Take a participant working toward a specific goal, say, catching the bus to visit her sister on weekends without a support worker beside her. Over several months, a support worker writes dozens of progress notes about the sessions that build toward it: practising the trip with a coach, learning the timetable, managing the walk from the stop to the front door. Each note is accurate, and each one matters, but read on its own, it describes an activity that happened on a Tuesday. It doesn't show whether she is any closer to riding that bus by herself. Skills, a capability we've recently built into Minikai, is designed to close exactly that gap.
From service-based to outcomes-based funding
For a long time, the way we have written about care has centred on the activity itself: what was delivered, by whom, and for how long, because that is what funding models have asked for. Carers, support workers, therapists and clinicians have always captured what happened in a session. What's changing is that funding bodies are starting to ask a different question: whether that activity moved the person any closer to their own goals. It's a shift from service-based funding toward outcomes-based funding, and it changes what a note needs to do.
Writing notes directly against goals
An admin can set up a Skill once, for exactly how the organisation wants a piece of work done, whether that's a progress note, a handover, or a particular report, so everyone gets the same quality, written the same way, every time.
For a provider making the shift to outcomes-based funding, that means the progress note itself can be set up to always ask the same question: what did this session move the person toward? Ask Minikai to run it after the bus practice session, and what comes back already reads as progress toward catching that bus on her own, not just a description of Tuesday's practice run.
Watch: How Skills put your organisation's context behind every question. Bec and Bron on what Skills unlock for customers (YouTube).Evidence already in the everyday record
That evidence matters well beyond a single review meeting. When a provider needs to show a funding body, a family, or an auditor that a person's goals are being met, a trail of notes written against those goals is the proof, already sitting there in the everyday record rather than reconstructed under pressure ahead of a review. It also makes for a better record for the person themselves and whoever is advocating for them, showing the shape of their progress over time rather than a single day taken in isolation.
What stays with the people doing the caring
None of this changes who does the caring or who makes the judgement calls about someone's progress. A support worker still writes up what happened, and still checks that what Minikai drafts is right before it goes anywhere. A therapist or clinician still decides what the goal should be and whether it has been reached. What Skills does is administrative: it means the instruction to write against the goal is set once, by the organisation, rather than left to whether each worker remembers to do it that day.
Getting ahead of the shift
I think this is where funding in our sector is heading, and the providers who can already show their outcomes will be ahead of that shift, rather than catching up to it once it arrives. Writing against someone's goals has always been the right thing to do for the person. It's good to see the record starting to catch up to that.