15 Feb Why manual admin is costing your home care organisation more than you think
As a home care provider, are you feeling a bit in over your head with increasing compliance requirements? New rules and new fee caps mean
more tasks to tick off – sometimes with less income.
So how can you control costs while being compliant – and upholding quality of service delivery?
The answer is simpler than you think: by saying goodbye to manual administration once and for all.
Here’s why.
The silent costs that add up
When it comes to controlling costs in your home care organisation, a quick switch from manual admin to smart management technology might be just what you need.
Wait, what?
We know what you’re thinking. Isn’t obtaining a whole new IT solution an expensive option? When keeping your paperwork system doesn’t cost a cent?
Well, yes and no.
While a new IT system might seem too costly to consider, manual admin is a lot more expensive in the long run.
Here’s how manual admin is silently costing your home care organisation:
1. More time and effort required
Paper-based systems require repeated data entries on multiple documents. Think of all that extra time your staff spend on filling out duplicate information.
On top of that, your team is caught up with:
- The multi-step process of printing, filing, scanning and sending documents, while also maintaining your stationery cupboard and archives
- Calculating then uploading payment information to government portals for reimbursement
- Calling or emailing staff to advise of shift allocation
Not to mention the long and tedious process of preparing reports and compiling information for your clients’ family members.
All these activities are time-consuming – and not revenue-generating.
2. Higher chance of human error
No matter how good your staff are at what they do, they’re only human.
And that means they will sometimes make mistakes – as we all do.
For example, when you rely on manual calculation for individual services costs, it’s easy to add a wrong number. Such miscalculations could go undetected for a long time – and cause your business irreversible losses.
And if your team’s handling confidential documentation manually, the risk of error skyrockets. In the home care sector, such mistakes can lead to complications, losses, care errors – or a privacy breach.
Mixing up client details has the potential for either harm or neglect – both of which need to be mandatorily reported to government authorities. And that could pose a real risk to your consumers, plus reputational risk to your business.
3. Extra employment costs
The more manual admin tasks you have, the more staff you need to manage and complete them. And with more staff comes the need for additional layers of management.
Before you know it, you’re spending a lot of money on employing a lot of people… for admin. With none of them adding to the bottom line.
4. Poor scalability
If you run on manual admin processes, the only way you can grow your home care organisation is by hiring more human resources.
Which, as explored above, can really add up employment costs.
But it also means you won’t be able to quickly expand your operations to accommodate a growing consumer base.
And by the time you do get the resources required? All that’s left could be missed opportunities and lost clients.
5. Start controlling costs with smart technology
Designed to address productivity, efficiency and compliance requirements, VIPS Care can be tailored to your organisational processes – so you can do what you do better.
To help you eradicate labour-intensive work and control costs, our applications can:
- Accurately track service delivery and the time spent
- Reconcile delivered services quickly and easily
- Process invoices promptly – so you can receive government reimbursements sooner
- Present clients’ care package reconciliations in a simple report
- Accurately pay support staff including calculating travel between clients for reimbursement
- Ensure support staff are optimally utilised via the rostering app
- Streamline processes and reduce the need to employ a large admin team