01 — Pressure
Need and complexity increased
More people are living with multiple, complex conditions, while health systems face rising demand, worsening outcomes, and pressure on healthy life expectancy.
Health system capacity
Turning intelligence into capacity.
The Health Systems Sandpit is a live operating environment to diagnose capacity issues, prototype and test new ways to deploy existing resources, and generate evidence to scale what works.
Already reconfiguring community mental health
The challenge
The system already has what it needs — it just cannot organise it.
Knowledge
>10 years
Health knowledge doubles every few months, but takes decades to reliably reach where it needs to be applied.
Technology
>80%
Many good digital health ideas don't move past pilots or proof-of-concepts.
Workforce
>50%
Clinical workforce spend over half their time gathering and entering information, rather than in direct care.
Health systems already hold the intelligence to execute decisions at the time and place they matter most.
The shortage is no longer resources. It is orchestration.
Why now
The model is changing because it has to.
02 — Pressure
Cognitive load exceeded traditional models
Care is now distributed across consumers, community providers, hospitals, digital platforms, and automated systems. The volume of information, monitoring, escalation, and coordination now exceeds what natural intelligence alone can reliably manage manually.
03 — Pressure
Emergence of the consumer-led era
Consumers increasingly expect visibility, participation, convenience, and continuity across their care journey, rather than episodic interactions with isolated services.
The boundaries between natural and artificial intelligence are increasingly blurred. Questions of who or what does the work, what becomes automated, and what remains fundamentally human are now central design challenges for health systems.
Most health systems still rely on workforce structures and workflows designed for a less connected era.
The limiting factor is no longer access to intelligence.
It is the ability to orchestrate decisions, actions, and accountability across layers of the system.
01
Redesign who does what
Determine which functions should be led by consumers, community providers, clinicians, and digital systems.
02
Move capability closer to need
Shift coordination, monitoring, and intervention upstream into community and consumer settings.
03
Align the operating environment
Align workforce, digital, funding, and policy systems to support distributed models of care.
How it works
A capacity problem goes in, a working configuration comes out.
Designed to ensure decisions happen at the right time, in the right place, by the right combination of people and systems.
01
Problem
A capacity problem.
Start with the challenge type that needs solving — not the technology.
The Sandpit begins with a live bottleneck, pressure point or policy problem.
- Capacity is lost before the decision point.
- Work is sitting in the wrong place across people, workflow and infrastructure.
- The need is for a new configuration.
02
Configure
Four configurable assets.
The Sandpit assembles a fit-for-problem response.
Drawing from four resource types calibrated to the problem at hand:
- Methods — diagnostic frameworks for mapping how work and intelligence are distributed.
- Platform — software for prototyping configurations on existing digital systems.
- Live environments — real services and systems where prototypes deploy and test.
- Verticals — thirteen configurations at various stages of maturity.
03
Outcome
A configuration ready to scale.
Who does what, where, what is automated, what is reimbursed.
Noticing
Recognising
Carrying risk
Making the call
Distributed across consumers, community care, clinicians, and health system operations.
In the field
Already running in the system.
The Sandpit is grounded in live programs across multiple clinical domains — with a roadmap that cycles the same model through six verticals.
Mental Health Risk Monitoring
Returning clinical time to community mental health case managers by moving sensing work from clinician to system. Six published papers, a Productivity Commission citation and a 2023 SA/NT iAward.
View case study →AutoMedic
Projected to free around 58,500 pharmacist hours per year across six public hospitals by reconfiguring how information gathering and reconciliation work.
View case study →EndoZone
6,752 health reports delivered into the hands of people living with endometriosis, turning specialty knowledge into everyday decision support.
View case study →Governance
Operates as a governed ecosystem.
With access to national and state digital systems and cross-sector partnerships spanning hospitals, primary care, pharmacies, community services, NGOs, consumer communities and professional bodies.
Anchored by
Flinders University
MRFF NCRI
Hosted by Australia's leading health-system design lab. Funded as Australian medical research infrastructure.
Engage
Have a capacity challenge to bring?
We work with policy teams, procurement leads, investors, and service organisations. Bring a problem, a workforce question, or a piece of policy intent we can design a configuration around.
Bring a challenge →