Regional provider leading digital transformation
Embracing digital change can help providers be ready for 1 July and beyond, says Whiddon’s Regan Stathers, who provided ITAC 2025 insight on how smaller providers can keep up.
Not-for-profit aged care provider Whiddon services regional and remote communities in New South Wales and southeast Queensland – an area that chief infrastructure officer Regan Stathers told the ITAC 2025 audience is particularly tricky to implement technology. The problem was amplified after Whiddon fell victim to a cyber-attack just six months into their technological transformation journey.
“We started our journey saying, ‘cyber is going to be everywhere, it’s going to be okay,’ we learned through that process that it was definitely not okay,” Mr Stathers told delegates on Wednesday.
“Shortly after we launched our tech strategy, about six months in, we were building, we were prepping, everything was getting really exciting and then we had the dreaded cyber-attack.
“We had someone in our network, someone in our systems and we looked at this and rather than focusing what we had in front of us as a barrier and a problem, we looked to it and we said how can we fix this – but how can we use this as energy for it as well.
“They say you never let a crisis go to waste. We did our best. In 40 hours straight we adopted multi-factor authentication, modern identity, across 2,700 employees across 23 geographic locations and we supported our teams to have practically zero downtime.
Whiddon got to work putting in new systems with a focus on cloud enablement, supported the workforce to develop digital literacy skills, and worked through rapid deployments.
Mr Stathers said Whiddon then moved into data, and after much discussion, decided to employ a product approach to it.
“We treated data as a product within our business. We treated our tech team as product developers, and we treated our internal teams as our customers,” he told ITAC 2025, which drew over 650 people to Marvel Stadium, Melbourne.
“We talked to them, we listened to them. Sometimes that’s hard, sometimes that’s easy, but if you don’t try, you don’t know. We had great conversations with our teams.”
Critical to utilising data as a product is to “bring it to life through visual stimuli,” he said.
“Data is hard, people don’t understand data, they don’t understand where it comes from – they know what they need.
“So we turned around their requirements into visual stimulus and we asked them to tell us, are we heading in the right direction? We started looking at risks, and how our quality teams and our clinical teams could really consider all the risks that they’re undertaking to improve resident wellbeing.
“By being able to detect and monitor deterioration we brought our workforce team a representation of how they can best manage and optimise their workforce.
“And then we helped our administrative sales teams by doing something quite simple, which is visualising occupancy on our floor plans, so they can start to see where things, where people and our staff are needing to operate and work on. Through that process we built trust exponentially.”
Embracing change
Mr Stathers said Whiddon has grown over the 75 years it has been in operation, but it is still largely siloed, with residential care, independent living retirement villages and home care completely separated.
“We decided that we needed a program to be future fit,” he said. “We started with a program of five steps. Our first step was about governance. We needed our board and our management team to come along on the journey,” he explained.
“We recognised that our board didn’t have the technology skills as well to make some changes, so we brought in some committees, some structures to help govern us… we brought in change management – and I’m going to say this was the number one benefit to the entire program, starting with change management at our core.”
Mr Stathers encouraged other providers to take the leap and embrace AI, sensory technology and data the way Whiddon has.
“We feel that we’ve only just scraped the surface. There’s so much more to do,” he said.
“This became a little bit like Qantas – more pilots than you cared for. But we’re there and we’re working through those pilots and we’re making some good outcomes and some good progress on how we can move sensors forward.”
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