Connecting a community with the care it needs:
The Thames Valley Family Health Team is one of the largest family health teams in Ontario, Canada. More than 120 physicians across 18 sites provide team-based primary health care to more than 160,000 patients. With a team of family physicians, registered nurses, nurse practitioners, dietitians, social workers, pharmacists, occupational and respiratory therapists, and administrative staff, the TVFHT works together to deliver the best care possible to their patients, and their community.
As an organization, the TVFHT is a vital support network for both physicians, and patients. They work closely with local governments, physician’s clinics, and other community organizations to provide resources, education, and direct care to people across the region who may not have access to a primary physician, like the unhoused population or individuals who recently immigrated to the country.
The TVFHT also helps provide follow-up appointments and ongoing aftercare for patients recently discharged from hospital, dealing with chronic or long-term illnesses, those in need of mental health services, and much more.
The TVFHT plays an invaluable role in ensuring that people, from across the regions in which they operate, can access the care they need, timely, and in a safe environment by serving as the operational hub for a large and complex network of healthcare providers in the community.
Doing more, with less
Before adopting Plooto, accounts payable and receivable practices were conducted manually, from data entry, processing, paying, and tracking invoices, to payroll. Not only does the TVFHT accounting team manage those functions for its own organization, over the past few years, several other organizations providing healthcare and community services have been brought under their umbrella, increasing the workload for their team which had already been managing capacity constraints.
“When I started two years ago, there were about 50 invoices a month that came through this part of the office, whereas now there's between 150 to 200 every two weeks when we do the payment cycle.,” Jennifer Colwell, Accounting Technician at TVFHT, said. “It's really tough when you have those constraints and finite resources and it all has to fit.”
Before using Plooto, the operations and finance team set aside hours to manually enter and process payments, print, sign, and mail physical checks, track budgets for three organizations, and review financials prepared by a third-party to submit for government approval.
By automating payment processes with Plooto, Jennifer has been able to not only find significant efficiencies and improve workload capacity but has also been able to dedicate the time saved to onboarding a large list of new payees that support an expansion of the TVFHT’s services in the region.
“Saving that time with Plooto has been heavenly,” Jennifer said. "It just enables us to do so much more than we can without it.”
Alleviating constraints with increased efficiencies
With Plooto, the TVFHT eliminated time-consuming manual processes, and fully automated their accounts payable and receivable. This gave them greater control and visibility over cash in and out, and, most importantly, freed up valuable time for their accounting team to focus on supporting their vendors, partners, and organizations under their umbrella. The operational efficiencies this change brought to the TVFHT created valuable capacity by helping the finance team:
- Save time - Using Plooto, TVFHT was able to save hours every month, alleviating the capacity constraints their team had been experiencing.
- Maximize budget - TVFHT was able to cut back on all costs associated with the manual processes, especially costs around paper checks.
- Streamline reconciliation - The automated two-way sync between Plooto and their accounting software, QuickBooks, eliminated tedious manual processes and mitigated risk of data entry errors.
- Control cash flow - Now, TVFHT has complete visibility of all their payments and receivables, allowing them to plan further ahead and provide valuable reporting and tracking insights into their cash flow.
- Simplify reporting - The monthly reports, and increased visibility have made it much easier for TVFHT to fulfill the obligations they have for reporting financials as a government-funded organization, helping them maintain funding they need to support their partners and community.
“Having something that is cost effective, efficient, and that works is difficult to find,” Jennifer said. “The fact that Plooto is efficient, effective, and economical is amazing.”
More time and resources for community support
The TVFHT has grown substantially over the past several years, expanding their own operations, and bringing subsidiary healthcare organizations under their umbrella. While this growth has enabled the TVFHT to maximize the impact of the public funding it receives by providing crucial services to a much larger number of organizations. Though supporting other organizations does put additional strain on the internal resources within TVFHT, it is a necessary step to create sector efficiency and reduce administrative redundancy in the communities in which we serve.
Adopting Plooto enabled the resource-constrained accounting team at the TVFHT to streamline their processes across AR/AP, payroll, and reporting functions across their entire organization, including their subsidiaries. As a result, their team has unlocked the capacity to provide better support to their growing community of healthcare professionals, and the patients that rely on them.
