CareMatch

Inspiration

Someone on our team spoke with a support coordinator who said she felt like she was "guessing with someone else's life." She wasn't a beginner. She had years of experience. She just didn't have the right tools.

We talked to more people. Participants who spent months finding a single provider. Families who gave up and settled. Providers doing good work that nobody could find. The same story, different people. The NDIS isn't broken because of a lack of services. It's broken because finding the right one is unnecessarily hard, and the consequences of getting it wrong fall on the most vulnerable people in the system.

That's what CareMatch is built to fix.

What it does

CareMatch matches NDIS participants, families, and support coordinators with providers that actually fit. Not a directory. Not a list to scroll through and hope for the best. A platform that takes your situation seriously and gives you real, comparable options with the context to make a confident decision.

Less guessing. Better outcomes.

How we built it

We started by mapping the full journey across all three user types: participants, coordinators, and providers. Each one has different needs from the same system, and designing for only one of them would've broken the others.

The prototype focuses on the core loop: intake, matching, comparison. We treated cognitive load as a design constraint throughout. If something felt like effort to use, that was a bug, not a tradeoff.

Challenges we ran into

Designing for a user base this broad is genuinely hard. The NDIS serves people with vastly different needs, literacy levels, and relationships with technology. What feels intuitive to one person creates a wall for another. We went through multiple versions of the onboarding flow before something clicked.

Scope was the other fight. There's a long list of things that would be useful to build. Cutting them to protect the core experience required discipline we didn't always have naturally.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We turned a genuinely complex problem into something that feels simple to use. That's harder than building something complicated.

We also landed on a matching approach that handles real-world messiness, like participants with multiple support needs or providers with partial availability, without surfacing that complexity to the user. It just works.

What we learned

Complexity isn't the problem. Clarity is. The NDIS has enough services. What it doesn't have is a reliable way to connect the right people to the right support and give them a reason to trust that connection. Every good decision we made came back to that.

We also learned that accessibility isn't a feature you add at the end. It's a foundation. Build on top of it or don't bother.

What's next for CareMatch

The matching system gets better with real data, and right now we don't have enough of it. The next step is getting in front of actual coordinators and participants, testing the logic against reality, and closing the gaps.

After that: a feedback loop so outcomes from past matches improve future ones, and a coordinator view so they can manage multiple participants without starting from scratch each time.

The bigger picture is straightforward. Right now, navigating disability support in Australia depends too much on who you know and how persistent you are. It shouldn't. CareMatch is how we start changing that.