🇦🇺Australia

Unbezahlte Berichte und Nachuntersuchungen durch pauschale Therapieabrechnung

Updated: Feb 20261 verified sources

Definition

Speech Pathology Australia explains that clients funded under the NDIS may require an updated assessment and report before their funding is reviewed, and that speech pathologists may need to conduct another assessment in order to provide accurate information to the NDIA, with all assessment and reporting costs to be clearly disclosed to clients as part of the service offer.[4] This implies that report preparation is an explicit, chargeable component of service, not a free add‑on. In practice, many allied health clinics document progress notes and compile review reports outside of scheduled billable sessions, or they fail to use the correct NDIS assessment/report line items, resulting in report time not being invoiced. Logic based on typical private‑practice hourly rates (AUD 180–220/h) and average report workloads for NDIS/insurer reviews (2–4 hours per participant, several times per year) indicates that even a small clinic with 50–100 funded clients can easily fail to bill 50–150 hours per year of report work, equating to AUD 9,000–33,000 of revenue leakage. Larger multidisciplinary providers with higher caseloads can lose substantially more. Because reports are legal documents belonging to the client that must be prepared to a defensible standard, they cannot simply be skipped or dramatically shortened without clinical and legal risk, so the time is effectively mandatory but often not monetised.[4]

Key Findings

Financial Impact: Logic estimate: 50–150 hours/year of unbilled report preparation at ~AUD 180–220/h ≈ AUD 9,000–33,000 annual revenue leakage per small clinic; for larger services this can exceed AUD 50,000 p.a.
Frequency: Ongoing; every NDIS plan review, insurer review or major re‑evaluation cycle where report writing is required but not billed as a discrete service.
Root Cause: Lack of alignment between clinical workflows and funding rules that allow separate billing for assessment and reporting; poor item‑code selection when invoicing; progress note templates that do not automatically track and push report-writing time into billing; cultural tendency to treat documentation as non‑billable overhead despite being a defined, chargeable service component under funder expectations.[4]

Why This Matters

The Pitch: Allied health providers in Australia 🇦🇺 (Physio/OT/Speech) regularly lose AUD 10,000–40,000 p.a. in unbilled progress and re‑evaluation reporting time. Automation of time capture and separate report-item claiming recovers this leakage with no extra clinical work.

Affected Stakeholders

Private practice speech pathologists, Occupational therapists, Physiotherapists, Practice owners, NDIS coordinators / administrators, Allied health billing staff