Another week, another council worrying that its social care services are in crisis. This time it was Kent County Council (KCC) warning that it was facing “significant financial challenges” and would have to scale back or delay non-statutory but vital preventative services such as early intervention – even though everyone knows that they are proved to reduce long-term costs.
As Diane Morton, KCC’s member for adult social care and health put it:
“The current funding model is broken and no longer fit for purpose … early intervention via prevention services should be the foundation of a sustainable care system, not an optional extra cut to save money in the short-term resulting in long term issues escalating.”
At Alocura, we completely agree. The people and organisations we work with – funders, commissioners, councils, care providers and most importantly people who need and deserve support – all tell us every day that the only way to reduce costs in the long term is to have a detailed and auditable plan for consistent, quality care.
But ultimately, the only way to underpin that sustainable care system is for councils and commissioners to know exactly what their money is being spent on. It was interesting that just a week on from Diane Morton’s comments, Kent County Council wrote off nearly £4m of debts to adult social care.
Though the reasons given for the write offs were – according to Conservative Group Leader at KCC Harry Rayner – for “all sorts of different reasons,” there’s a pretty big elephant in the room here.
Less than 10 per cent of home delivered care packages are audited
We know through our experience and expertise in the health and social care market that less than 10% of home delivered care packages are ‘audited’ – and even these are done so manually through request and receipt of bank statements and timesheets.
Yes, we know money is tight. But councils like Kent have very little idea what they’re actually spending the money they do have on. This lack of visibility is a huge problem if they have any ambitions to run a sustainable care system.
Come away from care commissioning for a second and imagine any organisation who placed a large purchase order and then paid for it – without checking whether it was delivered at all, partially delivered or even whether it was what was ordered in the first place. It sounds absolutely ridiculous doesn’t it. A company wouldn’t procure a new computer in this way, so why is this happening with virtually all healthcare delivered in non-hospital settings?
All that is checked is whether the payment was made and only then against a small sample. Put simply, it is a breach of financial standing orders in any organisation – and most certainly in a public one.
Contract managing and auditing care delivery in real time with Rostrata
This is why we developed our end-to-end care management system Rostrata in the first place. It’s the first desktop software solution built for commissioners to contract manage and audit care delivery in real time – eliminating that reliance on outdated manual, retrospective processes. It checks care delivery against the original order, the care plan and by producing the invoice data needed… it’s a clever, but simple solution.
And it does so by generating key live data, enabling instant and automaed comparisons between planned and delivered care, and supporting treasury management and brokerage from the outset. This shifts oversight from reactive to proactive, driving greater accountability and efficiency.
Sounds obvious, doesn’t it. And yet, with the notable exceptions of the commissioners and councils we work with at the moment, every other council or health service who approve a care plan to be delivered by a provider in the home immediately lose real-time visibility of it. They no longer have access to the data reflecting whether care is being delivered as planned — leaving large portions of the process reliant on trust, not transparency.
And locking out commissioners during the delivery phase is a huge problem. There’s no real-time automated oversight, no link between planned care and invoiced care and a huge digital and data void.
This is a fundamental flaw in today’s care management practices.
Sustainable care systems are possible
So when Kent County Council talks about sustainable care systems, we say to them that Rostrata can drive the efficiencies that they so desperately need. Not by cutting services, but through framework operation of Rostrata by care commissioners and their supply chains.
Rostrata’s data and reporting allows for clawback of unspent funds for starters, but the open book framework allows everyone in the process to understand the variation in a care package and immediately spot any inefficiencies.
Such optimisation of the funding and delivery of a care package will become vital, and Rostrata is ready, now, to be that difference maker.