technology
Out with the old
Startup aims
to drag aged
care out of the
analogue age.
Joseph Mercorella
interviewed by
Conor Burke
A
delaide startup Lumary is a
workflow management platform
aimed at streamlining processes
for workers in the aged care and
disability space.
The brainchild of founders Joseph
Mercorella and Matthew English, Lumary
was conceived during their time in the
IT department of the SA government.
With the introduction of the NDIS,
Mercorella and English saw a need to
ease the relationships between providers,
consumers and government.
“The problem we’re trying to solve is
the disparate systems that exist in the
organisation’s technology stack today,”
Mercorella says.
According to the Australian Financial
Review, for the financial year 2019, Lumary
handled $750 million in NDIS funds and has
now secured $2 million of funding from
investor Equity Venture Partners to grow
the business.
Aged Care Insite talks with Mercorella to
hear what Lumary is and what it can do for
the aged care sector.
ACI: What are workflow management
solutions, and why do we need them?
JM: Workflow management systems are
very important. They enable us to connect
different operations of the business,
providing an end-to-end solution so we
can run efficiently and effectively in a
model that supports the market we’re
trying to service.
36 agedcareinsite.com.au
It’s no different to any other industry,
whether it’d be aged care or the healthcare
sector in general. Workflow management
solutions that are connected are very
important to facilitate this.
What did you see in the aged care and
disability space that made you think this
was needed?
Basically, the problem we’re trying to solve
is the disparate system that exists in the
organisation’s technology stack today. A
lot of the organisations have been around
for quite some time. The majority of them
have been not-for-profit, and the way
they’ve been funded hasn’t enabled them
to operate in such a way that creates the
efficiency that would normally be created
in a systemised way in other industries.
They have systems in place that don’t
speak to each other, which means there’s
a lot of duplication between systems, and
essentially the organisations need to have
a lot of manual administration processes in
order to deliver the services they need.
So the problem we’re solving is
connecting the data and removing the
duplication, as well as any problems
associated with that process, and providing
a more modern platform and framework.
How might this help in the day-to-day
life of an aged care worker?
If we take a scenario where an individual
is seeking a service – it could be for
themselves or on behalf of someone – the
first part is about the initial inquiry and
understanding the needs of the individual.
Many organisations don’t have a CRM
[customer relationship management] or
self-hotline management tool that enables
them to capture this information and
understand the need effectively.
If that’s not present in an organisation’s
technology infrastructure, it’s captured
manually. It could be an email or phone
call written down and handed over to the
next person. And there’s no understanding
if that individual has contacted them in
the past or if they’re an existing customer,
because the workforce who’s taking that
inquiry is not communicating with the
remaining workforce that’s engaging with
that particular customer.
So, the problem we have just in
this simple scenario is that there’s no
awareness or consolidation of client or
inquiring information that enables them
to understand it.
If you think of the next step, then
the organisation is trying to identify
and establish whether or not they can
service the individual’s need. Do they
have capacity – the right staff, skills
and certifications – to facilitate this and
achieve it? And if they don’t, can they
respond and help that individual to be
referred to an organisation that can?
This happens today, but it happens
manually, and organisations aren’t fully
aware straight away with the insight they
have to understand if their workforce
is capable of delivering, either from a
capacity or capability perspective.
So, if we have a system like Lumary
that is able to capture the inquiry and
understand the workforce and their
capacity and capability to deliver the
service, then automatically, at that
beginning point of inquiry and onboarding,
the person who’s responding to the
request can articulate quite quickly that the
organisation either has the capacity and
capability or can refer them straight away.
That process can happen instantly,
whereas in the past it has taken hours, days
and even weeks. And the person who’s
trying to receive the care is not getting any
closer to the answers they need.
I imagine that in this largely manual
industry, it would be tough to
convince people to come over to such
technologies. Have you noticed attitudes
change since the royal commission?
Yes. There’s a great appetite now for
systems that provide compliance and good
enforcement of process and structure
that enables organisations to then adhere
to the rules and regulations. Prior to
that, organisations were doing what they
needed to do, at a minimum. So, I went
looking at the next step: how they can
service the customers better.
For organisations that have manual
processes in place, I want to systemise
them. It took a long time to understand
how we could help them in a consistent
and feasible manner. ■