Connections - 12.19.19

How Our Tested Strategies Improve Your Bottom Line

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As a community provider who cares for individuals with developmental disabilities (I/DD), you’re all too familiar with the problems we face with flat-lined state and federal reimbursements. The recently published article “Missouri Looking To Fix ‘Disastrous’ Pay System For Developmentally Disabled Care” explains the current situation quite well, and we encourage you to read it. In short, states reimburse providers at vastly different rates for the same level of care. Costs for organizations to care for people are increasing, yet the money providers receive has virtually remained the same. This makes operations more challenging and affects how organizations provide backup support and cover administrative costs. It also leads to low pay for caregivers, exacerbating already high turnover.

Our 40 years as a community provider has taught us that relying on state budgets to fund I/DD services is not a way to build sustainable organizations that provide high-quality care, or whole-person services across the lifespan of need. The current climate has driven GoodLife to be as savvy as possible with our labor solutions, to diversify our funding streams, and to refine the way we provide services.

At GoodLife, we aren’t relying on changes to happen within State legislatures and you don’t have to either. Our strategies add margin to mission-minded providers in the midwest across the country. We have the tools, resources and outside-the-box thinking to build and sustain infrastructure for caregiving organizations. For example, we’ve reimagined caregiver schedules, vacancy coordination, compensation strategies, and created other unique strategies that save the organization money and increase income for direct support staff.

That’s just the beginning- — every day we’re working on innovative workforce and labor strategies to help community care providers build a sustainable framework that ultimately leads to improved care for seniors and individuals with I/DD.

We would love to hear from you. Let us know what challenges you face with shrinking resources and we can explore how our labor strategies might improve your organization’s margin or how our Co-Op and partnership opportunities might sustain your organization’s mission.

Authored by staff writers at GoodLife Innovations. For more information contact [email protected] and visit our website at mygoodlife.org.