Statista estimated that in 2020, home care services providers brought in over $97 billion in revenue and employed over 1.4 million persons.
Statista further showed that the U. S population of Baby Boomers is getting old, and the demand for home health services will continue growing.
As a home healthcare provider, it’s paramount that you increase the efficiency of your service delivery, and one way of doing this is by using a software program.
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Ways the Right Software Makes Your Home Care Agency More Efficient
How does a software program help increase efficiency in a hospice facility? Here is what it does:
It streamlines the appointment scheduling process
One of the major paint points of running a home health agency is difficulty in scheduling. Since caregivers are always on the move, they have a challenge making proper follow-up and checkup schedules while dealing with shortages, emergency calls, and increased demands.
When the scheduling is done manually, there are increased chances of making mistakes. Two of the most popular errors are leaving some patients out of the schedule and booking two or more patients at the same time.
A software program reduces the chances of making these mistakes by up to 95%.
By using integrated scheduling tools you:
- Accurately plan your sessions, daily meetings, and conferences
- Track, manage, and update your caregivers
- Monitor and update information in real-time
- Send the visit requests to the caregivers and ensure that they respond to the invites in good time.
Using the software programs, you have an easy time scheduling your daily, weekly, and even monthly visits, which comes in handy in helping your teams collaborate better and organize their workflows, which, as you can tell, significantly makes the operations in your agency more efficient.
It ensures that your employees show up on time
When you are doing things manually, the best you can do is to call your caregivers and ask them to visit a patient at a certain time—you have no way to tell whether they show up at the agreed time.
A home care software program has an electronic visit verification feature that tells whether a caregiver delivered the service at the agreed time. This significantly reduces patient neglect. Your employees also can’t fraudulently document home visits and steal from you.
When buying software for hospice management, ensure the software has a GPS and time tracking feature. This way, you will easily document all the home visits and record the time the caregiver clocks in and out. Some programs allow you to see the exact coordinates of the service provider when they are offline.
Besides this feature saving you money and ensuring that your patients get the service they need at the right time, it also provides you with electronic proof of every home visit, you bill your clients correctly, pay your employees the right amount, and protect your agency in the event of a potential dispute.
It allows better communication and teamwork
With a software program, you have an easy time communicating with your employees. When you want a caregiver to attend to a patient, you only need to send them a message bearing the name of the patient, their location and the scheduled visit time.
Thanks to the recording feature, you will know the exact time the caregiver clocked in and out.
Since you have all the patient records in one centralized place, you aren’t restricted on the caregivers you can use.
All you need to do is to make the patient records visible to the caregivers, and the relevant caregiver can easily pick up where their colleague left off, without compromising the effectiveness of the treatment.
In the event a patient changes their available time, you can easily communicate with your caregivers and give them the new schedule.
It brings about a sense of accountability
When you don’t have proof that an assigned caregiver treated a patient, the caregiver can easily say they aren’t responsible in case of a problem.
When you have home care software, this can’t happen as you have digital proof, and you can tell which caregiver attended to which patient.
Many cases have been reported where a patient was given a certain medication, and the situation worsened. Some patients get litigious, go to court, and sue your organization for poor service or neglect.
Since you have digital records, you can easily tell the caregiver who delivered the service and the nature of the treatment.
Since your employees know you can tell everything about them from when they clocked in, to the type of care they provided, they are more cautious and responsible in their service delivery.
The fact that the employees know they will be responsible for their actions, they are more efficient in their work and this puts your business in good light as potential clients know you deliver excellent services efficiently.
The software saves you money and time
When dealing with notepads and spreadsheets, you waste not only a lot of time but also a lot of money.
Taking the example above, where the caregivers fraudulently document a home visit they didn’t make, you stand to lose the money you shouldn’t have.
Doing things manually also means you make plenty of mistakes that take a lot of time to fix.
As mentioned, a software program reduces the chances of you making a mistake by up to 95% so you save time and money as you don’t have to keep going back and forth.
To have an easy time with your software, get software that allows you to easily generate reports for any area of your business that you might be interested in.
An ideal software should make it easy to generate expense reports, patient reports, invoices, supplier reports, and any other reports you might need.
Are you taking advantage of home health software?
If you haven’t already started using home health software, it’s time to do it. The right program will significantly increase your efficiency and save time and money.
A good software program doesn’t come cheap, but when you properly use it, you will quickly recoup the investment and, at the same time, pose your home health and hospice business as a worthy player in the healthcare industry.
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Chibueze Uchegbu is a certified medical physiologist with a great passion for healthy living.
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