AI moves to the frontline: Sunnyfield deploys HCI's real-time policy support for 1,800 disability workers

HCI

Disability services provider Sunnyfield has rolled out an AI-powered compliance and patient safety management assistant to its 1,800 frontline staff, with the agreement recently celebrated by the Irish Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, James Lawless T.D, on his diplomatic visit to Australia.

The platform, Cloda, developed by Enterprise Ireland client HCI, the healthcare digital transformation company, enables instant, multilingual, policy-aligned responses for healthcare staff. This empowers faster, safer decision-making while improving procedural understanding and regulatory compliance, ultimately enhancing care outcomes for service users.

The deployment reflects a growing challenge across disability, aged care and health services: ensuring frontline staff can consistently access and apply the right guidance in the moment, particularly in environments shaped by workforce shortages, increasing compliance obligations and a linguistically diverse workforce.

“In disability care, the risk isn’t just whether policies exist, it’s whether staff can access and apply them when it matters,” said Andrew Hyland, CEO, Sunnyfield Disability Services. “Moving from static documents to real-time, on-demand guidance is a significant shift in how we think about both safety and compliance. Now our staff have our policies in their pockets at all times.”

Sunnyfield said the decision followed a successful pilot across six sites in late 2025, spanning respite, shared living and community services, where staff adoption ranged from approximately 70 per cent to 93 per cent. The company expects to see a reduction in training and retraining costs, as well as a reduction in serious incidents.

“The biggest return on investment is the amount of time people are actually taking to look something up and make sure they are right. That’s hundreds of care hours that will be returned to our residents”, said Mr Hyland.

Importantly the pilot also surfaced practical but critical gaps in frontline knowledge, including inconsistencies in access to key operational information.

“Sometimes the highest-risk gaps are the most basic ones, like staff not knowing the correct on-call number at a site,” said Linda Hunt, General Manager of Safeguarding and Assurance at Sunnyfield. “Cloda helped us identify and address those issues immediately, while also giving staff greater confidence in applying our policies in real time.”

The platform supports multiple languages and device types, a feature Sunnyfield said is particularly important in a sector where a large proportion of frontline workers speak English as a second language.

HCI says the broader opportunity for providers lies in shifting compliance from a reactive, audit-driven function to a real-time, embedded capability across the workforce.

“Frontline care workers make hundreds of decisions every day, often under pressure and with limited time,” said Ray Fleming, HCI’s Australian representative. “Cloda is designed to ensure the right guidance is available instantly, in the worker’s language, on the device they already use. What we’re seeing with Sunnyfield is what happens when policy access becomes genuinely frictionless.”

HCI is currently working with disability, aged care, and health service providers facing similar challenges, as the sector shifts away from static policy frameworks towards more dynamic, accessible models of governance.

About HCI

Since 2005, HCI has been transforming quality and patient safety and regulatory compliance through professional services and digital transformation. Its platform, Cloda, enables organisations to deliver real-time, accessible guidance to frontline workforces, supporting improved decision-making, risk management and regulatory compliance. https://www.cloda.ai/

About Sunnyfield

Sunnyfield is a leading disability services provider supporting people with disability across New South Wales. The organisation delivers a range of services including supported employment, accommodation, community access and capacity building, with a focus on enabling choice, independence and inclusion. https://www.sunnyfield.org.au/

 Ray Fleming, Ignite Partners, [email protected], 0402 146 9155