Here’s a potentially confronting question for you – when was the last time you actively reviewed the systems and processes within your Disability Service Provider business?
Often, when a business is profitable, leaders get caught up in status quo, with the attitude of “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?”. This may serve as a solution for a little while, but the reality is, with the rapidly changing business climate, increased competition and changes in government policies and processes, you are leaving your business highly exposed. All it takes is one change to disrupt your momentum, and your business could go from profitable to unprofitable in a very short space of time.
Conducting regular, proactive reviews of systems and processes within each department and service function of your DSP, while keeping an eye on developing technologies, can help to identify areas to improve efficiency, streamline administration, and ensure compliance.
When conducting your reviews, we recommend focusing on the following areas:
Mileage claim recording and processing:
Through an audit of a medium-sized DSP, we found that the general managers knowingly processed a 20% overrun in mileage claims, brought about purely by manual entry errors. Had this business been using GPS enabled technology that transferred data back to the accounting and administration records, they would have eliminated these administration errors and recovered over $32,000 per year in profit.
Streamlined rostering generation and meeting formats:
Manual rostering creation for DSP’s can be a nightmare to reconcile. With a Disability Service Provider business offering multiple service types, in multiple locations, to many different clients, combined with reconciling annual leave and sick leave approvals for many employees, roster generation and management can be a very complicated, time-consuming task fraught with a high possibility of error. Implementing a software system that automatically reconciles client service requirements with employee availability to generate rosters can help eliminate the inefficiencies and conflicts that are most common in roster generation. Combining this with empowering your in-field employees with the mobile technology to participate in internal meetings from remote locations will help to reduce time wastage travelling to and from the office, and free up more time for service delivery.
Invoice generation and reconciliation against client care plans:
With NDIA requiring individual invoices to be submitted and reconciled against individual client care plan allocations, we recommend keeping a close eye on your DSP’s invoice generation process. A largely manual process can result in high administration time which bears a high wage cost and doesn’t protect against the risk of human data-entry errors. Any invoices submitted with errors results in rejection from NDIA and more lost time in rectifying and resubmitting the invoices. Not to mention the negative impact on your DSP’s cashflow through delayed payments for services already delivered. We recommend implementing an integrated software system that transfers data seamlessly and securely between services delivered and client care plan records, for automated invoice generation.
When evaluating available technology, we invite you to consider CARETAG. CARETAG is a purpose-built, modular, easy to use, client-centric service delivery system designed to streamline your administration, saving you time and money. CARETAG was custom designed to address the challenges of service providers in the community care industry, specifically, National Disability Insurance Scheme providers, and Aged Care providers.
From our extensive experience providing IT solutions for these industries, we understand that operating budgets are becoming tighter, service expectations are elevating, and reporting requirements are increasing exponentially to comply with government regulation. The CARETAG System helps to streamline your operations, making service delivery, record keeping, staff management and reporting efficient and easy.
For more information on the case study we ran with a medium-sized DSP, please click here, or if you’d like to find out how CARETAG can help you streamline your systems and processes to increase the efficiency of your DSP, contact us to arrange a demo.
