From Burnout to Breakthrough: A new wave of Practice Management Software to transform Allied Health

Allied health professionals enter their field with a passion for helping people. Yet today, practitioners including physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and psychologists find themselves drowning in paperwork instead of doing what they do best - caring for their clients. The culprit? A perfect storm of surging NDIS demand and complex compliance requirements, creating an administrative nightmare for practices across Australia. And until now, software that was failing to keep up. 

Welcome to the AI Era

The allied health industry has witnessed three distinct waves of technological evolution. First came the on-premise software solutions of the 1990s, followed by cloud-based systems in the late 2000s. Now, we're seeing the third major switching moment driven by AI and Language Learning Models - and it's creating a rare opportunity for market disruption.

What makes this moment particularly compelling is the behavior of practitioners themselves. In an industry typically resistant to change, practitioners are reassessing their setups in droves, suddenly awakened to the possibilities of modern software - clear evidence of the mounting pressures they face and their desperation for meaningful solutions.

Google Search volumes for AI Health Software have exploded over the past 2 years.
Source: Google Trends. 

Platform vs. Point Solutions

In the first innings of the AI era for allied health software, the industry has been flooded with point solutions - standalone AI tools promising isolated efficiency gains of 10-20% in specific areas like appointment transcription or document processing. Built on top of the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta, these standalone tools offer significant value to practitioners but ultimately add complexity. By fragmenting workflows, they create new integration challenges for already overwhelmed healthcare workers.

Long term we see these point solutions as commoditised features. While software providers may be able to charge high sums today, practitioners’ willingness to pay will be eroded as copy cats emerge.

In splose we found something fundamentally different: a comprehensive platform solution that will deliver a step change for the allied health industry. Unlike point solutions that address single pain points, splose provides a holistic practice management product where AI capabilities are natively developed into every aspect of practice management. This platform approach eliminates the friction of multiple disconnected systems while delivering exponential rather than incremental productivity gains. Long term, it’s this deeply embedded workflow solution that will be valued by customers and investors alike. 

The splose Difference: Integration by Design

“splose batch invoicing has really allowed us to cut down on our administration hours. We used to spend over 40 hrs a week on invoicing, now we’re spending a couple of hours a week. We’ve been able to focus on growing our therapy team, without growing our admin team at the same rate,” says Icaria Health Director Peter Sirr, highlighting the dramatic real-world impact of the splose platform. 

The platform was born from witnessing practitioner burnout firsthand. In 2018, while developing websites for allied health professionals, Adelaide-based Nicholas Sanderson uncovered the extent of the burden: practitioners were drowning in administrative tasks. Rather than creating another system to "manage" these tasks, Nick envisioned software that would alleviate them through intelligent automation. Early investors and physiotherapy practice owners Rob Bowden and Nick Chigwidden of PhysioXtra became crucial collaborators, with their practice acting as a testing site for splose. This partnership was the beginning of a solution that would give practitioners back hours in their day to focus on what matters most - caring for people.

splose handles everything from staff scheduling and client communications to online booking, case note documentation, and payments. But the key difference is how AI is woven into the fabric of these features - not reactively bolted on. This native integration provides a seamless user experience while delivering the productivity gains practices desperately need, particularly in the compliance-heavy NDIS space.

Market Validation: Traction Speaks Volumes

Our investment thesis is strongly validated by splose's remarkable market traction. Since its official launch in 2021, the platform has:

• Showcased genuine customer love with 75% of trialists converting to paying customers and customer satisfaction scores consistently sitting above 90%
• Built a loyal customer base of over 15,000 practitioners in Australia
• Successfully expanded into New Zealand and the UK 
• Scaled to $6M in annual recurring revenue, growing 115% year-over-year

Impressively, splose has grown primarily through word-of-mouth recommendations - a rare achievement in an industry typically resistant to change and a powerful indicator of product-market fit.

Global Expansion and Emerging Product Capabilities

With a $5M investment from EVP’s Fund IV, splose is accelerating its global expansion, starting with the UK market while continuing to deepen its presence in Australia and New Zealand. These three markets represent a $500M revenue opportunity - but we see this as just the beginning. 

Aligning with its integrative product vision, splose has new features in the pipeline to enhance the practitioner experience - AI calendar scheduling and advanced payments are some of the top features to be introduced. 

In an industry fragmented by point solutions, integrated platforms like splose represent the future. We are proud to partner with Nick and the team as they build technology that allows practitioners to focus on what matters most: patient care.

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