LUDIVINE SIAU: Hello everyone, welcome to our webinar, thank you for joining us. I am Lu, I am the Product Head of RSS products in Made Tech. I have with me Asha and David who are also part of our team.
Just to introduce Made Tech in a few words, you might already be familiar with our work, we have been working in the public sector for about a decade now. Across those years we have worked with a number of local authorities, and we realised that we kept coming across the same challenges, the same problems and solving them again and again for different organisations.
We figured there has to be a better way to help those local authorities and that’s when we decided we would have a go at building products, and help councils deal with the pressures that they are under; the tight resources, the strain from external pressures like the raised cost of living and living wages. All in parallel with insufficient funding and very unpredictable funding. All those restraints just to maintain services when they are already facing a gap in funding. That’s just maintenance, let alone improving services. So, it is really crucial for our councils to reduce costs and create efficiencies in services. That’s what we are trying to help with, with our products.
Today, more specifically, we would like to talk about direct payments in social care. We had the chance to work with a council a few months back who let us in on their direct payments service in social care. So, we learned a lot about the importance of direct payments in the community, the benefits that it brings to social care users – independent living, more control about their care. That also comes with challenges for councils in managing those direct payments. In making sure that the users receive the right level of support, that their personal budget fits their needs and that the funds they receive are also well used and are not left unspent.
We suspected that there was a chance to help with that process. The councils that we were working with let us have a look at their current process.
This is a real example of a monitoring team running regular audits on their payments that social care users are receiving in that local authority. This particular council has tried to push digital cards, digital wallets, as the main payment method for direct payments. But there were still a lot of users in the community relying on receiving those payments in their bank account or in managed accounts. So, they were not able to streamline the process like they would with a digital wallet. They still have to run manual audits.
I won’t go into details, but the process is quite lengthy and cumbersome. It involves a lot of time spent chasing users for responses when asked for their documents. A lot of exchanges spread across different channels like letters in the post, emails, phone calls to chase users. Having to manually collect a copy of all of those comms and keep an audit trail manually in their system. So, it makes it really hard for that monitoring team to run those regular audits and achieve their targets, making sure those audits are run when they need to be run.
Now, the pain involved in that process is not exceptional compared to other services in local authorities. We have come across it in a lot of services. Disjointed user journeys that are caused by an ideal way to collect and verify evidence. It often relies on complicated paperwork and conversations that are spread across channels, so it puts a strain on the Officer’s, taking away their time from more important tasks. It involves risks regarding data privacy and incurs operational costs. It causes the service users frustration, even just for the fact that it delays the delivery of services, creating friction in that delivery.
Now, let’s look at what that direct payment monitoring process that we’ve just looked at could look like.
We did a bit of imagining and this is what the process could look like. What if Officers could ask users for their evidence online in a single, ready-to-go request, so they didn’t have to fumble in their system for a template email or a template letter. They could just send it in one click to the user that needs to be audited. That user would receive it in their email, they would be able to provide the requested evidence in their own time, using the device they prefer. If they don’t have the documents at hand, they don’t necessarily have to do it in one go. They would receive automated reminders to make sure that they do that in due time. That would save the Officer the time and trouble of chasing them, as well.
Then the Officer would receive all documents from all users in one place, so saving a lot of trouble and preventing risks of data ending in the wrong hands.
This is the experience that we would like to deliver with our product, Evidence. Trying to simplify the collection of evidence process, making it faster, reducing the effort that it takes from the Officer, and also reducing risk around the process.
it is better if you see it in action, actually. So, I’m going to hand over to Asha, who is going to show you what the product looks like.
ASHA BURATHOKI: Thank you, Lu. So, before I begin, I just want to present the scenario. Let’s imagine that I am an Officer responsible for monitoring direct payments. In this scenario, one of our service users, Lu, has been receiving direct payments for the past six months. Now it is time for me to carry out an audit and request evidence from her to verify that she has been using the payments correctly.
Let me start off by creating a request. When requesting, as you can see here, I’ve got two options to prepare a custom request or a templated option. I select this templated option because it comes with all of the necessary evidence required for the direct payment monitoring, saving me time and effort.
As you can see, there are other possible scenarios that we have considered, where evidence may be required from an applicant, such as the taxi vehicle licence. For now, let me go ahead with direct payment review. The reason for the request is already pre-filled in the template. Now I move on to Applicant Details.
I am going to put in Lu’s essential details, her first name, last name, and email. This is optional, so let me just click send now. The request will now be sent with just one click. Once the request is sent, I can confidently move on to other tasks, knowing that I will be notified by email once the applicant completes their part. So, over to you now, Lu.
LUDIVINE SIAU: Let me share my screen again, just to show you that I have received the request that Asha has just sent to me.
You see in my emails that I have received the message from Asha, letting me know that I need to complete some checks. It is telling me for what purpose and giving me a link to complete the requests. It is also letting me know how long I have to do that. In seven days, the request will expire. Until then, I can complete the checks in my own time. So, I’m going to do a bit now.
It is listing all the evidence that I need to provide. If I didn’t have them at hand, I could close that up, pick that up on another day. As long as I do that before the expiry date, I can come back to it on another device or on this one. I can upload half of those and come back to it later, that’s all good.
I’m going to do it now. Here it is giving me some instructions that are part of the templates, just to let me know what kind of document I need to provide for this check.
These instructions can be as detailed as needed. Those are defined during the onboarding with the council.
I am going to upload a bank statement and save that. I could upload more, of course, to cover the time period that I’ve been asked about. There we go. And finally, a payslip for the assistant that I have needed for my personal care. There. That is all that is needed from me, so I’m going to send that back to the council and wait for their response. I have a request reference just in case I need to contact the council and ask about my request. Otherwise, I can just close that up and Asha will get back to me when she needs to.
ASHA BURATHOKI: Thank you, Lu. Let me share my screen quickly. As you can see, now I have received and email notifying me that an applicant has completed their request. Now I am going to review the checks.
Here you can see all the evidence that I requested, and all the evidence that Lu has provided.
Let’s start with the first one, the bank statement. The second one, let me click on this. If I click on Open File, I can see the bank statement provided. I am happy with that. The same with the other files. I’ve got evidence for invoices received, so let me say I am happy with it, and I am going to mark it as complete.
The same with the payslip. I am happy and I am going to mark this as complete. Say for example I would like more documents for this bank statement, instead of emailing, I can just ask for more documents here. I’m going to say I need a bank statement for August to September 2023. I’m going to save this message and send the response again. What happens next is that Lu will be notified that I am expecting more documents from her for that specific evidence. On this request page, you can also see different statuses which I want to quickly highlight, that will show you the progress of the request.
If I approve something, it will be approved. If I am waiting for a response for evidence, the status will be ‘awaiting response.’ That is pretty much it from my side of the demo. Over to you, Lu.
LUDIVINE SIAU: Thanks, Asha. I just want to quickly show you that I have received Asha’s request for more documents. I’m not going to go into it, it’s the same mechanism as I have shown you before. I would be able to upload a document and send that back to Asha.
Also, if I didn’t complete my checks quickly enough, or if there was only a bit of time left before the expiry of the request, I would receive a useful reminder. The time when I receive that reminder is also configured during onboarding with the council, to make sure the user still has enough time to complete their request.
Hopefully the demo should have sparked some ideas around the direct payment monitoring process, and where there could be some efficiencies created. Already, you know the process altogether. You might already be looking at improvements in your own service. If you haven’t started yet, we have a couple of tips on where to start to look at a processing service.
The first is to start with your targets. What are the results that you are looking to improve? Specifically, to the direct payments monitoring process. We can be specific here, to ensure we improve the right thing. Is it about increasing recovered revenue, where you suspect that you are losing revenue with direct payments, and you want to recover more of it? Is it about reducing operational costs because the process is really costly in the team? Is it about security because you suspect that there are risks with data privacy and other steps in the process? Or is it about service users, and trying to improve the experience for the direct payments users?
It could be a combination of those, but they might not all be the issue.
Then it’s about assessing the process itself, and finding those opportunities for improvement.
First, the staff involved in running the process can probably point towards the pain and the bottlenecks in that process. It’s definitely the first place we would check. Also, leveraging any direct payment users’ feedback that you have, to give you an idea of their experiences and how lengthy the process is. How clearly do they get the right guidance? Do they know what to do, what is expected of them and when? Are there frustrations on the way? And benchmarking some key metrics about the process before you look at improving it.
Maybe the end-to-end lead time from the time you start an audit to the moment you can complete it – how long does that take? How long does the collection of evidence take? How many emails and phone calls and letters are involved in what audit with one user? All those kinds of metrics that could be useful to target during improvements. Mapping the process – a very high-level mapping – that is meant to be a living document that is going to improve as the process is changed step by step, could also help pinpoint where the pain points and the bottlenecks are.
We can help with that improvement process, and also in exploring other ways that you might want to reach your targets. Watch your inbox, we will be sharing a link for you to try Evidence yourself. We’ve got a playground for our product where you can actually send yourself some requests, see how it works, how it might fit your own service. You will get a link to access that playground shortly after this webinar.
We would also love to chat. So, if you would like to discuss your own process specifically and how we might help with it, we would love to talk about that with you, so book a discovery call with us and we will have a chat. Maybe there are questions for now?
ASHA BURATHOKI: I would like to go over some questions that we got asked at the last few live events if that’s okay. The first one was, “What are the main benefits of Evidence for teams monitoring social care direct payments?”
LUDIVINE SIAU: Evidence can really streamline your process in monitoring those payments and cut the lead time in gathering all the financial records you need from your service users for your audit by bringing the process online. It saves time for your officers in chasing users for their documents. It saves time and money spent on communicating by post and by email and across all channels. And it keeps all of those communications in a single place. Because we make it easier and faster for you to run those audits, you can run them more regularly, and you have a better chance to recover unused or misused funds and reduce the costs of running your social care direct payments services.
ASHA BURATHOKI: We were also asked, “Why are such products a good choice for local authorities?.” Related to that as well, “Why is Evidence a SAS product?”
LUDIVINE SIAU: Yes, Evidence is a true Software as a Service product. It is hosted in AWS, Amazon Web Services, and all our customers use the same version of our products which means they always benefit from the latest improvements with no extra costs or delay. And they don’t need to worry about the technology and managing it. We fully manage it. We have security and data privacy in the front of our minds so you can rest assured that is taken care of.
With our product comes very simple, transparent pricing. It is all inclusive of implementation, free and responsive customer support. So, it makes it really easy for you to manage your budget and plan ahead.
ASHA BURATHOKI: Perfect, that’s it for today. Thanks for joining us.
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