Strategies to reduce Labor Costs, Improve Productivity, Care Quality, and Clinician Satisfaction
In this blog, we will discuss the six steps home health care agencies can take to improve the utilization of clinicians' time. Home Health Care Agencies should look for an integrated Home Health Care Software platform to provide the right tools to enhance clinicians' productivity.
Overview
Home Health Care Agencies typically spend about 60% of their revenue on employee wages, most of which will be for field employees providing patient care. Declining reimbursements, continuing labor shortages, and increased labor costs make it imperative to improve the utilization of clinicians' time.
Improving operational efficiency in intake, scheduling, clinical documentation, and quality assurance will improve clinician utilization, quality of care, and the bottom line of Home Healthcare Agencies. Some of the strategies to significantly improve clinician utilization, time spent on patient care, and operational efficiency are:
Enter as much clinical information as possible at intake to reduce the clinicians' data entry time at the point of care.
Provide easy access to complete patient information at the point of care to reduce clinicians’ time looking for information about the patient.
Ensure clinicians have access to patient's communication logs.
Provide easy-to-use clinical tools to reduce time spent on clinical documentation.
Six Steps for Home Health Care Agencies to Improve the Utilization of Clinicians' Time
1. Intake Process
One way to improve clinician utilization is to reduce the time clinicians spend collecting data at the point of care that can be collected during the intake process. Back-office staff can use the discharge summary to collect and enter patient demographics, payers, current list of diagnoses, medications, treatments, advanced directives, DME Supplies, Nutritional Requirements, etc. Back-office personnel can also collect and enter the patient's Personal and Professional contacts during intake.
With back-office personnel capturing as much information as possible during intake and the software making this information available to clinicians at the point of care, clinicians will review and make corrections or collect any missing information instead of entering all the information at the point of care.
Home Health Care Software should default as much information as possible to assessments and other clinical documentation areas to reduce clinicians' time looking for or re-entering the information.
A streamlined intake process can significantly improve clinicians’ productivity and the quality of care for patients.
2. Easy Access to Information at Point of Care
Getting familiar with the patients and their current clinical conditions before a visit will benefit the clinician in providing quality and effective care. Sometimes, clinicians spend a lot of time gathering all the information. Providing easy access to all relevant patient information will significantly improve clinicians’ productivity, satisfaction, and quality of care.
Home Health Care Software should provide clinicians and care providers easy access to 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 to the clinicians while providing and documenting the care.
In addition to clinical information, providing access to patient communication logs, previous visit notes, and patient schedules will be very helpful to the clinician.
A holistic and consolidated view of patient information will significantly help clinicians to focus on care and improve the utilization of their time.
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 at the point of care during comprehensive assessments. Home Health Care Software should detect problem areas and prompt the clinicians to review the risk area and care plan if necessary. Clinicians should be able to select one or more templates based on their assessment quickly and personalize the care plan for each patient.
Home Health Care Software should have the following features to help clinicians consider all problem areas for developing the care plan:
Ability to detect problem areas,
Proactive prompts to the clinicians to review the problem areas and care plan
Use 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. Real-Time Changes
Treatments will continue to evolve and change as a patient's clinical condition changes. With many people involved in providing care, communicating changes in condition and treatment will be essential in providing quality care to the patient and improving the clinician's productivity.
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. The availability of clinical information in real-time positively influences care delivery and significantly improves the quality of care and clinicians' productivity.
5. Quality Assurance
Home Health Care Agencies usually have a Quality Assurance Group to review every clinical note before it is 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 delays in making the information current and billing.
Home Care Agencies should consider software tools that will push many quality assurance tasks to the point of care. Configurable consistency checks and validations during clinical documentation will help clinicians identify any issues at the point of care and correct the issues before signing off on the clinical note. This process will significantly save the time spent on quality assurance. This model will enable clinicians to 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 checks clinical notes rather than check every clinical note.
Reducing time spent on quality assurance will improve the overall productivity of clinical staff by making them available for direct care.
6. Scheduling
Scheduling efficiency is another area where Home Health Care Agencies can improve clinicians' productivity by efficiently managing their schedules. Home Healthcare Agencies should use the software platform and scheduling tools to improve scheduling efficiencies. Effective software tools should allow 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 clinicians’ productivity, operational efficiency, and the bottom line of the home care agency.
Conclusion
Clinicians are the most valuable resources for Home Health Care Agencies. Home Healthcare Agencies must empower their clinical and back-office personnel with the right software platform and tools to provide the information needed at the point of care to improve the productivity and satisfaction of clinicians. Improving clinicians' productivity and satisfaction will help agencies improve the quality of care, patient safety, and employee satisfaction while improving the agency's bottom line. A comprehensive and integrated software platform can provide rich functionalities that reduce the 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.
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