A Discussion re ‘Unidentified’ Clients

Created by Ivo Support, Modified on Wed, 27 Nov, 2024 at 9:22 AM by Ivo Support

There is a lot of difficulty experienced every reporting period with many organisations receiving feedback that they have recorded too many 'unidentified' clients, that the NDAP/DRC/NDIS Appeals programs are individual based and therefore the number of 'unidentified' clients should not exceed 5% of the total number of clients.

To be clear, the problems regarding 'unidentified' clients have been created by the DSS -

most fundamentally (and I'm aware I am shouting at the wind here), by shoehorning advocacy reporting into a system that is fundamentally not designed to handle it -
- the DEX is case based, whereas advocacy is issue based. The only way that has been provided to handle the fact that clients have multiple issues is the creation of the NDAP Topic field at the Session (ie. file note) level. This is a very poor way to do it, but sure, perhaps all that could be done in a case based system
- the DEX is designed to handle reporting of discreet instances of service such as "25 meals provided" or "2 hours of personal care provided". Advocacy doesn't work like that.
providing advice to funded organisations in 2017 that does not appear to now be made known to grant mangers, thus requiring us (1024 and you, the funded organisations) to continually educate the department on their own system
lack of understanding of the part of the NDAP/NDIS Appeals/DRC team of the technical requirements of the DEX. This is evidenced in the lack of understanding around how systemic issues must be reported (see below)
Lack of clear direction. For example, what constitutes a "measurable outcome" (see 'Inquiries' below)?
Lack of mechanism for a direct relationship between developers like 1024 and those who manage the programs
The division between the DEX helpdesk who only support technical aspects of the DEX and will direct you to the funded program for anything else, and the funded program who will simply direct you to the helpdesk or the documentation, and not answer our questions.
Lack of some documentation. For example, the DEX helpdesk used to maintain an "errors document" that explained what each error meant and how to rectify it. They no longer do this. The reason I was given on the phone was "it was too hard to maintain" - that is what we as a vendor have to deal with so all that leaves us is a lot of trial and error, which is hardly ideal ?

Inquiries

In 2017, the department provided the following advice -

Ivo implements the above advice correctly.

However, what is a "measurable outcome"? No definition of this has been given, which leaves the 70+ funded organisations to make their own interpretation. This is not how good data collection is done. Therefore we implemented time as a definition of a "measurable outcome" - that is, if an inquiry goes longer than x minutes (Ivo defaults this to 15 minutes) then the inquiry is deemed to have had a "measurable outcome". Please note it is our opinion that a funding body should not be leaving questions open like this such that a vendor is "making up" how to report data.

Education

We have never received any clear advice on whether or not education sessions should be reported, and if so, how. When our clients have reported education sessions in the past, they have typically received the feedback regarding having too many 'unidentified' clients.

Systemic Issues

A systemic issue must have at least one unidentified client, which Ivo also implements. However, this means if you report your systemic data, there is a good chance you will get the feedback of having too many 'unidentified' clients. So what do you do?

What's the solution?

The solution is that the DSS need to better understand their system, and need to adequately train their grant managers in both understanding what funded organisations have been told to do, and how to use the DEX itself in order to accurately assess the data provided by funded organisations.

Failing that, from here on 1024's recommended advice is to only include inquiries where the client is identified, and to report additional data in any written report to the department.