather than an email thread. Enquiry submission, provider vacancy confirmation, consumer consent, information sharing including MAC and ACAR data, tour booking, provider assessment, and placement outcome each have their own stage. Email notifications, escalation reminders, and timed cadences keep the process moving without anyone having to chase it manually. The workflow turns what was previously an open-ended series of conversations into a managed pipeline with measurable progress and clear next actions at every step.
- Multi-tier role-based access. BedSearch supports the actual organisational shape of the aged care market. System administrators, account managers (the coordination organisations who own the platform deployment), provider administrators, and individual facility managers each have tiered permissions appropriate to their role. The platform also supports a lightweight “BedSearch-only” access tier for users who need vacancy search and provider contact information without the full enquiry workflow.
The platform runs on AWS (EC2, RDS MySQL, SES for transactional email) and was built to be deployed across multiple care coordination organisations rather than as a single bespoke installation.
The Results
BedSearch was delivered in late 2023 and went live with Benevolent Society and Connect The Dots, two of Australia’s care coordination organisations working with families navigating aged care placement. The platform replaced the fragmented phone-and-email process with a structured digital workflow, giving both coordinators and providers a single operational environment for the placement journey.
The platform was designed from the start as a multi-tenant model, with the hosting account transferred to the client in 2024 to support broader adoption. The architecture supports new coordination organisations being onboarded without rebuilding or rearchitecting, and the success of the platform is measured in uptake across the sector rather than in any single deployment.
For IONYX, BedSearch demonstrates the same pattern that runs through the broader portfolio. Public-facing access to a structured back-office platform, with workflow, role-based access, and operational reporting designed around how the industry actually works rather than how a generic CRM thinks it should.
