ASX BRIEFS

GLOBAL HEALTH LTD (GLH) - From Clinics to the Couch: How Global Health Links Care Teams and Patients

• Andrew Musgrave

Share episode

Send us a text

Healthcare shouldn’t feel like a maze. In this candid talk with Global Health Managing Director Mathew Cherian, we unpack how a connected SaaS stack—MasterCare+ for clinicians, Lifecard for consumers, HotHealth as the digital front door, and ReferralNet for secure messaging—can turn fragmented journeys into coordinated care. The stakes are real: chronic mental health, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and AOD services demand team-based workflows that stretch from hospital to home. With budgets tight across public and private sectors, the only path forward is smarter systems that do more with less.

Mathew explains the company’s heavy lift from legacy desktop to modern SaaS and AI, a three-year investment that’s now driving a 6% subscription revenue lift and a return to positive operating margins. We dig into practical AI: scribes that cut documentation time, triage avatars that route people to the right help, and clinical documentation support that raises quality and compliance. The vision is grounded—open integrations, best-of-breed components, and choice for customers—so organisations can adopt the right tools without lock-in.

We also explore growth levers: Lifecard’s refreshed UI/UX and new monetisation via direct-to-consumer and B2B2C models; a partnership with Best Practice that opens access to 6,000+ GP practices; and a measured international push into ASEAN markets where ageing populations and chronic disease trends mirror Australia’s. With R&D spend tapering and more than a dozen implementations underway, the team is shifting energy to sales, marketing, and repeatable migrations that compress delivery timelines and improve margins. The message to investors is clear: complete the SaaS transition in 12–18 months, grow ARR, and return to profitability by June 2026, with a portfolio that follows the patient from first consult to recovery across settings.

If you value thoughtful takes on digital health, AI in care delivery, and the hard work of turning platforms into outcomes, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share with a colleague who’s wrestling with care coordination, and leave a review with your biggest question about patient-controlled records.

Andrew Musgrave

Welcome back to ASX Brief, where we talk with the leaders transforming Australia's innovation economy. And today we're joined by Matthew Cherian, the Managing Director of Global Health Limited, a digital health company with a portfolio of software and SaaS applications that connect clinicians and consumers across acute, community, and primary healthcare. 
 
 Mathew, it's great to have you with us today and welcome to the ASX Briefs Podcast.

 

Mathew Cherian

Thank you for having me, Andrew. It's a pleasure being here.

 

Andrew Musgrave

Okay, now Matthew, for listeners that may be unfamiliar with Global Health, can you just provide a brief overview of the company?

 

Mathew Cherian

Sure. We've pivoted from being a generic software and consulting business to a pure health product business or tech product business in 2008. Our business mission is to support people living with chronic lifelong conditions. For example, people living with mental health conditions, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, alcohol and drug dependencies, and other lifestyle conditions. The thing about people living with chronic conditions is that they typically need a variety of specialists working with their general practitioner and multiple allied health clinicians, all working as a team with the patient or the client. The occasions of service are delivered in multiple settings, sometimes in the home or in community clinics, hospitals, and aged care facilities. Our mission since inception in 2008 has been to connect clinicians and consumers to deliver productivity improvements for healthcare businesses and improved patient outcomes. Supporting our mission, we have a portfolio of four SaaS applications. MasterCare+ is our brand for clinicians designed with a composable SaaS architecture that enables us to configure features to suit a variety of clinical roles, administrators, and delivery settings. The second product in our portfolio is our Lifecard Personal Health Record, or PHR as it's commonly called, which is for consumers and encourages better involvement for us as clients or patients to proactively manage our health in collaboration with a team of carers. HotHealth is our digital front door or patient portal for consumers to digitally engage with their healthcare provider, either with online bookings or video or face-to-face appointments, submission of pre-consulting forms or ongoing assessments, collection of fees through an online shop, discussion groups, chats, and forums, essentially a CRM for healthcare service providers. ReferralNet is the final application in our portfolio, which enables the secure sharing of sensitive clinical and patient information between healthcare providers and their colleagues in full compliance with government standards for secure messaging and also providing integration brokers to connect to third-party applications using, of course, worldwide industry standards. The company's portfolio of SaaS platforms is designed to digitally connect the healthcare ecosystem, creating a more collaborative model that automates workflow wherever appropriate to deliver improved productivity and profitability for operators and the outcome for individuals is better collaboration or engagement with the care team and empowerment to deliver improved health outcomes.

 

Andrew Musgrave

Okay, and Matthew, the company posted a 6% lift in subscription revenue and is back to positive operating margins. So, what drove this turnaround and how sustainable is the trajectory for FY26?

 

Mathew Cherian

Andrew, technology moves at a hectic pace. Global Health, we are now in a fairly watershed moment as far as technology goes. We are in a transition phase and have started to upgrade three of our different or commenced upgrading three of our different desktop on-premises applications to current best practice technologies using SaaS and incorporating AI for doing more with less. This has required a very high spend on updating our platforms in the order of 8 million over the last three years. That has gradually dropped, but in the meantime, this has limited our investment in sales and marketing. So, the 6% growth is a credit to our team. Moving on to the sustainability question, the private hospital and public hospital market is under severe financial pressure. Government-funded services, which cover about 60% of the sector, is also under pressure due to high government debt. Our range of applications and deployment settings has enabled us to grow despite this challenging macroeconomic environment. And the reason for that is that there's good demand for our solutions, particularly in the community health sector for service providers that support people living with mental health conditions and alcohol and drug dependencies. New government regulations, such as the Workers' Health and Safety Act, are requiring a higher duty of care for their employees. So, we are now seeing demand from large employers and EAP providers, in addition to our traditional market of healthcare operators. So, with this broadening market, we are optimistic that growth in annual recurring revenue will continue.

 

Andrew Musgrave

Now, talking on AI, you've embraced AI across support, development, and product platforms, including triage avatars and AI scribes. So what tangible impacts are you seeing and what's next on the AI roadmap?

 

Mathew Cherian

Yeah, Andrew, AI is having a significant impact on our internal operations, product development and business processes, streamlining development, testing, support and operations. This improves our release quality, reduces response time, and increases productivity across the group. Our customer base is also keen to embrace AI to improve productivity and efficiency. For healthcare organizations, AI provides greater and more timely analytics to support better decision making and service delivery. We are continuing to embed AI into workflows and having fruitful discussions with a number of AI vendors to deliver practical applications such as Scribes, Triage into Lifecard, and clinical documentation support. And this is being applied across all our platforms. Scribes for MasterCare, triage for our digital front door, HotHealth, and soon health coaching for our Lifecard subscribers. AI to do more with less applies to our own operations and equally to our customers' operations.

 

Andrew Musgrave

Now, earlier you touched on the Lifecard PHR. So how does this tie into the broader patient-centric ecosystem and revenue diversification?

 

Mathew Cherian

Well, Global Health has always been an advocate for the empowerment of individuals through our Lifecard personal health record, which allows consumers to engage actively in their care and share information with their broader clinical team. This has been central to our business strategy since 2008. Lifecaard, with the advent of COVID, the demand for consumer engagement, consumer empowerment, and consumer video consults has strengthened our position, and Lifecard strengthens our patient-centered ecosystem alongside MasterCare, Hot Health, and ReferralNet and reinforces our strategy of connecting clinicians and consumers. We are in the process of updating the modernizing the Lifecard UIUX, which should be out within two or three weeks in October, as the healthcare ecosystem continues to evolve and patients become better educated and more actively involved in their own healthcare. There is, in fact, greater acceptance by the medical profession to engage with the patient in their treatment remotely and to include all healthcare professionals. There's also a trend to move healthcare services from institutions to the home and do consulting via video and teleconsults. All these trends are very positive for Lifecard prospects. We release our new version of Lifecard, our updated version of Lifecard, I should say, this month in October. And this upcoming update will support both direct-to-consumer and B2B2C models, adding new revenue streams. These LifeCard currently produces no revenue for us. It's just there as a freebie. But our intention is to drive a new revenue source through LifeCard over the coming months and years.

 

Andrew Musgrave

Okay, now looking at your growth, you signed 30 new clients in FY25 and now partner with Best Practice, Australia's largest GP system. So how are partnerships shaping your sales model?

 

Mathew Cherian

Partnerships are central to our growth, and it aligns with our patient-centric healthcare strategy. Our agreement with Best Practice will unlock over 6,000 practices which can integrate referral and HotHealth into their ecosystem. This best of breed approach enables us to engage with other healthcare providers in a positive way and creates recurring revenue for both participants. Our philosophy is straightforward and realistic. You simply cannot be best in everything involved in digitizing the healthcare journey. Healthcare businesses should be free to integrate their applications best in breed third-party applications. We're also looking to integrate to a number of third-party AI applications into our platforms on the same basis. That means customers get to choose the AI appropriate to their needs.

 

Andrew Musgrave

Now, looking at offshore markets, you've hinted at early discussions with international channel partners. So, what's your strategy for global expansion and which markets are most attractive?

 

Mathew Cherian

We're always exploring channel partnerships in overseas markets, focusing on sustainable long-term channels that protect our IP and aligned with local standards. Each market operates within its own criteria, and we remain committed to the high ethical standards across different jurisdictions. Given our vision is to empower consumers, ASEAN or our neighbourhood is an attractive region with its huge population and the same drivers of an aging population, growing incidence of chronic and lifestyle disease and conditions, the increasing cost of treatments with an increasing number of devices and new medications. Each jurisdiction has its unique requirements. We have to expand carefully, leveraging proven partnerships and focusing on consumer engagement models. That is, the primary focus will be on our HotHealth digital front door and Lifecard personal health record, working with locally proven provider systems.

 

Andrew Musgrave

Now, with RD expenses trimmed in recurring revenue up, how are you balancing reinvestment with your path back to profitability?

 

Mathew Cherian

We are reducing RD spend after major investments and expect to transition the savings into sales and marketing. We have more than a dozen customers today in the process of implementing MasterCare+ and HotHealth. So, our platforms are ready. They are live. We've got live customers, live, happy customers. Many of these are new logo clients. That means they are new customers for us. But they also have several existing customers upgrading from our legacy desktop applications to our SaaS platforms. For that category, the implementation services and data conversion programs from our legacy desktop applications and in some cases the new logo customers require significant effort. But once we have completed the data conversion programs from our three desktop applications into MasterCare+, along with common replacement systems that our new logo customers are replacing with us, will mean that MasterCare, coupled with HotHealth Digital Front Door, will be in a great position to commence more aggressive campaigns to our existing base with faster delivery timelines. This will ensure we maximize returns from the technology we have built while moving towards stronger profitability and positive cash generation to achieve higher returns for our shareholders.

 

 

 

Andrew Musgrave

Now, finally, for investors watching SaaS healthcare platforms and AI-driven MedTech, what's the key message you want to leave investors about Global Health heading into FY26?

 

Mathew Cherian

Global Health has invested heavily in RD over the past three or four years. This has enabled us to transition our legacy platforms to modern SaaS and AI-enabled platforms and grow our annual recurring revenue. The full transition, moving all our products into SaaS, will be completed within the next 12 to 18 months. In FY26, our focus is on revenue growth and returning to profitable operations by June 2026. We believe Global Health is unique in the market, having the portfolio that follows the patient journey from initial diagnosis through to treatment in multiple delivery settings by multiple specialists and allied health providers. Global Health is undervalued by the market with our own market capitalization less than a single year's annual recurring revenue. We expect this to be recognized by investors as we move forwards, and we return to profitability and positive cash flow over the current financial year.

 

Andrew Musgrave

Okay, Mathew. Well, it's been great to chat today, so thanks for your time, and we look forward to further updates from Global Health in the upcoming months.

 

Mathew Cherian

Thank you, Andrew. It's been a pleasure.

 

Andrew Musgrave

That concludes this episode of ASX Briefs. Don't forget to subscribe, and we look forward to catching you on our next episode.