April 2, 2026

As the fiscal year ends and a new one begins, we celebrate the successful conclusion of the Optimization Initiative. This multi-stream effort focused on enhancing our core digital systems – UKG, M365, AlayaCare, and Unison – and providing resources to empower employees to use these systems more effectively.

While the formal initiative wraps up in March, the progress made has built a strong foundation for the future. Below is a highlight of the specific achievements for AlayaCare and Unison.

What did we optimize and why?

AlayaCare and Unison are our core systems for documenting and tracking information about the people who use our services and services provided. Over the past few years, we have received feedback from support staff and operational leaders about improvements that can be made to create efficiencies and promote better use of these systems. The work undertaken was primarily focused on actioning the feedback, with an emphasis on improving and optimizing data quality, system functionality, and operational processes.

AlayaCare Key Achievements

  • Minimized missed and incorrect occurrence incident notifications for all relevant staff and enabled OI notifications for on-call specialists ensuring timely awareness and swifter response to incidents. 
  • Established better approach for goals and actions tracking: Goals are not tracked in visits, instead goals are attached to actions and only actions are tracked in visits. Click here to read the article that was published.
  • Clearly differentiated ministry-funded people who use our services from those who purchase our services on a fee-for-service basis by creating a unique profile tag in AlayaCare for those who are fee-for-service and enabling syncing of the person’s profile between AlayaCare and Unison.
  • Added Canada Disability Benefit (CDB) and Disability Tax Credit (DTC) to profiles to help support teams efficiently track relevant information and easily identify people who may be eligible to apply for the CDB and DTC.
  • Minimized manual effort and inefficiencies in filling out personal plan forms by enabling pre-filling of new plans with answers from previously submitted plans. 
  • Enabled data tracking and document management for unique home providers in Host Family services by creating unique home provider profiles under Facilities.
  • Enabled tracking of behaviour therapy data for people receiving behaviour supports by adding relevant data fields on people’s profiles (Visible to Internal Behaviour Therapists and Service Standards Managers) and creating “Behaviour therapy case note” progress notes (Visible to Internal Behaviour Therapists, Program Managers, and relevant district leadership roles).

Unison Key Achievements

  • Improved Information Display
  • Searchable drop-down boxes for services and individuals allowing employees to quickly find specific records.
  • Expense approval status added to the Direct Support Professional View so that DSPs can know the approval status of expenses they log related to passport and fee-for-service.
  • Implemented the service location inventory tracking feature and migrated past data from the ODB restoring visibility into the data and enabling ongoing tracking.
  • Enabled unique TAMS configuration for people who use our service on a fee-for-service basis to meet their unique compliance tracking needs.
  • Built automated validations for service history records to prevent overlapping and incomplete records and improve accuracy of ministry non-financial reporting.
  • Automated processes for Passport fiscal year switchover, including roll‑forward of passport agreements and continuing activities, resulting in reduced manual effort, fewer errors, and decreased reliance on external vendors.
  • Implemented permanent fixes for TAMS issues to minimize inconsistent dates, incorrect assignments, and item generation errors.

What’s Next?

While the Optimization initiative has been concluded, Operations and DTI will continue to work on improving AlayaCare and Unison and driving meaningful adoption in a business-as-usual capacity. Also, improved training resources will be developed and published.

Thank You

We would like to extend a special thank you to all employees who have shared feedback—whether through help desk tickets, emails, messages, or by voicing their thoughts in meetings. Your input will continue to shape these systems as they evolve. We appreciate your commitment to making Karis a more digitally connected workplace.

Jeff Ham, Director of Digital, Technology and Innovation
James Palmer, Executive Director, North District