Streamlining support with the My ChildCare BC Services portal

For Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) in B.C., time is a valuable resource. To help them get it back, teams at the Ministry of Education and Child Care are building, maintaining and enhancing the digital systems that deliver funding that makes child care affordable.

Their newest release is the My ChildCare BC Services portal (MYCCBC), which allows providers to apply for funding online, including operational funding for operators, fee reductions for parents and wage enhancement for ECEs. Thanks to automated processes and a layer of complex machine logic, all three groups are spending less time on applications and forms.

Streamlined funding processes

MYCCBC leverages automated processes and advanced logic to reduce time spent on applications and forms. For example, operational funding applications are streamlined through automatic queuing and assignment, allowing the system to determine when human review is needed.

Automating the system

MYCCBC uses automatic queuing and assignment to automatically identify if certain applicants are eligible for funding. The new system analyzes the provider’s submitted fee increases over the previous 24 months and expedites or flags applications based on specific criteria. For example:

• Providers without fee increases are automatically approved
• Providers with fee increases within the median limit of the BC School Superintendents Association Chapters (BCSSA) area are flagged for review and recommended for approval
• Providers with fee increases above the median are flagged for focused adjudication

Currently, 80% of submissions are automatically approved at the first stage, significantly reducing processing times. In 2024, this efficiency enabled many renewals to be completed by April, a process that previously extended through July.

This streamlined approach means more funding delivered to facilities and parents on time, with faster processing for child care facilities. Here automation triages the work, prioritizing the time of providers’ staff and creating simpler buckets of work for ministry employees.

The human touch

Child care is a complex enterprise, and some applications require human touch due to unique circumstances that automated logic can’t address. Documents like financial statements still need to be analyzed by the people making the ultimate decisions. Unique scenarios and patterns that can’t be analyzed by automated logic require human review and authentication.

Some scenarios too complex for automation include:

• Providers offering different types of care in summer or over holidays
• Parent fee structures changing from monthly to daily
• Temporary adjustments to fee amounts
• Analyzing operational costs against proposed fee increases

In these situations, ministry staff determine important details and make the final judgment call. Documenting these edge cases helps the team to further improve their automated logic in post-launch updates, with three major updates and several minor updates since launch.

Young and growing fast

The success of MYCCBC is driving plans for continuous improvement. The immediate plan is to improve current functionality, enhance the product, and explore how other functions in the program could take advantage of automation, digitization and AI. The team is eagerly exploring AI implementations like chatbots to streamline support and assistance for providers and staff even more in the future.