AI Rostering, Care Deserts, and the Future of Aged Care

Eric Marquette

Welcome to the show everybody! I'm Eric Marquette, here with Dmitry, and Dmitry, I was looking over the new Australian Support at Home guidelines for 2026, and one number absolutely floored me. Home care providers are going to have to jump their direct service margins from 12.2% to a massive 32.5% just to survive. That is nearly tripling their margins overnight.

Dmitry

It is a brutal operational squeeze, Eric. Having spent 32 years in the clinical field as a registered nurse, I look at that 32.5% target and my stomach knots up. You have to realize this is hitting a system already in deep crisis. We are currently staring at over 25,000 active staff vacancies across the country, and the forecasts are projecting a massive shortfall of 110,000 direct aged care workers over the next decade. Tripling your service margin while running on an empty tank of staff is an almost impossible math problem for these operators.

Eric Marquette

25,000 vacant slots right now. That explains why scheduling feels like a high-stakes puzzle. I mean, if you are a manager, how do you even begin to allocate those scarce hours manually? It must take all day.

Dmitry

It is a complete nightmare. Back when I was managing clinical teams, scheduling was done on dry-erase boards and spreadsheets, and it took hours of manual work every single day. A coordinator has to balance staff availability, travel times, complex award rates, and, most importantly, the clinical care minutes mandated by the Royal Commission. If you make one tiny manual error, you face massive overtime costs, or worse, you fail to meet compliance and get hit with a lower Star Rating.

Eric Marquette

And that is where the Phoenix Protocol blueprint suggests stepping in with AI-powered hyper-optimized rostering. It claims to solve that entire multi-variable equation in literally minutes.

Dmitry

Exactly, but we have to talk about who actually gets access to this technology. If you are a massive provider in Sydney or Melbourne, you can afford the heavy enterprise software. But what about the small and medium-sized providers in regional and remote Australia? In the bush, the distances are greater, the staff shortages are even more acute, and they simply do not have the capital to buy million-dollar platforms. That is exactly why I started SiMPLS LABS. We have to bring affordable, simple solutions to these rural providers so they can automate the back office and keep their doors open. Without them, we get "care deserts" where older Australians have absolutely nowhere to turn.

Eric Marquette

That concept of a "care desert" is terrifying, Dmitry. And it makes the actual matching of staff to residents so much more critical. The AI is not just filling a slot; it is looking at dynamic matching. I saw in the National Seniors Australia survey that there were 55 specific comments from older adults begging for the same carer. Just fifty-five comments focusing solely on that one issue of consistency.

Dmitry

And those 55 comments represent a fundamental truth about clinical care. Continuity of care is not a luxury; it is a clinical necessity. When the same support worker visits Mrs. Smith every week, they notice the tiny things. They notice if her gait has slowed down, or if she seems slightly confused, which could be the early sign of a urinary tract infection. An agency worker who has never met her before will miss those subtle changes. AI algorithms can prioritize these long-term relationships during scheduling, while also making sure the worker actually has the specific clinical training required for her needs.

Eric Marquette

So the technology is actually preserving the human connection, not erasing it. And the numbers back this up. The blueprint points to a 30% reduction in administrative burdens, which saves about 1.5 hours per shift for the nurses and carers. 1.5 hours back in a single shift!

Dmitry

Think about what 1.5 hours means on the floor, Eric. That is ninety minutes of actual, uninterrupted human interaction. It is ninety minutes of sitting down, having a cup of tea, listening to a resident, and offering real emotional support. Right now, our highly qualified nurses are drowning in paperwork, updating care plans, and typing progress notes. If we can use ambient voice-to-text scribes to handle that documentation, we transition our staff from being task-driven operators who are constantly ticking compliance boxes into experience orchestrators who can actually focus on the person in front of them.

Eric Marquette

But I have to ask about the anxiety side of this. There was an ABC News report where care workers expressed deep anxiety, saying they felt like they "taught the machines" their jobs only to have their roles hollowed out or replaced. How do we overcome that fear?

Dmitry

We overcome it through absolute transparency and high-quality training. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer actually found that "my employer" is the most trusted institution to introduce AI. That means providers have a unique license to lead this change, but only if they do it right. If a business leader introduces AI simply to cut heads and save a buck, the staff will reject it immediately, and care quality will suffer. We have to frame AI as a tool for empowerment. We are not replacing the carer; we are giving them a digital co-pilot so they can do the job they actually trained for, which is to care.

Eric Marquette

It is a profound shift in mindset. It means the future of Australian care might not be defined by how many robots we put on the floor, but by how much administrative noise we can silence so that humans can finally connect with other humans again. Dmitry, thank you for sharing your clinical perspective today.

Dmitry

Thank you, Eric. It is a journey we have to take, and we must make sure we do not leave our rural and remote communities behind.