How to Adapt When NDIS Rules Change

Anyone working in the disability support sector will have already read their fair share of “What’s Changing on the NDIS” articles, especially when it comes to the endlessly evolving NDIS Price Guide. Or rather, the “NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Price Limits and Support Catalogue” as it’s currently known. For now. 

This is why we want to take a moment to look past the noise of changes and deadlines to focus on the bigger picture here. For disability support providers, the question isn’t as simple as asking what’s changing now? The real issue is how can NDIS providers stay in step with regulatory shifts in a scheme that is forever changing?

The problem: Regulatory changes leave NDIS providers scrambling for solutions

The NDIS has changed every year since launch. This reality presents an incredible challenge for leaders within large disability support organisations, where pricing changes can quickly throw your business off track. It’s not easy to stay nimble and adapt when you’ve got hundreds if not thousands of employees and customers to bring on board to a new process. Instead of focusing on workforce utilisation and efficiency, you get distracted playing catch up. Even when solutions are clear, they are rarely quick or easy to put in place. 

Take the changes to group support pricing for example. By moving from a ratio-based model to the apportioned pricing model, the NDIS is taking positive steps to give providers more flexibility in the way they charge for group services and account for the non face-to-face work required to run them. That’s the good news. The bad news is that this is no simple change. It requires NDIS providers to completely rework their billing practices and service structure for group service delivery. This change was dropped with what felt like an impossible implementation deadline, even with a last-minute extension to June 2023. 

The complexity of this change is not a one-off. It’s an example of how NDIA announcements threaten to stress out and stretch your teams at any given moment. 

The solution: Adopting technology that evolves in-step with the NDIS

Ongoing regulatory changes on the NDIS are a challenge to even the most flexible and agile teams. The only way to avoid reworking an entire system line by line is to rely on technology that is purpose-built for the NDIS and flexible enough to accommodate its future iterations. Technology that will stay in-step with the NDIS so that you can too (without the legwork). This gets your entire operation on the same page and lets you adapt to change as they happen.  

When the NDIS drops major changes, even customised software can become an issue. If you’ve invested in technology built to an exact specification or process, a change to your operation (like reworking a billing process) will render these tools redundant without a rework. Customisation has long been sold as a solution for sectors like health and human services — but it can also trap you into a legacy system that can’t evolve as quickly (or inexpensively) as you need to. It’s not long before providers find themselves cobbling together various solutions and offline workarounds to hack together a new procedure. This approach can be seriously problematic for your operations and for organisation-wide adoption of the tools you rely on to make decisions as a leader.  

Free Download: Learn 3 steps to future-proof your NDIS organisation by downloading The Digital Transformation Playbook. 

How GoodHuman is addressing NDIS changes and billing through an all-in-one platform

GoodHuman’s NDIS software is an all-in-one platform that has been co-designed with the disability support sector. More than a piece of software, it works like an entire operating system for your organisation that actively evolves to address whatever complexities the NDIS throws our way. 

We started by working with NDIS service providers across Australia to create a solution to their billing woes. Among the many inefficiencies uncovered, the work required to stay up to date with the NDIS and cross-check line items against each customer’s service agreement meant that invoices were taking weeks or even months to be paid. Overcoming this hurdle would take more than just good invoicing software — it would need to connect to every service code and individual service agreement. So that’s what we built.

GoodHuman is a platform that connects the dots between your customers, frontline workers, and administrators. When a booking is created, line items are informed by the customer’s digital service agreement and calculated based on the service provided, time, day, location, and support level required. Information provided by the frontline worker including expenses and travel claims are also included. 

This lets your teams put the NDIS Pricing Arrangements and Limits guide away and leave the calculations to us. Even for group services delivery. GoodHuman’s automatically generated invoices can include apportioning group fees and claims for non-face-to-face support, capital centre costs and travel, based on the details of each booking and the relevant line items listed in each customers’ service agreement.

Explore a better way of working

To find out how GoodHuman could transform your disability support operations, speak to one of our Melbourne-based team members by dropping us a line here. 

If you would like to learn a little more about how it all works first, check out our video library to explore how GoodHuman connects and simplifies billing, workforce and customer management for disability support organisations.