NDIS ICT Systems
Submission 11
Committee Secretariat 14 September 2018
Joint Standing Committee on the NDIS
PO Box 6100
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
Phone: +61 2 6277 3083 Fax: +61 2 6277 5829 ndis.sen@aph.gov.au
RE: NDIS ICT Systems
As a family living and working at the coal face of the NDIS - with a teenage daughter who has multiple, severe physical and intellectual disabilities - we are here to tell you that the myplace Participant Portal is a complete shambles and utterly inadequate.
It is an incredibly clunky and poorly-built site through which we are required to administer and hopefully protect our child’s NDIS funds. There is currently nothing to ensure that Providers are charging appropriately, without us manually checking every single entry.
The display-listing, grouping, searching and linking of Service Bookings and Payments is completely inadequate. We have to watch these ever-growing lists of entries like a hawk to ensure that providers are not helping themselves to funds inappropriately (which has already occurred).
The entries in the Service Bookings and Payments accumulate – even across plans – and are impossible to find by Provider name/number or group Payments per Service Booking. There is currently no way to “archive” the payments or bookings from a previous plan, and even just the first year plan had over 200 payments associated with it!
There is a My Document Upload section where I can see documents relating to my child’s planning – presumably uploaded by the LAC and/or Planner – but I cannot open them! This is completely inappropriate. If the document is visible to us in the portal, then I should not have to apply under freedom of information for a copy of it.
There was also a notice on 10 September 2018 that Providers will now have the ability to make changes to all aspects of the Service Bookings. This is horrifying! We will now have to watch the portal even more closely to ensure that providers are not taking funds inappropriately or incorrectly. Providers should not be able to add new Service Bookings or make changes to the existing ones without authorisation from the Participant.
Add this stage the format of the Participant Portal adds hours and hours of work and additional stress to our lives to administer the participant’s plan – purely due to the inadequacies of the ICT system. Administering and keeping an eye on my child’s NDIS funds should not be a full-time job.
The communication process when a participant’s plan changes is also completely inadequate. New plans are commenced without any timely notice to families, and when an error in my child’s new plan was fixed the whole plan was ended & replaced – causing me hours of work setting up new Service Bookings so that the supports in place could continue uninterrupted.
The myplace Participant Portal cannot be fixed. It needs to be completely replaced with a fit-for-purpose, fully-functional system. I must allow for better linking and searching between Payments and Bookings, and it must secure the funds to prevent inappropriate access and claims by Providers.