The global home healthcare industry is expected to reach almost $663 billion by 2027.
At the same time, WHO has projected that the number of older people will double by 2050, which means that there will be approximately 2.1 billion senior citizens in the world. It goes without saying that many of them will need long-term care.
These figures show that this landscape will become increasingly competitive and challenging. The fact that healthcare providers will have to switch to a more patient-centric approach in offering healthcare services is something that will shape future efforts to meet future demands and deliver on client expectations.
To streamline your operations, ensure caregiver retention, and improve the quality of care, you need to choose a home health software platform that will allow you to stay on top of all this.
Here are some tips to help you with this task and pick the best application for your home healthcare business.
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Before helping you choose home health software that will meet your requirements, we need to establish what such an application is and discuss its essential features and functionalities.
A simple and straightforward definition would be that home health software is a system that facilitates home health care agency management and streamlines service coordination.
Such a system allows private-duty agencies to schedule appointments and visits, prevent double bookings, track caregivers’ visits, simplify insurance billing, and facilitate invoicing and payment management.
Home health care can be used interchangeably with home care services, as both terms refer to agencies that provide skilled and unskilled as well as both short and long-term health care services in the comfort of patients’ own homes.
Spurred by the ongoing pandemic, hospitals are trying to reduce overcrowding, while insurers see this model as a way to slow and minimize healthcare spending.
As a matter of fact, 30% of patients admitted to hospitals are eligible for in-home care, which means that there’s a huge potential for agencies and providers of such services to step in and pick up the slack.
So, it’s a solution that all parties will benefit from.
Benefits of Implementing Home Health Care Software
To properly choose a home health care platform, you have to understand how it will improve your daily operations, customer service, as well as your client's well-being.
It’s obvious that you can’t run an agency using a spreadsheet and a simple accounting app. What you need is multi-faceted cloud-based software capable of keeping track of all the caregivers and other non-medical members of your staff, allowing you to schedule appointments, notifying your workforce about any schedule changes, and exporting time records to major payroll software systems.
Unlike on-premise software solutions that run only from a server in your agency, SAAS will provide your agency with greater flexibility. As this type of cloud-based home health care software is cloud-based, you and your employees can access the data you need anytime, from anywhere.
As of January 1, 2020, home healthcare agencies must implement EVV solutions in an attempt to prevent fraudulently documented home visits and patient abuse and neglect.
That’s where electronic visit verification comes in to ensure your caregivers actually show up on time for their scheduled appointments. Using such a solution, you’ll be able to hold your staff accountable, bill your clients only for the provided services, and have everything documented.
Home care health fraud is a serious offense, and it can result not only in your Medicaid or Medicare claims being denied but also in up to 10 years in prison per count.
Given that EVV is usually done using a GPS-enabled device paired with the tracking software, Timeero is the right choice. It comes with GPS-tracking, time-tracking, and scheduling features, which means that you will always know where every team member is or has been and when they arrived at or left a particular location.
In addition to that, you can use Timeero web-based solution and mobile app to:
Remind your employees to clock in/out
Approve and export time to payroll software
Create a schedule for your entire team and notify them about their shifts
Use messaging to send message blasts to employees, ensuring they’re always up to date.
Monitor your employees' whereabouts in real-time during their working hours.
All this means that with Timeero, you won’t have to worry about ensuring the best patient care, accurate billing, and compliance.
2. Improve the patient experience
The success of your home health care agency heavily relies on the satisfaction of your clients.
Patients are already worried about their condition, so giving them a sense of consistency and stability is something that will reduce their anxiety and make them feel more at ease. If your caregivers are punctual and reliable, it will be easier for them to establish credibility and trust with their patients. This will, in turn, improve the patient experience and the reputation of your agency.
Therefore, if you choose software for the home health business properly, you’ll have a powerful tool for monitoring your staff and ensuring they’re offering the best possible care. Also, if you notice some red flags, you’ll be able to act immediately and replace a team member who doesn’t live up to your patients’ expectations and your agency’s standards.
Also, since billing is automated, you’ll prevent potential legal issues.
3. Improve the caregiver experience
Similarly, by strengthening the reputation of your home care business, you’ll position yourself as a desirable employer. Needless to say, this will attract top talent and improve caregiver retention.
When it comes to the caregiver experience, home health software puts all the information about daily schedules and tasks at your staff’s fingertips, meaning that they won’t have to worry about missing an appointment or being late.
Also, the time-tracking functionality will ensure that your employees are properly paid, which plays an important role in their satisfaction and staying with your agency. Having long-term caregivers is important for the patient experience, too, since some people feel more comfortable when the same caregiver assists them.
With Timeero, it will be much easier for you to handle staffing, coordinate schedules, and streamline invoicing, payroll and billing.
Last but not least, if you choose home health software suitable for your business, you’ll reduce both your and your employees’ administrative burden, which means that your caregivers will have more time to focus on what really matters - their patients.
How Do I Choose Home Care Software?
It’s evident that you need help managing healthcare appointments, monitoring your field staff, ensuring better patient care, staying compliant with federal regulations, and automating your workflows.
However, it’s not easy to choose home health software as numerous solutions are on the market.
Before investing in this application indispensable for your home care agency, here are the factors you should consider.
1. Essential features
Before you choose home health care software, you need to list all your requirements and find a solution with all the necessary features at affordable pricing within your budget.
Some of the core elements to look for in your home health software include:
Scheduling. With this functionality, you’ll easily organize your staff, eliminate the risk that a visit will be missed or double-booked, and ensure that every shift will be covered if a caregiver cancels at the last moment.
Timeero’s “Who’s Working” tab shows you a list of all available employees and allows you to easily re-schedule a visit and notify caregivers about any changes in their schedule. This makes managing and care management hassle-free.
Time tracking. What happens when a caregiver forgets to clock out after completing their visit? You don’t have to worry about this because Timeero will notify you about suspicious behavior so that you’ll be alerted if someone’s working overtime. Also, this feature makes it easy to track patient visit times and caregiver work times. Paired with GPS- tracking, this feature provides proof of service, which is necessary for electronic visit verification.
Mileage tracking. Since your employees have to visit patients, it’s clear that mileage is an important element of your budget. Caregivers drive around in your vehicles, and you should know how much that costs if you want to save money. Timeero helps you track mileage and automate the entire process so that you can get a breadcrumb path of your employees’ movements without asking them to log their mileage. The geo-fencing functionality will remind your team to start tracking time and mileage. In addition, Timeero suggests the shortest route to a certain location, helping you cut down your mileage expenses. With accurate and reliable mileage data, reimbursement for employees using their personal vehicles for business purposes will run smoothl
Timeero mileage and route tracking
Billing and invoicing. To facilitate billing and invoicing, your home health software should be integrated with billing and invoicing applications so that you can easily generate accurate invoices and send them to your patients.
Data security. Healthcare agencies collect and store many sensitive patient data, so it’s crucial to opt for a HIPAA-compliant solution to keep patient data and medical records safe and secure.
2. Integrations and adaptability
We’ve already mentioned that home healthcare marketing has been growing rapidly, so you have to think ahead and choose home health software based on its ability to adapt to new requirements.
Pick a vendor that offers many different integrations and has been steadily upgrading its software. That way, you’ll be sure that the software will be updated in the future to include new legal regulations and ensure compliance.
For example, Timeero integrates with popular accounting and payroll applications such as Quickbooks, Xero, ADP, and Paychex. In addition, it also comes with a Zapier integration, which means that you’ll be able to connect with more than 3,000 different applications that will streamline any aspect of your business.
3. Ease of use
Don’t underestimate this factor, as it’s what will decide whether your new home health software will turn out to be a success or failure.
For this reason, it’s essential to choose home health software that is user-friendly and that your staff will quickly adapt to with minimal training.
To check this, ask for a demo, as sometimes the features you see in writing fail to materialize properly, resulting in a clunky system that you and your employees will have difficulty learning how to use.
Timeero’s intuitive user interface guarantees that you won’t have to waste time on hit-and-miss attempts to implement it.
Besides that, happy users’ testimonials and referrals can be a great vote of confidence, so it’s a good idea to hear what others from your industry say about the software you’re eyeing.
You can read what Timeero’s clients from the home health care industry say about using the software and how it helped them organize their workflows and eliminate the administrative burden. Besides that, they praise the reporting feature, which allows supervisors to pull reports by groups and evaluate their teams and monitor their performance in a couple of clicks.
So, How Do You Choose Home Health Care Software That Will Help You Grow Your Agency?
With the right home health management software, you can automate your flows, go paperless, and optimize administrative tasks.
All this means that your employees will have an opportunity to focus only on their job and patients' care plans. The features and functionalities we discussed will help you maintain high standards and improve the patient and caregiver experience.
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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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