Uniting Aged Care Vic/Tas

Helping the Aged Care Industry with XaptCare

Uniting Aged Care (UAC) is part of the Victorian and Tasmanian Synod of the Uniting Church in Australia. It is the largest aged care provider in Victoria and Tasmania offering a full continuum of services with over 1,700 residential beds across both states, a wide range of diverse community programs and Independent Living Units. It has a revenue turnover of $93 million per annum.

UAC was established in July 2004 to assist the Uniting Church in meeting the challenge of ministry to its aged care clients through the provision of quality holistic care following a review by the Uniting Church in evaluating the delivery of its aged care services. This is reflected in the organisation’s vision of being a leader in the provision of creative options for the elderly and seeking to value the individual and build community. UAC is also part of the Uniting Church’s UnitingCare network across Australia.

A key element in the establishment of UAC was to consolidate a decentralised range of entities comprising 21 different permanent residential aged care facilities, 10 separate ILU complexes and over 12 community centres across Victoria into one central entity. The later inclusion of a number of separate services located throughout Tasmania has further added to this process.
In establishing UAC it quickly became apparent that the new central organisation needed to consolidate its business processes and financial reporting to underpin and upgrade its decision-making processes. This meant that a sound technology infrastructure and common systems were required to achieve this. Being a progressive and forward looking organisation, it understood that good quality systems are required to underpin the provision of quality care.

A Fully Integrated Solution from Eclipse
When looking for a solution, UAC quickly recognised the shortage of suitable off-the-shelf products in the market place. Most of the aged care offerings in the market were either financial solutions or care-only solutions. It required an integrated solution that would have aged care-specific financial reporting and billing requirements in addition to being highly customisable and flexible.

The decision was taken to work closely with integration partner, Eclipse Computing (Australia) Pty Ltd, which was already working on XaptCare, a fully-integrated solution built on the Microsoft Dynamics AX application (formerly Microsoft Business Solutions-Axapta) to cover the full aged care industry requirements including residential management, reporting and financial control. The product would also be expanded to include rostering, clinical care management, community care and retirement villages. UAC also chose PayGlobal people management system to help it to better manage time and attendance, rostering, human resources self-service and web recruitment. It was imperative that the solution be easily integrated with UAC core aged care system.

UAC established a project team that included a combination of internal staff and consultants from Eclipse to re-engineer all of its business processes. The implementation will be a staged approach starting from integration of each of the individual agencies with UAC’s core system. This will let it achieve a consolidated IT infrastructure that is flexible, customisable and ready for its future growth.

The automation of processes such as generating direct debits and associated receipts, RER and RCS forms, claiming of retentions and issuing of contracts, means less staff hours are required to do administrative tasks, freeing valuable resources to provide improved care for the residents. XaptCare financial management is designed to automate the time-consuming reconciliation processes that surround government subsidies and resident supplement tracking. This significantly reduces manual handling and ensures no funding is lost through the subsidy claim process. The many warnings and alerts ensure that paperwork is submitted in time to avoid penalties and XaptCare has additional features providing a top-of-the range basis for the development of electronic submission of claim forms and payment statements.