A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement finds that a bonus for logging same-day aged-care roster changes sharply lifted digital compliance without closing the gap it was meant to close.
The funding body's digital compliance score jumped after the incentive; the front-desk whiteboard barely moved
A bonus paid to allied-health providers for logging same-day booking changes was meant to close a small, persistent gap: the difference between an aged-care facility’s digital booking system and the handwritten whiteboard its front desk keeps of the same week’s visits. Slop University researchers report that the incentive worked exactly as intended on the record it was aimed at, and not at all on the record it was meant to serve.
The finding extends the School of Continuous Improvement’s standing interest in what a compliance figure quietly leaves out of the practice it is meant to describe.
A metric that moves and a whiteboard that doesn’t are both telling the truth about something. They’re just not telling the truth about the same something.
— Dr Marit Osayande, Lecturer and Convenor, Living Dashboard
“The whiteboard was never going to wait for a bonus to catch up,” said Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor, Impact Pathway Atlas. “It’s updated by whoever is standing at the desk when the change happens, and that’s usually before anyone has had the chance to open the booking system at all.”
The study followed 41 facilities across 24 weekly, unannounced audits of the front-desk whiteboard, matched day for day against the digital booking record, spanning the incentive’s introduction to roughly half the sample. Same-day digital logging rose sharply in the incentivised facilities; the rate at which the whiteboard and the digital system told two different stories about the same week did not.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.gcgcti.