Aged Care hands Accenture $289m in digital overhaul

The Department of Health and Aged Care has contracted Accenture to supply contractors into a large-scale digital transformation program underway in aged care.

The department has handed $289 million to Accenture for a "workforce uplift supporting the temporary demands of reform initiatives while ensuring the ongoing capability and capacity to maintain the future aged care digital ecosystem is retained in the department’s permanent workforce," a department spokesperson told iTnews.

Accenture, the spokesperson said, is one of several integrators that will "augment the permanent APS [Australian public service] workforce ... during a period of significant reform and digital uplift for the aged care sector."

"Accenture will augment the department’s aged care digital transformation capacity over the next two years to enable delivery of aged care reform measures, such as the New Aged Care Act and Support at Home [program]."

The fresh contract comes months after Aged Care gave Accenture $157 million to develop the government provider management system (GPMS), a Salesforce and MuleSoft-based system.

The GPMS is intended to replace Aged Care's 20-year-old national approved provider system (NAPS), which are repositories of aged care services providers.

Speaking to iTnews, an Aged Care spokesperson said Accenture “has capabilities in cloud, digital, and security domains, and provides the department with specialist ICT skills in areas such as architecture, solution design, delivery management, software development, testing, release management and application support”.

“The implementation of the foundational GPMS was a key deliverable in the first phase of the aged care digital transformation agenda,” the spokesperson added.

“With the baseline solution built, the department is continuing to develop new functionality and components on the GPMS portal to meet the ongoing requirements of planned reform measures, new government policy initiatives, and legislative requirements.”

Aged Care has so far paid $29.3 million directly to Salesforce for its technology, and $83 million to Capgemini for professional services related to the Salesforce platform and the creation of “user-centred design services”.

Accenture also took a separate $10.5 million contract for the New Aged Care Act digital implementation.

Its total role in the digital transformation is now valued at over $446 million.