Mable payments
Speeding up payment timeframes and reducing invoice rejections.
Mable is reimagining aged care and disability support for Australians.
Challenge
Improve the payment experience for all stakeholders processing claims for NDIS plan-managed clients on Mable.
Objectives
Ensure support workers on Mable set rates that are under the appropriate price limit for the service they provide.
Allocate accurate support items to hours on support worker invoices sent to NDIS plan managers.
Increase the speed of payments for workers.
Reduce the number of invoices rejected by plan managers.
Role
Product Design Lead
When
2023, 8 months
Team
The Payments Squad: Product Manager, Engineering Manager, Data Analyst, and a delivery team of engineers and QA.
A complex design challenge
I joined the Payments squad with the daunting realisation that previous designers who had attempted to solve this challenge had parked it due to the uncovered complexity.
Why is it so complex?
Support items are chargeable codes that can be invoiced to the NDIS. There are over 840 codes, and NDIS participants only have some codes available specific to their NDIS plan. The most common types of support overlap many different codes.
This problem is unique to Mable as an unregistered provider. Registered providers can access this information through the NDIA Portal, apps or APIs.
Discovery
Can clients select the charge category?
We discovered that most clients are unfamiliar with the budget they have available or how it works. Clients who have tried to understand their budget have found the NDIS rules complex and overwhelming.
Customer testing prototype: getting clients to select the support category for a specific job.
“I feel physically sick just seeing this question. I’ve just put so much energy and effort into trying to understand these categories and the more I try, the less it makes sense to me. I would have no idea what to select here, and I would be so so scared of getting it wrong and affecting my budget.”
Pivot #1: Could plan managers share their client’s budget information?
We interviewed plan managers and found that Mable’s invoices are very time-consuming to process. They see the upfront effort as a great help because it will prevent huge problems down the line, like invoice rejections and disputes.
“We have so many invoices coming from Mable that we cannot confirm the service and it is over the price cap so we cannot process them.”
Testing our riskiest assumption: clients will consent to Mable accessing their budget information
We found that clients were reasonably comfortable with the concept of Mable contacting their plan manager for budget category information.
Prototype screen grabs from testing whether clients would be comfortable giving consent for us to contact their plan manager and request budget information.
Mounting complexity leading to pivot #2
Plan managers shared that clients would need to contact them directly to provide consent, rather than Mable facilitating the consent and gaining the information independently.
“We would need direct contact from the client asking us to provide this information, it’s not enough for Mable to say they’ve consented. And we’d require a secure portal to upload the information to. It can’t be shared over email.”
A complete pivot to our approach
An interview with our finance Head of Collections uncovered that ~20% of rejected invoices were for allied health services. The NDIS support items for these services are one-to-one, making it simpler for Mable to use logic to determine the service based on the worker's qualifications and client service request.
The NDIS released an industry quarterly report detailing how funds were being allocated to providers. The report showed that unregistered providers like Mable provide services from core funding around 99% of the time. Core funding is the more flexible funding type, giving us more leniency.
How might we use data and logic to accurately set the default for the majority (at least 95%) of services on invoices?
Our vision
To automatically allocate at least 80% of Mable’s plan-managed NDIS invoices to a support item code. We don’t make any client or support worker who is unfamiliar with the codes feel they need to go and learn them. We support specialised support types to be allocated by request.
Outcomes
Support item codes were be applied to all Mable invoices, improving key third-party relationships and speeding up the payment process for all stakeholders. We achieved 96% accuracy (above the 80% success metric we had set).
100% rollout success
Reduced price limit invoice rejections by 76%
A/B testing revealed a detailed alert with in-context dropdowns achieved ~15% higher interaction and user action compared with a simpler message with a link to learn more.
Reduced payment timeframes and uncertainty for workers
Call volumes to our payments assistance team dropped by 44%.
