Over the next 30 years, the demand for Home and Community-Based Services will continue to grow due to the retirement of the baby boomers and their wish to age in place. Industry watchers expect the elderly population to cross 80 million in 2050. Care in the home will continue to evolve in the breadth and complexity of services offered, along with an enhanced care model enabled by an integrated system of services with seamless transitions. Hence, providers that can better serve both patients and referral sources across the continuum of need will have the advantage. Home health care will also play an essential and critical role in expanding delivery models like Hospital-at-Home and SNF-at-Home.
The labor shortage and the need to do more with less
The labor shortage will continue to be a significant challenge in 2022 and beyond. In the not-so-distant future, demand will outweigh supply for critical caregivers, operational management, technology, and leadership roles. Home Health Care Agencies will spend fifty to sixty percent of the revenue on wages. Wage pressure will continue to grow along with additional regulatory demands.
One option to meet the challenges posed by the lack of skilled resources will be to improve operational efficiency across the board. Improving agency management and operations efficiency will be the sure-fire way of improving the bottom line. An integrated software platform can help agencies do more with less. While most commercially available home care software solutions meet about 80% of their requirements, the other 20% reduce efficiency and require costly workarounds and manual efforts.
Home Care Agencies should look for a software platform that will meet most of their requirements without any manual workarounds.
This article reviews the top 10 features you should look for in a software platform to improve operational efficiency.
1. Integrated Software Platform:
What happens when Agencies do not use an integrated platform?
One of the challenges home care agencies providing more than one home-based service is finding the right software platform to meet the needs of all lines of service. They use multiple software solutions or software suitable for one service, not others. Even when they use the same software for multiple lines of service, they set up a separate patient for each line of service. Such mechanisms lead to redundant data entry and additional manual efforts to maintain the information. Home Care agencies struggle to get a consolidated view of patient information as Clinical and financial information is in different accounts.
Due to the lack of features in the software to provide an integrated view, agencies tend to duplicate the records for employees who provide services across multiple lines of service. Such workarounds increase manual scheduling, overtime calculation, and payroll processing time.
Importance of an integrated software platform
A software platform that supports all home-based services under ONE Software, ONE Patient, and ONE Employee will be essential to improve efficiencies in all aspects of home care agency management. An integrated software platform for all home-based services will bring the following benefits:
Eliminating redundant data entry
One patient to get a consolidated clinical and financial view of the patient
One employee for all services – efficiently manage employee's time and overtime
No need to train employees in multiple software solutions
Improve operational efficiency and the bottom line
2. Intake:
Operational efficiency starts with referral management and the intake process.
Data collection accuracy. By collecting the necessary information during the referral management and intake process, agencies can improve care plan design, billing accuracy, and the clean claim submission rate.
Eligibility Verification. Integrated eligibility verification functionality ensures that the patient has coverage before admitting the patient.
Unified Patient Record. A unified patient record for all services eliminates redundant data entry and error and acts as a repository for clinical and financial information for all services provided to the patient.
A consolidated view of the patient's clinical information improves the quality of care, patient safety, and satisfaction. Integrated financial records enable home care agencies to manage billing and collection for all services together.
“A consolidated view of the patient’s clinical information improves the quality of care, patient safety, and satisfaction. ”
3. Authorization/Plan of Care Management
Integrated and effective authorization management is critical to improve compliance, reduce non-billable services and pay for employees for non-billable services.
Integrate with Scheduling and Billing. The software must integrate with scheduling and billing to prevent scheduling for non-authorized services. When the software does not provide such integrations, home care agencies erroneously deliver services for non-authorized visits. They do not get reimbursed, but they must pay the employees for these non-authorized visits. That's lost revenue and additional payroll expenses directly affecting the bottom line.
Alerts and validations. Integrated authorization management with proactive alerts and validations is essential to improving operational efficiency and bottom of home care agencies.
4. Scheduling:
The major component of the cost structure of Home Care Agencies is payroll costs to caregivers, i.e., field workforce. The scheduling area has a very high potential for home care agencies to optimize the utilization of field employees, reduce labor costs, and improve the bottom line.
Ease of Scheduling. Software platforms should have the right tools to help home care agencies efficiently and quickly schedule shifts/visits without additional manual workarounds.
Intelligent matching features. Smart matching of patient preferences with employee availability and skills will provide a pool of available employees to schedulers. Matching employees based on travel distance will help schedulers optimize employees' time and reduce travel costs for the agencies.
Improved field workforce utilization. Publishing available shifts or visits to employees will give the schedulers a list of employees willing to take the shift. Schedulers should offer shifts to selected employees from the matched pool and follow it through scheduling.
Secure Schedule Communication. Communication with employees is very critical to managing the scheduling process effectively. HIPAA compliant messages, schedule reminders, and real-time schedule monitoring will improve scheduling efficiency.
The right set of scheduling tools will significantly improve scheduling efficiency, improve employee satisfaction, reduce cost, and improve the bottom line for home care agencies.
5. Clinical and Point of Care:
Clinical documentation is another area where opportunities exist for home care agencies to optimize utilization of field employees, improve quality of care, patient satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and the bottom line.
The software platform should be easy-to-use and provide easy access to the patient's clinical information across multiple service lines at the point of care.
Real-time Care Plan Updates. The software must be capable of reflecting any changes to a patient's medications, treatments, or care plan at the point of care in real-time. With these features, clinicians do not waste time and are sure that the updated clinical information is available on the system.
Care quality improvement. The software should provide proactive alerts to clinicians, such as missed medications, treatments, vitals, measurements, etc., to help them provide care on time, improving patient safety and satisfaction.
Improve Clinical Documentation
Configurable clinical consistency checks at the point of care help clinicians accurately document the visit while delivering care. These checks reduce time and the effort spent at the back office on quality assurance.
Configurable clinical tools help agencies improve clinical documentation, patient safety, employee satisfaction, etc.
6. Electronic Visit Verification (EVV)
21st Century CURES Act mandates the use of EVV for Medicaid providers, and EVV will be necessary for all Home Care services from January 2023.
In-built EVV features. When home care agencies use more than one software platform for EVV and their agency management, they must deal with redundant data entry and manual efforts to keep the information current and accurate across all the software. An integrated home care software platform should integrate EVV in the agency's standard workflow instead of having separate processes for EVV and other operations.
Support all state EVV aggregators. The software platform should also have a unified interface for all state aggregators.
EVV Validations in Billing. Billing functions should have validations to ensure the acceptance of EVV records before sending the claims. These validations reduce rejected claims and the time spent reviewing and resubmitting the rejected claims.
7. Billing and Revenue Cycle Management:
With increasing regulatory requirements and declining reimbursement, home care agencies must improve billing and collections efficiency.
Improved information capture during intake. Revenue Cycle Management starts at intake and continues through authorization, scheduling, billing, and collections. The home care software platform should help home care agencies establish processes to collect accurate information at intake, verify eligibility, keep up with authorization, schedule caregivers' visits based on authorization, and validate claims before submitting.
The software platform should have the ability to configure claim formats to meet all payers' disparate claim submission requirements, reducing the manual efforts needed to submit claims for some payers.
Built-in Claims Scrubber. A configurable and built-in claim scrubber feature in the agency's software will ensure claim claims submission and timely reimbursement by validating claims before submitting them.
8. Payroll Integration:
Payroll processing is a very time-consuming, critical, and time-sensitive operation for home care agencies without much room for errors. Payroll accuracy is vital for home care agencies to keep employee satisfaction high.
Managing overtime and exceptions. Home care agencies spent significant time in manual efforts to process overtime and payroll exceptions. An effective software platform should help agencies minimize these manual efforts, thus improving payroll accuracy. The functionality to maintain exceptions to pay rates, manage overtime, and shift differentials will improve payroll accuracy.
Built-in payroll validations. Configurable payroll validations to validate visits for payroll will eliminate potential payroll errors that may increase the cost for home care agencies.
APIs and integrations with Payroll service providers. Home Care Software platform should have a flexible and configurable interface to the agency's chosen payroll services provider or software, reducing manual data uploads and validations.
9. Communication
A comprehensive, integrated software platform that provides multiple communication tools that are easy to use is essential for effective communication to improve quality of care, patient satisfaction, operational efficiency, and compliance.
Secure Messaging. Home Care Software platform should have a HIPAA Compliant Secure messaging function to communicate with employees and patients. Communication logs should be available to document communication about patient care and make it available for all team members.
Communicate Schedule changes. Software should have tools to send out schedule reminders and schedule changes to employees and patients.
Clinical Communication. Clinical communication, such as providing a complete clinical picture of the patient at the point of care and disseminating changes to patient care in real-time, will improve patient safety and satisfaction.
Portals. Integrated portals for employees and families will help improve communication with employees and patients.
A software platform with effective communication tools will improve communication and operational efficiency for home health care agencies.
10. Care Coordination:
Robust Care Coordination features improve quality of care, health outcomes, and satisfaction for the patient.
E-Fax. An integrated e-Fax function will improve the speed and effectiveness of sending and receiving the plan of care and physician orders with physicians.
Care Continuum. The ability to send and receive direct messages with other health care providers will improve the quality of care for the patient.
A software platform with effective care coordination functions will improve the operational efficiency of home care agencies.
Conclusion:
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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