Scenario: Broker Services Out to a 3rd Party

Scenario: Broker Services Out to a 3rd Party

It is increasingly common for an organisation to need to offer services for delivery by 3rd parties, such as agencies, contractors, or other companies as they seek to meet the wide variety of care needs for a client, or to cope with staff shortages. This article covers the number of ways CareVision supports this arrangement, and how you can leverage them, these include: 
  1. Setting up Contractors, or Suppliers and Certifying Them
  2. Invite Contractors and Suppliers to Access the Mobile Application 
  3. Using Contractor Rate Sets vs Individual Orders
  4. Recurring Services vs One Off vs Purchases 
  5. Service Delivery and Invoice Submission via Mobile App 
  6. Service Delivery and Invoice Submission outside of Mobile App 
  7. Charge for Brokered Services 
  8. Paying for Brokered Services 
Your organisation may choose to adopt all or some of these approaches. It is important to note that this article is about Brokering services out to another 3rd party to deliver, there is a separate article about how to manage Broker In services where a 3rd party will ask your organisation to deliver the services on its behalf. 

Setting up Contractors, or Suppliers and Certifying Them

Contractors and Suppliers are Team Members with different security roles. As such you can set them up like any other team member from the portal, however there are a few recommended differences: 
  1. Security Roles: the Organisation Scope security role of Contractor should be used, the Active Circle Security Role should be set to either Active Carer or Active Contractor depending on the level of access you want them to have, and Inactive Circle Security Role should be set to inactive carer or contractor, which both have no access to the client records. 
  2. Role: You may wish to add all your contractors to a Role so that when scheduling you can filter down to the contractors, or all contractors of a particular type.
  3. Availability: It is advisable to agree to this with the contractor, or else to set this to 24/7 availability 
  4. Qualifications and Skills: You will need to certify your contractor ensuring you have accurate insurances, police checks and other details to allow them to work, these can and should be done using qualifications and skills to ensure they remain certified, receive notifications and updates about certification renewals, and ensure your compliance when scheduling. 

Invite Contractors and Suppliers to Access the Mobile Application

Your contractors can be invited to use the applications to remain informed, set up their certificates, receive and accept job offers and also submit their invoices. To invite contractors to the system this should be configured in the Notification Settings. If you would like to invite contractors at a later date, then it is best to trigger a username and password reset for them. 

At this time, Contractors and Suppliers are only able to login on the Mobile Application and not the Management Portal, as such this approach tends to be most popular with small or independent contractors rather than with large organisations or agencies. CareVision are seeking expressions of interest and input on potential solutions for larger agency or broker organisations and how to engage them. 

Using Contractor Rate Sets vs Custom Rates 

If you have a supplier that offers services across a range of your clients, you can set their rate card up as a Billing Category and use it when booking services in for clients with that supplier. This will streamline your billing for these services as the rate is pre set. If the contractor completes the service on the mobile app, they can submit the correct amount of time for the booking occurrence and the item will fall into the service review workflow to be approved. If the contractor submits an invoice that differs from the usual duration or rate this can be added to the item as a time change or as a rate override to ensure the client is charged correctly. 

It is not always possible to utilise the same supplier and have a pre arranged rate set, when this is the case you need to be able to customise the quoted amount for the client based on a quote by a supplier. If this is for a one off service it can be added as a manual line item on the order, with qty, rate, unit and GST status. If this is for a recurring order then this can also be added as a manual line item on a care plan item, or as a rate override on the time line item. When you add these manual line items to the item you are prompted to enter the estimated amount. This allows you to pre set the estimated charge, and at the time of service or delivery record the actual amount in line with the invoice received. 

Recurring Services vs One Off Orders 

As mentioned above you can capture brokered out services and orders on a recurring basis via a Care Plan Item on the client's care plan.  When you do this there are a few key considerations:
  1. Occurrence and Time are often a bit fluid when assigning to contractor, it is best to pre arrange a regular time with the contractor, and if this needs to change then it can be on a case by case basis. 
  2. Assign to the Contractor or Preferred Contractor so that it defaults to them
  3. Skills for the service to include a contractor specific skill to ensure it is assigned in scheduling appropriately 
  4. Select the appropriate time based billing category so that the item can inherit the reference codes for claiming, billing, paying from the rate set
  5. Select the appropriate funding source or select to use the default funding for the client 
  6. Add a manual line item with the appropriate recurring charge in the estimated value
  7. If you are billing using manual line item remove the time based line item, or set the rate override to 0 
  8. It is recommended to put an indicator on services that are ordered or delivered by a 3rd party to enable filtering of these on action boards, i.e. Goods and Equipment as a service
For one off orders these can follow similar principles however with the difference being you can use a one off or ad hoc item. 

Service Delivery and Invoice Submission

via Mobile App 

If your contractors are using the mobile app, they can: 
  1. Accept new job offers 
  2. Check In and complete bookings 
  3. View booking details 
  4. Add attachments to Bookings such as Invoice
  5. Add Manual Line Items to bookings for their invoice 
  6. Adjust the time on the timesheet if it changed 
By doing these things they are able to indicate the final charges for the service and make invoice processing more efficient. 

Via Other

If your contractors and suppliers are not using the mobile app, you are likely going to have another process for receiving invoices from them, usually an inbox and someone processing these invoices via the service review board. A few things to keep in mind for this process: 
  1. You can change the descriptive name of the service to contain the invoice number and details for ease of reference when looking at the list of items and also this will appear on the client statement and invoice for transparency
  2. You should attach the invoice to the item 
  3. You can review the details on the booking such as date and time of delivery, 
  4. You can check the estimated invoice value = the actual invoice value and submit the actual amount 
  5. Once processed you can approve this item

Charging for Brokered Services and Items 

Just as any other item, these items will flow through to the invoices output and have robust adjustment handling in place. 


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