University of ÃØÃÜÖ±²¥ Health Research Institute
11 Kirinari Street
Bruce ACT 2617
+61 (02) 6201 5131
uchri@canberra.edu.au
The Problem
Australia’s mental health system is fragmented, complex, and difficult to navigate. Service planners and navigators lack integrated tools to make effective, data-driven decisions, while providers struggle to connect clients quickly to the right services. The need for better system navigation has been identified by many recent reports into mental health, including the Productivity Commission.
Recent years have seen an explosion in the number of navigation tools, from just a handful to more than one hundred. There is a danger that tools designed to help could result in more confusion.
The Solution
MChart addresses this problem at two levels:
1. Planning and Management
Visualising the big picture of services, workforce, needs, and data to guide decision-making about resource allocation.
2. Navigation
Helping providers working with individual clients to identify available service options, check location and opening hours, view workforce details, and understand funding mechanisms to facilitate access.
MChart’s Benefits
- Improves decision-making through geographic mapping and visualisation of workforce, service utilisation, service connections, and neighbourhood/social determinants characteristics.
- Visualises the distribution of services and identifies gaps, promoting greater system equity.
- Provides accurate, reliable information obtained from the services themselves: where they are, what they do, how they can help, and how they are connected to each other.
- Supports collaboration across health and social care sectors.
- Designed in Australia, built on an internationally recognised taxonomy.
System Overview
Australia’s mental health system is complex and fragmented, making it difficult for planners, providers, and clients to find and connect with the right services. While many navigation tools now exist, the growing number has only added to the confusion.
MChart offers a clear solution — a powerful, data-driven platform that brings clarity to both system planning and service navigation. It enables planners to visualise the distribution of services, workforce, needs, and gaps, supporting more equitable and informed decision-making. For providers, MChart simplifies navigation by helping them quickly identify appropriate services, check availability, and understand access pathways.
Developed in Australia and built on an internationally recognised taxonomy, MChart delivers accurate, up-to-date information to improve coordination, collaboration, and outcomes across the mental health and social care sectors.
MChart’s Modules and Dashboards
MChart has been designed as a digital tool that incorporates a set of multi-applicable modules for navigation of the mental health care system.
The modules include:
- MChart Final report executive summary
The MChart study team published a review of Australian digital mental health care navigation tools in 2024. This report provides a summary of tools identified in the study.
This semantic mapping and interoperability report presents the findings of an attempt to align the key terminology and coding systems of two major mental health service classification tools used in Australia—NMHSPF v4.1 and DESDE-LTC (2018)—along with a mapping of DESDE-LTC terms to those in the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare’s (AIHW) online metadata registry, METeOR.
- Automation of data collection report
- Marketing plan
