GenesisCare Australia, History

Dan Collins is the founder and Managing Director of GenesisCare. He set out to transform the Australian health care industry after supporting his father's challenging patient journey and subsequent death from a complex disease known as amyloidosis.

Although Dan had limited knowledge of health care at the time, he was an experienced business analyst and those skills allowed him to effectively research and assess the challenges, risks and opportunities in our struggling health system.

Passion turned to intrigue and a real determination as Dan discovered the same problems occurring right around Australia: patients not accessing care at all, different standards of care, doctors and patients unable to use known guidelines to make the right decisions, significant waste and duplication and a funding model that was about to break. How would our health system cope with burgeoning patient demand, funding pressures, rapidly changing technology and an ageing population?

To tackle this challenge, Dan ultimately focused on a few simple priorities which were to improve health care quality and access ensuring patients received the right care when they needed it through a more sustainable and better funded model. He strongly believed that a different operating model needed to be developed which fostered alignment between all of the key stakeholders - the patient and referrer, doctors, professionals and hospitals providing care and how care was funded.

In 2003 Dan approached Dr Geoff Holt who led HeartCare Partners in Brisbane, a practice of seven well-regarded cardiologists. At the time HeartCare Partners had led the way in terms of group practice, sub specialisation, expert training and a move towards electronic medical records. With a shared view of what was possible and a strong desire to effect change, Geoff, Dan and the HeartCare Partners '7' set about putting together the right strategy and plans. They agreed to bring together like-minded doctors in a network to expand access to care, to make a meaningful difference to care standards and share best practice.

With the vision and plans clear, Dan teamed up with a cornerstone investing partner to make it all possible. He approached the then listed healthcare company, DCA Group, led by CEO, David Vaux (the current GenesisCare Chairman). Plans were expanded to cover cancer care also with the broader vision now capturing the two largest disease burdens in our country – cancer and cardiovascular disease. Alongside Dan, DCA provided an initial $10 million investment to launch the HeartCare network in December 2004. The CancerCare network launch followed shortly after.

Ten years on in 2014, GenesisCare is now the largest provider of comprehensive cancer, cardiovascular and sleep treatments to patients throughout Australia. The group has made a profound positive impact for patient access and care standards around the country providing more than 300,000 cancer treatments and over 400,000 cardiovascular treatments in the last 12 months. This has been made possible by a wonderful team of medical professionals and over 1300 employees providing care at 102 locations. GenesisCare now leads or participates in more than 110 clinical trials, provides care on behalf of government and is one of the largest trainers and educators of medical professionals in Australia.

Today, the organisation has a simple patient focused formula, which underpins every decision:

To provide high quality care;
To patients and communities in need;
By delivering the benefits of a group.

GenesisCare raises the standard of care by providing better support to the people looking after patients. Through a unified network, GenesisCare fosters the sharing of best practice around technology, training, clinical practice, process and systems to facilitate integrated care delivery. In the future, our vision for sustainable care excellence will continue to evolve to meet the needs of the Australian people and beyond.