Plan review week is the most important week of a support coordinator's year. It's also the week most SCs dread.
The pattern is familiar. The plan ends in two weeks. The participant's needs have shifted — sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. The funding model needs to bend with them. And you, as the SC, have to make the case to the NDIA delegate that what you're asking for is justified by what's actually happened over the past 12 months.
So you start digging. You scroll through your inbox for the email thread about the medication incident in October. You phone the SIL provider to confirm whether the 1:1 hours actually held all year. You ask the OT for the latest report — except the OT sent a PDF four months ago and you have to scroll back through your messages to find it. You patch it together. You write the funding case. You hope it holds.
Sometimes the story is enough. Sometimes it isn't. The delegate asks "what's the evidence for this?" and you have anecdotes. Not numbers.
The data you need to make the funding case exists. The problem is it lives in someone else's system.
Why does it happen this way?
Not because SCs are disorganised. Most SCs are obsessively organised — they have to be, given the caseload and the documentation expectations. The problem is structural.
Every shift the SIL provider runs, every incident logged, every training certificate, every OT recommendation, every goal the family wants prioritised — it's all written down somewhere. The provider has Aura OS or SupportAbility or one of fifteen other compliance platforms. The OT has their own client database. The family has a folder of PDFs on their desktop. You have an email inbox, a calendar, and a Word document.
The same information exists across all these systems. None of it flows. When the data doesn't flow, the support coordinator becomes the human integration layer — collecting, verifying, compiling, justifying. At plan review. Under time pressure. With incomplete information.
What the delegate actually wants
Compare what an SC usually says at plan review to what they wish they could say.
What gets said:
- "I think Emma needs 35 hours of 1:1 support per week."
- "There have been some incidents this year."
- "We're recommending continued behaviour support."
What an SC wishes they could say:
- "Emma received 1,847 hours of 1:1 support over the past 12 months."
- "14 reportable incidents, 2 requiring medical attention. Incident frequency up 56% year-on-year, concentrated in the last quarter."
- "95% training compliance across the worker pool supporting Emma. The 5% gap is one new worker awaiting a refresher booking on 22 May."
- "Recommendation: 1,920 hours for the year ahead, indexed for award changes. Behaviour support plan due for review by the BSP practitioner on 6 June; we'll fold those updates into the post-approval implementation log."
Same participant. Same year. Two completely different conversations with the delegate. The second one isn't possible without the data. And the data has to be captured as it happens — not reconstructed from memory in the three weeks before plan review.
The three principles Pilot is built on
Log as it happens. Stage 1+2 live
Every conversation with a provider, every check-in with a family, every advocacy moment — logged in Pilot in 30 seconds. By plan review week you have 12 months of context, not a 48-hour reconstruction effort. Caseload, participants, and contemporaneous notes are the foundation; everything else is layered on top.
Funding justifications are structured, not free-text. Stage 6 live
Pilot's funding-justification flow asks three things every time: what change are you requesting, what evidence supports it, what's the alternative if it isn't approved. That structure mirrors how delegates actually read submissions. The same structure feeds into the plan review report and the implementation report; you write the work once, it flows where it needs to go.
Connect makes the data flow across the team. Foundation live · evidence pull rolling out
When the SIL provider runs on Aura OS, when the family uses Compass, when the OT writes in Scrive — the participant data they capture is available to the SC through Connect, with the family in control of consent. The graph is participant-centric: the family approves who's on Emma's care team, who can see what, and can revoke at any time. The audit log is plain English; one click to drill into who accessed what.
What's live today, what's coming
Pilot is in early release. The caseload, contemporaneous logging, plan review report, implementation report, and funding-justification flow are live in production right now — you can sign up at clearlinehealth.com.au/pilot/register/ and start using them.
Connect is being built piece by piece. As of today: the participant-centric graph foundation, three-tier scope catalogue, NDIS-hash discovery, off-platform invitations, and the Compass consent hub UI are all live. The cross-product evidence auto-pull — the part that means "Pilot fetches Aura's incident counts for Emma's plan review automatically" — lands across the next several releases. For now, the structure is in place; the data flow is filling in.
What this looks like in practice
SC writes: "Emma has had a difficult year, with increased behavioural incidents and a need for closer monitoring. We're requesting 38 hours per week." Delegate asks for evidence. SC asks the SIL provider for incident counts. Provider runs a report and emails it. SC writes a follow-up letter to the delegate. Decision delayed two weeks. Net result: the recommendation lands, but later than the participant needed it.
SC opens Emma's plan review prep. The connected Aura data — with the family's consent — shows 14 reported incidents in the plan year against 9 the year before, 2 requiring medical attention. Average shift length is up from 4.2 to 5.1 hours as support intensity rose. The SC writes: "Incidents up 56% year-on-year, 2 medical. Average shift length 4.2 → 5.1 hours. Current 35 hr/week model strained; requesting 38 hr/week with quarterly review." Delegate has the numbers in the brief. Decision lands faster.
The delegate sees that Emma's allied health budget was 70% used. Why fund it again at the same level? SC says: "Yes, it was underused this year because of OT availability issues, but Emma still needs it." Delegate trims the allocation. The participant ends up underfunded for a need the SC could have evidenced.
SC pulls the connected Scrive data showing the OT had three plan-stage assessments scheduled, two completed, one cancelled due to provider absence. Aggregate hours show the underuse is a supply-side problem, not a need-side one. The SC writes: "Allied health utilisation 70% due to OT supply, not demand. Need persists — see Scrive functional capacity assessment dated 12 March documenting ongoing 2:1 transfer support requirement. Requesting same allocation; backup OT identified for the plan year ahead." Same money. Different conversation. Different outcome.
What this means for plan review week
The work doesn't disappear. You still have to make the case. You still have to know the participant. The relationships still matter — especially the one with the family.
But the case is built on numbers, not on what you remember. The hours are real. The incidents are real. The training compliance is real. The OT recommendations are timestamped and signed. The family's priority changes are documented in their own Compass workspace, with their consent for the SC to see.
Plan review week stops being the worst week of the year. It becomes the week you bring 12 months of work to the table.
Free for solo support coordinators
Pilot is free for solo SCs. No credit card, no trial timer, no quote forms. If you're running a small SC team or a Specialist SC practice, paid tiers add multi-coordinator collaboration and audit-export features — we'll publish the pricing publicly when we get there. We don't believe the funding-justification workflow should sit behind a paywall, and we're not interested in building a product that makes plan review harder.
If you want to see what 12 months of real evidence looks like in a plan review pack, sign up. It's the work most SCs are already doing — Pilot just makes the time you invest pay off when the delegate asks for the numbers.
Try Pilot for your next plan review.
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