For most community health and alcohol and other drug services, funding and reporting obligations quickly compound. We’ve built functionality in MasterCare+ to support these organisations, enabling clearer visibility to data, vital to being compliant and enhanced service delivery.
Funding sources complicate compliance beyond MDS
Community health and AOD services rarely draw on a single funding stream. A service might hold Commonwealth and State program funding alongside Medicare billing, DVA, TAC, workers compensation arrangements and private health.
Each of those carries its own data requirements. What has to be captured at intake, how a contact is classified, what evidence supports a claim and what has to be retained all vary depending on who is paying.
MasterCare+ supports PMHC and VINAH reporting, with NADA, VADC, AOD-NMDS reporting available in our next release of MasterCare+.
Where this shows up day to day
It usually appears as reconciliation work rather than as a single identifiable task.
Different funding sources run on different reporting cadences. Some are monthly, some quarterly, some annual. Documentation standards differ too. A field that is mandatory for one program is optional for another, and a service classification that satisfies one funder does not always map cleanly to the categories another one uses.
Staff absorb the difference. Intake workers learn which questions matter for which program. Team leaders check exports before submission. Somebody maintains a spreadsheet that translates between two sets of categories, because the systems in front of them do not. That work is real and it is skilled, and it takes up time that could otherwise be provided to client care.
Validate data in MasterCare+ before it reaches your funder
With over 15 years of experience working alongside funding providers, we understand the relationship and requirements between providers and community health organisations. The MasterCare+ MDS reporting feature has been developed with this in mind, validating data before extracting and being prepared for the funder. Incorrect fields are flagged and a link is provided to fix issue, resolving the administrative issue before it reaches the inbox of your funder. That means no incomplete data and no need to re-key information for admin teams already under strain.
Software should be reducing this load, not adding to it
Australian community and AOD services are funded and regulated in a particular way, and that way is not simple. A system built for that context should be absorbing some of the complexity rather than passing it back to staff as manual reconciliation.
That starts with capturing consistent clinical and operational data at every point of the client journey, so that a contact recorded once can serve more than one obligation. It ends with reporting that reflects what actually happened in the service, without a translation step in between.
If MDS reporting is on your list this quarter, our team is running a webinar September 29th 12.30pm – 1.15pm AEST, where you can see how community health and AOD services are approaching MDS reporting without the double handling. If you can make it live, register anyway and we’ll send you the recording. Register for the webinar here.
