CellTrak Blog

The holidays are right around the corner. Although this may be the most wonderful time of the year for many people, for home care and home hospice agencies, the holiday season can mean stress, extra work, and lots of headaches. Staff may not be available for holiday shifts, patients may be lonely, and payroll time-and-a-half requirements can create a major dent to an agency’s bottom line.

What, then, can a busy agency manager do to survive the crazy busy holiday season – and maybe even spread a little good cheer along the way?

If your agency doesn’t yet have a plan for holding onto your most talented caregivers, you could be in trouble. With turnover rates exceeding 65 percent and a potentially disastrous caregiver shortage looming, employee retention is one of the biggest challenges the in-home care industry faces.

As a result, agencies are scrambling to figure out how to make their employees happier, without breaking the budget. And they’re increasingly finding success from a surprising source: Technology.

The home health care industry is white-hot these days, and smart agency owners are looking for creative ways to capitalize on this growth market. With annual growth rates expected to hit 7.5 percent this year, the industry is anticipated to be worth a cumulative – and astonishing – $130 billion by the end of 2017.

So how can agencies save a piece of this pie for themselves?

As one of the most documented and regulated industries, home care routinely produces vast amounts of paperwork, costing agencies precious time and resources to generate and maintain. As technology has evolved, today’s digital solutions provide advantages that paper just can’t match, from enhanced productivity to better compliance, communication, cost, and care.

Employees are the single biggest asset most home care agencies have, and managing those employees is one of the biggest challenges agencies face. This not only means keeping employees happy – but also finding ways to manage labor costs. Given that most home care workers are not salaried employees and not exempt, keeping tabs on overtime laws is critical.

It’s important to note that overtime laws frequently treat home care workers as a special category, and eligibility requirements for overtime differ compared to most other industries. The changing regulatory landscape doesn’t help, either, making it extremely difficult for agency management to keep up with developments.

Today’s home health agencies are constantly challenged to provide better quality care at lower overall cost. Achieving this goal isn’t easy, and agency leaders often grapple with finding the right balance administratively while maintaining financial margins in the face of shifting reimbursement levels.  

The environment is not unlike the automotive industry in the late 1980s, where U.S. manufacturers struggled to build cars that could compete with Japanese imports on quality and price without sacrificing profitability or productivity.

When you’re managing care and service delivery, there are endless metrics you could evaluate to optimize care. From tracking the number of visits a care provider makes daily to the percentage of visits that start and end on time, it’s tough to know where to focus your attention.

It’s a critical decision nonetheless. If you select the wrong metrics, you risk chasing improvements that would only minimally benefit your organization. But monitoring too many at one time can overwhelm your staff.

By focusing on the right key performance indicators (KPIs), you can improve your agency’s service quality and outcomes for your clients, your own agency, and your payers. So, how do you determine what those KPIs are?

As more and more of our personal life becomes digitized, it’s no surprise that businesses – including home care and home hospice agencies – are closely following suit. Paper-based inefficiencies waste time and money; implementing paperless clinical documentation is an effective way to improve patient care.

But before you say goodbye to paper for good, understand what going paperless means to your processes and procedures and be prepared to help your staff make the transition.

Have you ever contemplated the risks your remote workers face when they provide home health services? In 2010, the health care and social assistance industry reported 653,900 cases of injuries and illnesses — more than any other private industry sector reported. Can your employees avoid being the next case?

As we look back on some of the key stories of 2016 for home care agencies, one leaps out repeatedly: Medicare fraud.