How will we care for Australians in the next decade?

The future of care—where it happens, who delivers it, and what it looks like—is being reinvented now. 

Australia’s healthcare system is overburdened. By 2050, the number of Australians aged 65 and over will double to 8.8 million¹. One in five now live with two or more chronic conditions². The nation will face a shortfall of 100,000 nurses by 2030³, and will need an extra 400,000 aged-care workers by 2050⁴. The cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is projected to reach $55 billion by 2030⁵. Climate change is adding new pressure, with extreme heat driving an additional 7,104 injury hospitalisations in the past 10 years⁶.

Healthcare leaders are managing these conditions alongside aged‑care reform, private health premium pressures, GP access shortfalls, and hospital ramping, while navigating ongoing disparities in access to healthcare services that disproportionately affect some population groups, including Indigenous Australians and culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities.

It’s a system under strain, but also one ripe for reinvention, and the opportunities are significant. Imagine an Australian care system where personalised treatments are as easy to access in Bourke as they are in Bondi; where homegrown pharmaceutical manufacturing is as sophisticated as anything seen overseas; where Indigenous-led health models are the norm; and where innovative Australian precincts lead the world in medical research and treatment.

This future is possible if health leaders act now to reimagine their role in the care ecosystem.

Australia’s new care economy won’t emerge from tweaks to the existing system. PwC’s research shows that powerful forces such as AI and demographic shifts are not just reshaping demand for care, but redefining the role health organisations must play in a more connected care ecosystem. 

Australia is well-placed to lead this transition.

Nationally, we have strong Medicare-linked data assets such as My Health Record, high consumer adoption of wearables, a growing healthtech start-up sector, and an established culture of preventative health in schools and workplaces. Where to from here?

Our research identifies four shifts that will define Australia’s new care economy:

Preventative care

Keeping people well for longer by focusing on disease risk factors and promoting self-directed healthy living can reduce the need for care. In many instances, Australia already has the infrastructure in place. For example, bowel cancer screening saves an estimated 90 lives each week, yet the participation rate sits at just 40%⁷. Retailer-led wellness programs are gaining significant traction, with Woolworths’ HealthyLife engaging 250,000 users who track their diet and health metrics, while Wesfarmers Health’s SiSU Health* delivers more than 550,000 health checks each year. These approaches demonstrate how prevention is becoming embedded into everyday life, removing barriers to early detection by bringing health screening into retail environments at scale. The opportunity is to scale what works by aligning incentives, leveraging consumer insights, and encouraging cross-sector partnerships that meet people where they are and make healthy choices more accessible and appealing.

Personalised care

One-size-fits-all care is being replaced by treatment tailored to the individual—their genetics, their lifestyle, and their specific risk profile—with better outcomes and potentially lower costs. The building blocks of a personalised care system exist locally. For example, the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre runs personalised oncology programs. Australian Genomics has more than 25 national precision-medicine trials underway. The challenge for Australia’s health leaders is to redesign funding, data, and workforce models that will enable personalised programs and care to move beyond the frontier and become standard practice across the health system.

Predictive and proactive care

Predictive, proactive care is a far more effective way to run a health system than the current reactive model—both in human and financial terms. AI and data analytics make this new model possible. Already, AI and data analytics are being used in Australia in acute demand management, aged care risk scoring, falls prediction, population health dashboards, and home-based virtual wards. Google Health is advancing AI models to predict hospital conditions including patient re-admissions and treatment outcomes.The University of Technology Sydney is using machine learning and data analytics technologies to predict the likelihood of relapse in childhood cancer. The Australian Government has invested $98.9 million in biomedical and medical technology—a sign that predictive, proactive care is a national priority. While the benefits are clear, scaling predictive care requires new capabilities in data governance, clinical adoption and organisational trust.

Flexible points of care

Care is breaking out of traditional settings to deliver services that are more flexible, accessible and convenient. Telehealth accounts for more than one in five GP consultations in Australia⁸. The country’s vast geography has driven a focus on decentralisation and value-based care such as virtual GPs, mobile diagnostic vans in rural areas, health-in-the-home models, and delivery models where payers reimburse providers based on patient outcomes rather than volume. Queensland Health is piloting pharmacy scope-of-practice expansions, where pharmacists in remote areas are upskilled to boost access to primary healthcare services. In Victoria, the government’s Better at Home initiative supports more than 15,000 Victorians access home-based care each year including acute care, rehabilitation, geriatric evaluation and specialist clinic services. Demand exists. The question is how quickly health organisations can move care out of clinical settings and into people’s lives.

The opportunity is substantial. The new care ecosystem will be worth USD$9.31 trillion globally in the next decade. Health organisations that can rethink their service delivery and reinvent their business models will thrive. But they need to act now.

Success depends on three foundational conditions:

Within the next decade, healthcare will cease to be a downstream service to be consumed when someone becomes unwell. From a system designed for sickness, the care model will become one designed for health. 

This will be a networked, preventative ecosystem, defined by new partnerships between care players, as well as innovative cross-industry partnerships, particularly from the Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT), financial services, and private equity sectors. As a result, Australians will see hospital admissions fall, care coordination models rise, and workforces transformed, improving the quality of life for millions.

Faced with so much change, care organisations must ask themselves: 

• Are we willing to cross sector boundaries to forge partnerships to meet the needs of patients and communities? 

• How will we earn the trust of consumers, workers and partners to lead this transition?

• Are we investing our resources for the system that exists today, or the one that will create value tomorrow? 

• What is one thing that we can do now to move us in this direction?