What Makes Child Care Licensing Different?

Child care agencies face unique challenges from public scrutiny to a shortage of providers. Plus, these regulatory agencies operate differently, requiring unique functionalities, like background checks and case management. Learn three ways to address these licensing challenges and put your state’s child care agency on the path of modernization.

Unique Challenges

The unique challenges of child care licensing agencies range from public and government scrutiny to handling a system overburdened with a lack of providers.  Along with this, agencies face a daunting list of child care regulations they must ensure that providers meet. And most importantly these agencies must ensure the health, well-being and safety of children in child care facilities.

Some of the unique challenges of child care licensing agencies include:

1. Shortage of providers: The child care licensing industry faces a tremendous shortage of providers—across the country. Providers must overcome strict barriers to entry, meeting multiple and varied licensing requirements, depending on the type of specialized care they provide. In addition, all staff, from janitors to managers, must go through rigorous background checks to ensure a safe environment for the kids.
2. Requirements for licensure: Each specialized child care license type must meet a rich source of requirements—or you place children at risk. As part of this, these potential providers go through in-depth inspections to ensure compliance with the many statutes.
3. Speed of licensure: Child care licensing agencies work quickly to authorize or decline child care providers, as demand for their services remains high. Working efficiently helps children get the care they need as soon as possible—and with the right provider.
4. Visibility of agency: Of any licensing agency, those that serve children see their names in the media when things go awry. Death and serious injury reports, for example, spotlight any weaknesses in the system—from missing children to child abuse.

Operational Differences

Some of the unique functionalities for the licensing process include:

• Background checks: Every single staff member at a licensed provider site needs a background check.
• In-depth inspections: The process of inspecting or surveying child care providers sometimes means checking off hundreds of requirements for meeting safety standards. And these inspections sometimes take days. Remote off-line surveys must capture signatures, duration, as well as geo-tagging for locations.
• Corrective Action Plans (CAP): When providers fail the inspection process, they must tackle a Corrective Action Plan (CAP) to make amends.
• Robust case management: Agencies require robust case management capabilities—from recording complaints to taking legal action.
• Provider portals: Portals enable agencies to support multiple forms of file and document uploads to meet requirements.
• Geographic Information Systems (GIS): GIS tools help track inspections/surveys for compliance and safety inspections.
• Powerful reporting: Accurate and intuitive reporting helps track providers.

Agency Modernization

As your child care licensing agency works to modernize, consider these important functionalities and features to ensure your child care licensing agency works to best protect the public. Use these three ideas to transform your agency and put your child care regulatory agency on the path of modernization.

Guide Staff

Connect your child care agency’s business processes to the regulations they must meet. Use a tool that guides your staff step-by-step through your processes, systematically meeting any regulations at the same time. These business process guides—built right into your regulatory software—enable new and current employees alike to follow your processes and not miss a step.

Standardizing your child care processes help your child care agency to measure performance, while improving continuously. Most importantly, these standardizes processes ensure your agency follows federal and state law.

Why guide staff with business process guides?

• Guides staff through every step of the process.
• Shows staff where they left off in an incomplete process.
• Highlights current step.
• Includes links to where staff input work.
• Built directly in your regulatory software.

Serve Customers

Integrate your child care agency’s workflow with a customer-facing portal. Customer-facing portals allow applicants or renewing licensees to log in and access all authorized online services from one location. These portals enable your licensees to easily submit an online application, update demographic or contact information, provide required documentation to meet safety requirements, as well as reference and print copies of their licenses. And when your agency enables role-based security permissions online users only access the screens and data updates their security settings allow for.

These customer-facing portals help licensees and providers communicate directly with agency staff; the bi-directional communication channel allows for correspondence via SMS, email or notifications within the user’s dashboard.

Why serve customers with client-facing portals?

• Authenticate users easily with single sign-on capabilities, for ease and security.
• Provides better customer service by creating one place for users to update information and submit forms.
• Meets your licensees’ expectations to work with your agency online, 24/7, versus communicating in person, by phone or by mail.
• Modernizes your regulatory processes, helping your agency shift from paper to digital, meeting the public’s expectations.

Measure Performance

Measure your agency’s performance and make needed changes to process workloads. Harness data already gathered in your regulatory software to measure that against Key Performance Indicators (KPI)—or measures of performance—that your regulatory agency establishes. Measure organizational, team, and individual performance from data stored within your regulatory software application.

Display the data using visually compelling Business Intelligence reporting, for example, to see performance trends over time, as well as geography. Drill down into your data to track and improve upon indicators such as tracking business process duration, project deadlines, and staff productivity to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

Why measure performance at your agency?

• Establish performance metrics and goals over time.
• Create personnel evaluations and incentive compensation plans based on one or more weighted KPI values.
• Identify team bottlenecks and workload balancing needs.
• Enable corrective action based on timely data.
• Drill-down in data to identify root causes for performance results.
• Visualize performance over time and geography to identify trends.
• Cross compare metrics to identify correlations.
• Save supporting data for auditing purposes.

Agency Transformation

GL Solutions’ Agency Transformation service guides your child care agency on the modernization journey. We take your regulatory agency through five phases of development from understanding your mission to continually improving and serving as a model agency. After evaluating your licensing and permitting process, we craft a detailed plan that follows the five phases.

To learn more about the optimal child care licensing system, download our white paper, the Key Components of a Child Care Licensing System or visit our child care licensing solutions page.