Having a strong profile on My Aged Care will help potential clients understand the service you offer and decide if it’s right for them. Your profile will also be seen by the assessors and My Aged Care contact centre staff who refer clients to services. As this will likely be someone’s first impression of you, think of your profile as an advertisement for your organisation.
While service providers are required to maintain accurate and up-to-date information in their profiles, it’s also good for business. People will naturally compare your organisation against others to find what suits them best. Accuracy is an important part of that decision-making process.
In many cases, it only takes a few small changes to improve your organisation’s profile and give potential clients a better sense of who you are and the services you provide.
Let’s look at what should be included in your organisation’s profile, and what is best kept out.
Who is this information for?
Adding and editing your provider information
Getting started
Fine-tuning your organisation's profile
Top tip: Keep your information up to date
Who is this information for?
This section of the My Aged Care website is for aged care provider staff who are:
- in a position to make decisions on how to promote their organisation and what it offers
- reviewing their organisation's content on the service provider portal. The portal is the way to create and edit the provider profiles that users see when using the Find a provider tool.
To update your organisation's profile on the portal, you will need to have an administrator role, or work with someone who does.
For technical guidance on how to make profile changes, visit the Service provider portal resources page on the Department of Health website.
Adding and editing your provider information
For tips specific to your service type, these pages will help:
Each page looks at specific features in your profile to focus on. They show where that feature appears in the service provider portal and on your Find a provider profile. They also provide tips on how to make sure your profile is the best it can be.
Getting started
A good way to start is to use the Find a provider tool to look up your own organisation.
Put yourself in your clients’ shoes and ask yourself:
- Is the information accurate and up to date?
- Do I get a sense of this organisation’s culture and the type of services it provides?
- Is the information easy to scan and digest (spelling, formatting, etc.)?
Keep in mind that, when search results in the Find a provider tool are equally relevant, the tool applies some randomisation techniques to ensure it’s fair for all. A user’s browser may cache the results; if this happens, they will appear in the same order the next time they use the tool.
Fine-tuning your organisation’s profile
Your organisation’s information may go through a few stages before it’s seen in a user’s Find a provider search.
- The information may be drafted first in a Word document or taken directly from your website.
- This content gets copied and pasted into the My Aged Care service provider portal.
- The next time you see this information is when it’s on the My Aged Care website – in the Find a provider tool.
Because of this, the information may not always appear on the My Aged Care website the way you would expect. For example:
- Text that looked good in your original draft may not look as effective when seen on your organisation’s profile. There may be too much information, or too little.
- Formatting such as dot points and line breaks may change or disappear entirely, because of how the content gets imported into Find a provider.
If something is not displaying how you intended, it’s important to:
- Use the Find a provider tool regularly to check what your organisation’s information looks like on the My Aged Care website. Make notes on the edits that would help improve your profile.
- Go back to the provider portal and edit your information directly.
- Double-check your updates on the My Aged Care website. Note that it can take up to 24 hours for these changes to take effect.
Allowing time for this process is important to ensure that your profile looks its best.
Top tip: Keep your information up to date
One of the most requested features of any organisation’s profile is that its information is accurate and up to date. For example, if a profile says that certain services are available, and a user finds out later that they aren’t, that organisation will appear unreliable.
Service providers are required by the Department of Health to keep their information up to date and valid. We recommend setting a regular calendar reminder to notify your organisation to update its details.
It’s vital that, if prices, service availability, location or other details change within your organisation, your profile is updated to reflect this.
