To provide their patients exceptional care, home health agencies must stay up to date with the latest trends.
Home health software has become indispensable for achieving this goal. It allows agencies to meet patients’ expectations and stay on top of different home care challenges.
This article will cover several key home health software benefits and discuss how it can help providers improve their services.
A home health care app can streamline routine everyday operations, such as scheduling, time, location & mileage tracking, internal communications, and more. This way, it can significantly improve your efficiency and the quality of your service.
Even with just a handful of clients, running your operations manually with a simple spreadsheet and accounting software can be pretty challenging. As the number of your patients grows, it becomes virtually impossible to keep doing things the same way without harming the quality.
Read our Why Are You Failing at Health Services Management? article for a more detailed insight.
Before we discuss home health software benefits and how such a solution can help you deliver exceptional patient care and contribute to the growth of your agency, let us explore the challenges of running an in-home care agency.
Even when your patient base is small, manual scheduling can lead to a number of no-shows, double bookings, and all kinds of complications.
One of the essential benefits of home health care software is its ability to streamline the entire appointment scheduling and eliminate the odds that your patients will be left without treatment.
With Timeero’s scheduling feature, you’ll make your managers’ job easier, ensure your patients are well taken care of, and save hours a week.
Timeero also offers a solution for one of the worst nightmares of every home healthcare agency manager - last-minute cancelations. Real-time “Who’s Working” functionality lets you see all available caregivers and easily find someone to cover the shift.
When discussing home health software benefits, it’s essential to delve into the challenges of managing a remote workforce.
You can’t be sure whether your caregivers show up for their scheduled appointments on time or whether they stay as long as they should. That’s why electronic visit verification (EVV) has been introduced and has been mandatory since January 1, 2020.
This method prevents patient neglect or abuse and the practice of fraudulently documented home visits. As you already know, every home care agency must stay EVV compliant, which means using EVV software. Otherwise, you risk being denied your Medicaid or Medicare claims and even a prison sentence.
Because of its GPS and time-tracking feature, Timeero is an excellent solution for agencies providing personal home care services. It allows you to document all the home visits, record the time when a caregiver clocked in or out, and see the exact coordinates of their trajectory, even when they’re offline.
This way, you will:
We’ve already mentioned that home healthcare has become an increasingly competitive industry. In other words, agencies not only compete for new clients but also for skilled, qualified, and loyal staff.
According to a recent McKinsey report, the most remarkable growth in labor demand by 2030 will be among health aides, technicians, and similar wellness and health professionals. It’s not hard to conclude that you need to offer the best conditions and perks to attract and keep professionals in such high demand.
Of course, paying your employees properly is non-negotiable. Still, it won’t do the trick unless you ensure they have all the tech and equipment they need.
Again, home health software that collects and stores all the relevant patient information and makes it easily accessible to caregivers is a must, as it makes their jobs much easier. In addition, having patients’ records at their fingertips will help your staff minimize the risk of mistakes while administering medication and providing health care.
To learn more about attracting top talent, read our article on Caregiver Recruiting Strategies. To focus on the issue of retention, check out our article How Can Home Healthcare Agencies Improve Employee Retention.
Billing and invoicing your clients, processing your caregivers’ hours, and calculating your costs can be time-consuming. For example, since not every patient uses the same insurance program, you must figure out how to facilitate your billing and invoicing process.
With the help of Timeero, it will be easier for you to monitor your expenses and pay your employees accurately. The software seamlessly integrates with 5,000 apps, including the most popular payroll and accounting software. This will allow you to approve and export time and mileage and streamline employee reimbursement.
After covering the most common and pressing challenges that home health agencies face, we can discuss the advantages of using home health software.
Here’s how your agency, patients, and employees will benefit from switching to such an advanced tech solution.
Efficiency is crucial in home health care. Still, at the same time, it shouldn’t come at the expense of service quality.
And that’s precisely what can happen if you don’t automate and optimize your operations.
One of the most essential home health software benefits is its capability to streamline your workflows by using the available data and analytics.
For example, the software will gauge the time between visits, keep track of the mileage, account for lunch breaks and days off, and create a cost-effective schedule that will cover every single patient. At the same time, it will reduce the need for manual data entry minimizing the odds of errors or fraudulent practices.
Timeero comes with a mileage tracking feature, and together with its GPS tracker, you can rest assured that your caregivers don’t take long routes intentionally or use company vehicles for personal purposes.
Read our Guide to Employee Mileage Reimbursement for more details on the matter.
Some of the reasons for choosing this kind of software solution is to:
All this will ultimately help you build a strong reputation among other healthcare providers and further grow your home care business.
Being a professional caregiver is rewarding. Still, at the same time, it’s one of the most responsible and stressful jobs.
Implementing home health software will ease your employees’ administrative burden, such as timekeeping or filling in mileage logs for employee mileage reimbursement purposes.
Using Timeero, your employees can complete their admin tasks from their mobile devices in minutes. They can clock in and out of work, a job, or a location, with a click.
The app will create a timesheet entry for them, keep track of their locations, and log their mileage and routes during their shifts.
Timeero can make other actions easier for your employees as well, such as:
When caregivers don’t waste time on menial tasks and paperwork, they can focus on their primary job, perform it better, and establish a more meaningful connection with their patients.
On the other hand, patients often feel scared and vulnerable. Some feel much better when the same caregiver visits them, giving them a sense of stability and security. Timeero can help your agency improve your patients' experience, as it helps with care coordination so that your managers easily assign the same caregivers for home visits. If your clients are satisfied with the care you provide, the odds are either they or their families will be happy to give you a referral, so you can count on getting more home health care clients.
Better caregiver experiences will, in turn, boost your employees’ loyalty, minimize your turnover rate, and improve retention.
To learn how to prevent caregiver churn, check out the article Understanding Home Health Nurse Turnover Rates.
More often than not, your patient's needs change while caregivers come and go.
All this makes it difficult for your team to be on the same page, which is why storing all the reference notes in the same HIPAA-compliant software, is crucial. That’s why keeping the lines of communication between all team members open is among the top-priority homecare software benefits.
Timeero allows your caregivers to add photos and enter relevant notes to their visits. Such a system provides for smooth hand-offs and continuity in the caring process.
A new caregiver can easily pick up where their colleague left off without compromising the success of the treatment.
Similarly, when you make or change the appointment schedule, it can take a lot of time to inform your employees about their shifts and communicate last-minute changes.
Again, Timeero offers an elegant messaging solution - the app will automatically and instantly alert your team about any changes in their schedule.
Once they receive the notification, your employees can check the shift’s details and accept or decline it using their mobile device.
Using home health software with a GPS and time-tracking feature is mandatory in terms of compliance and can come in handy if a patient raises an issue or refuses entry. In such circumstances, your employees can prove what happened easily.
This way, you protect your staff and agency from potential legal issues, as the software keeps digital records of every visit. Timeero tracks time for every location, and you can accurately monitor when each employee clocks in or out.
Some small agencies still stick to inefficient old-school paper-based systems for keeping records and making schedules.
When employees spend more time taking and accessing their notes, they have less time for patient appointments. Five minutes here and there add up. As a result, you might have to hire another employee to cover extra shifts and appointments.
By going digital, you’ll eliminate such inefficiencies and substantially cut your costs, which is vital for your agency's growth.
If you still haven’t, it is high time you chose home health software tailored to fit your agency’s needs.
Timeero is easy to use and will improve every segment of your home health or hospice business. The initial investment will pay off quickly and profoundly impact your agency's revenue.
Natasa is a writer specializing in the IT and software industry with 6+ years of experience in content writing and online marketing. During that period, she wrote more than 1,000 articles and several ebooks. She majored in English language and literature and loves cats, sneakers, and candy. When she's not working, she's probably binge-watching Netflix.
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