Change in legislation is inevitable and has recently been fueled by many Royal Commissions, pandemic and economic factors. Financial Services and Healthcare are two industries that seem to be attracting the bulk of focus and change. Let’s take a look at how these changes could be affecting your business and more specifically your customer communications.
Financial Services
The Financial Services industry sees continual change, (e.g. The Independence Statement change to your Financial Services guide implemented 1 July 2021). Changes such as this are being driven and implemented by many governance agencies including APRA and ASIC (www.apra.gov.au, www.asic.gov.au).
Health, Aged & Disability Care
In the Health, Aged and Disability Care sectors we have seen significant change and there is more scheduled.
- National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) who’s role is to implement and manage National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and is a new and evolving entity who will continue to drive improvement and benefit to the recipients through changing legislation.
- Home Care Packages (HCP) have been in place for a long time and have already seen significant change from the reforms in 2014/15 to the most recent implementation of the Improved Payment Arrangement (IPA) and then planned implementation of the Health and Home program (combining CHSP, HCP and STRC Programs) scheduled for 2023. All of these have required significant changes to operations as well as client reporting.
How does this affect my business?
In addition to the changes to core systems and operations, client communications (Financial Services Guide, Statements, Agreements, etc.) almost always require change. These changes generally have a few common threads, these include:
- Short notice to implement
- Susceptible to frequent changes
- Often neglected as focus is on operational changes
To exacerbate these challenges, core systems are generally not geared to address urgent and frequent changes. Software releases/roadmaps are often planned and locked in many months (sometimes years), in advance. Add to this, your clients’ communications are generally not front of mind to the system providers, they are focused, and rightly so, on adding more and improved functionality to the solutions that they provide.
How do I address this?
The best way to address these challenges is to ensure that your client communications are template based and reside outside, but integrated to, your core software solutions. Templates should be based on a purpose built document composition tool for optimal results. These templates should also be clever templates for flexibility and that logic may be added where appropriate.
This architecture enables your organisation to meet not only legislative compliance but gives you the ability to be able to manage change in your client communications and exceed your clients’ expectations.
Airdocs provides a template-based platform in the cloud with multi-channel delivery capability.
