A streamlined onboarding process with Logiqc for Maxlife Care

Maxlife Care was created to bridge the gap between disability support and mainstream medical care. With a team of dedicated in-house doctors and clinical experts, Maxlife Care provides holistic support services, empowering individuals to achieve their goals and lead fulfilling lives.

Join us for an insightful conversation with Debra Benger, Executive Lead in Quality & Risk at Maxlife Care where we talk about the remarkable achievements and challenges Maxlife Care experienced during the onboarding of the Logiqc quality management system.

What was the first step Maxlife took during the onboarding process?

We started the process with procurement. We interviewed clients within similar industries who had implemented Logiqc to gain insights into their experiences and recommendations. Our due diligence not only included the whole product but also asked questions about the setup and implementation. Additionally, we conducted an interview with someone who used the platform as an auditor, just to gain insights into their firsthand experience and identify key considerations from the get-go when using it for audits.

After reviewing that, we had frequent meetings with Unna (Unna Liddy, Executive Director & Business Development at Logiqc) to discuss what was required, and created a highly detailed Gantt chart. We dedicated considerable time to looking at all the necessary steps and assessing our internal staffing resources. If we had any resource issues, we discussed with Logiqc the associated costs if they were to handle any of these components. This allowed us to make a call on whether we would want to use that option or if we should explore alternative internal resources.

It was a very detailed process. We examined which tasks required a degree of knowledge and decision-making for implementation, and what tasks could be just delegated to less skilled members of our team with clear and specific instructions. The entire process took approximately three months to fully implement and get up and running.

Could you tell us more about what you wanted to achieve with Maxlife in terms of establishing a just culture during the process?

We went into a strong Just Culture journey with our staff, rather than just viewing it as implementing a system.

We work with complex disabilities and our clients often live in supported independent settings due to their complex needs. Unfortunately, there is usually massive underreporting throughout the industry, therefore, driving that Just Culture approach is essential to ensure that staff understand their accountability alongside a systems approach being taken to find the root cause of incidents and hazards.

We really put a lot of effort into educating our staff about incident reporting and fostering a just and fair culture. We developed multiple educational materials, including resources that are now integrated into our induction program.

Has Maxlife has worked closely with the Logiqc Team throughout the onboarding process?

The Logiqc team was exceptional and has continued to be exceptional in terms of system support. They stand out as one of the most responsive vendors I've ever dealt with for a software product.

Whenever we reach out, whether because there are changes in legislation or the way the NDIS is heading, they are quick to act and look at how they can improve the system to accommodate accordingly. This level of service has been consistent since the beginning. Often, vendors may show great support during the onboarding phase but become less accessible over time. That has just not been the case with Logiqc. They remain incredibly responsive, and just last week, I had productive discussions with Elizabeth (Elizabeth Church, Customer Success at Logiqc), and Bret (Bret Mannison, Executive Director & Product Development at Logiqc).    

What resources has Maxlife allocated within the organisation to support the onboarding process?

For a process like this, organisations usually need to rely on admin personnel to handle the bulk of the setup work. In Maxlife's case, we also needed to involve someone in the setup who understood both, the NDIS standards and the business in detail. This allowed us to set up the system architecture tailored to our specific needs. Ideally, this person should have a reasonable level of seniority to make decisions and have access to senior stakeholders within the organisation.

We were in the lucky position, or unlucky depending on perspective, that our Head of Quality and Risk had resigned but had a three-month gap before starting a new position. During this time, she was happy to work part-time as a contractor and dedicated around three days a week for about 10 weeks to properly setting up the system. The more you commit to fine-tuning your system architecture right from the get-go, the better the operational outputs from the product will be. Changing the architectural setting later may involve changing people’s understanding of how the system works, and that is less than ideal.

We were setting this up as a new system, so before implementing Logiqc, our ability to pull data and identify trends related to high-impact and high-prevalence risks was very poor. Therefore, we needed to have a comprehensive understanding of what these risks and incidents were likely to entail. Properly setting up the system from the beginning, enables easy tracking and trending of this key information later on.

What are some achievements and challenges Maxlife encountered during the onboarding process?

Our achievements have been massive. We now have an exceptional ability to track and trend high-prevalence and high-impact events, along with clinical risks. Also, the analytics and data dashboards are very good, robust and effective.  This is allowing us to move to work on proactive strategies to address our key risks and monitor success or otherwise, of those interventions.

One of the major challenges we faced after transitioning to a robust just culture is that it felt a bit like "be careful what you wish for" because we are now receiving reports of over 500 incidents per month which is extremely large for an organisation of our size. While it's encouraging to see increased reporting, the process of closing each incident can be repetitive. Moving from reporting to managing to closure can feel clunky, although it's possible to streamline the process with appropriate permissions.

We would like the ability to link and bulk-close incidents. We have got to some degree of resolution with Logiqc in this regard, but not completely. The Logiqc team is always keen to take feedback on board. If there are quick solutions available, they will implement them promptly. If the issue is a lack of understanding regarding the system's capacity to function differently, they will organise a session to provide clarity. For larger-scale pieces, they would let you know that it's a significant undertaking and they are taking it to the next stage of software development. All you can really ask.

Another challenge we faced as a young company preparing to scale was that we didn’t have a method for auto-uploading all our workers into the system. This meant that we had to manually type the name and contact details of every worker, which was quite laborious, especially considering we had about 400 workers due to our involvement in-home care and NDIS. While this process can be automated, we didn't have that capability in place initially, making it more difficult than anticipated.