Strategies to reduce labor costs, improve productivity, care quality, and clinician satisfaction

Home Health Care Agencies typically spend about 60% of their revenue on employee wages, and most of it will be for field employees providing services to patients. Declining reimbursements, continuing labor shortages, and increased labor costs make it imperative to improve the utilization of clinicians' time.

Improving operational efficiency in scheduling, clinical documentation, and quality assurance will impact the bottom line of Home Care Agencies. Some of the strategies to significantly improve the time spent on patient care and operational efficiency are:

Eliminating the time, clinicians spend on entering data that the back-office team can enter,
Reducing the time spent looking for information about the patient at the point of care,
Ensuring clinicians have access to patient's communication logs, and
Reducing the workload on clinical documentation.

In this article, we discuss the five steps home care agencies can take to improve the utilization of clinicians' time. Home Care Agencies should look for a software platform that will provide the right tools to enhance clinicians' productivity.

Improving clinician productivity in home care

1. Intake Process

Reducing the time clinicians spend on data entry during intake will improve productivity. Software functionality can help you adjust the intake process to collect clinical information, demographics, and billing information efficiently. Clinicians and back-office personnel can use the discharge summary to enter the current list of diagnoses, medications, treatments, advanced directives, DME Supplies, Nutritional Requirements, etc. Back-office personnel can also enter the patient's Personal and Professional contacts during the intake process.

With back-office personnel capturing all the information during intake and the software making this information available to clinicians, they will have to review and make corrections or collect any missing information.

Defaulting as much information as possible to assessments and other documentation areas will also reduce the time clinicians spend re-entering the information.

2. Access to Information at Point of Care

Clinicians spend quite a bit of time and effort getting access to clinical information. They need to get familiar with the patient to provide quality and effective care. They may have to contact other care providers and back-office staff to get their information.

Clinicians and care providers should access all clinical information, such as the current medication list, care plan, clinical summary, and past clinical notes for the patient, before starting a visit or shift quickly in one area. The same information should be accessible while the clinician documents the care provided during the visit.

In addition to clinical information, providing access to patient communication logs, previous visit notes, and patient schedules will be very helpful to the clinician.

As medications, treatments, and care plans change during the episode of care, the software used must reflect them at the point of care in real-time. Availability of clinical information in real-time positively influences the care delivery to significantly improve the quality of care and improve the clinicians' productivity.

Home Care Agencies must empower their clinical and back-office personnel with the right platform and tools to provide the information needed at the point of care to improve the productivity and satisfaction of clinicians.

Standard Care Plan Templates Home Healthcare

3. Care Plan Templates

Care planning is another area where clinicians spend significant time and effort. Home Care Agency's operations leaders can improve clinician productivity by standardizing care plan templates and protocols for different body systems or diseases and making them available online. Clinicians should be able to select one or more templates based on their assessment quickly and personalize the care plan for each patient.

The following functionality will help clinicians consider all problem areas for developing the care plan:

Having the ability to detect problem areas,
Systemic prompts for the clinicians to review the problem areas for care planning, and
Ability to use the care plan templates associated with the problem areas.

Standard Care Plan Templates and the ability to personalize the care plan for each patient will bring consistency to the care planning process and improve the quality of care and productivity.

4. Quality Assurance

Home Care Agencies usually have a Quality Assurance Group for reviewing every clinical note before it is considered complete. This process usually requires communication back and forth between the clinician providing care and the quality assurance clinician. The quality Assurance process requires time and effort resulting in billing delays.

Home Care Agencies should consider tools that will push many quality assurance requirements to the point of care. Configurable consistency checks and validations during clinical documentation will help clinicians identify any issues at the point of care before signing off on the clinical note. In this model, clinicians can also create the Plan of Care and the OASIS at the point of care.

With automated and configurable consistency checks at the point of care, the Quality Assurance group can spot check clinical notes rather than checking every clinical note.

Reducing time spent on quality assurance will improve the overall productivity of clinical staff by making them available for direct care.

5. Scheduling

Scheduling is another area where Home Care Agencies can improve clinicians' productivity by efficiently managing their schedules. Home Care Agencies should use the platform and scheduling tools to improve scheduling efficiencies. Practical tools should have the option for intelligent matching, keeping one employee for all services, optimizing travel time, and overtime management to help agencies manage complex and ever-changing schedules.

The effective scheduling tool will help agencies improve operational efficiency and bottom line.

Conclusion

Clinicians are the most valuable resources for Home Health Care Agencies. Improving clinicians' productivity will help agencies enhance the quality of care, patient safety, patient satisfaction, and employee satisfaction while improving the bottom line. A comprehensive and integrated software platform can provide rich functionalities that reduce documentation burden, make information readily available, and enhance care quality.

About CareVoyant:

CareVoyant is a leading provider of cloud-based integrated enterprise-scale home health care software that can support all home-based services under ONE Software, ONE Patient, and ONE Employee, making it a Single System of Record. We support all home based services, including Home Care, Private Duty Nursing, Private Duty Non-Medical, Home and Community Based Services (HCBS), Home Health, Pediatric Home Care, and Outpatient Therapy at Home.

CareVoyant functions – Intake, Authorization Management, Scheduling, Clinical with Mobile options, eMAR/eTAR, Electronic Visit Verification (EVV), Billing/AR, Secure Messaging, Notification, Reporting, and Dashboards – streamline workflow, meet regulatory requirements, improve quality of care, optimize reimbursement, improve operational efficiency and agency bottom line.

For more information, please visit CareVoyant.com or call us at 1-888-463-6797.