Melissa Kozak
Jun 9 2022
Reading Time: 3 minutes
By: Melissa Kozak, RN, BSN, President & Co-Founder, CitusHealth
In our “new normal,” it’s critical to provide remote care support for patients, families, and caregivers—while at the same time enabling a higher level of care team collaboration. The latest technology can give staff the tools they need to operate more efficiently and achieve higher patient and family caregiver satisfaction.
So what are the critical services you need to achieve these goals? Here are 10 essentials for home-based care providers to offer true virtual patient care support.
- Two-way patient and caregiver communication
- The ability to engage with staff in real time, during the stay and afterward, can relieve stress for families and caregivers during a difficult time.
- Instant virtual video visits
- Our new normal includes a combination of in-person visits, virtual visits, and telehealth. While waivers for unsecure stopgaps may have been adequate at one time, these stopgaps are not sustainable. The best solutions enable secure video chats to engage all stakeholders.
- Customizable forms and surveys
- Paper and fax create a greater risk for delayed care. Reaching out to patients and caregivers with electronic surveys to assess patient status, medication, and equipment needs allow you to react swiftly to those with urgent needs.
- Secure, instant care team messaging
- Dispersed, remote care teams waiting for an email or return phone call lose valuable time. Securely communicating in a virtual messaging environment, where a care team member can attach a photo or video to messages, is a standard feature and a must have.
- Electronic signature capture
- Electronic signature, including app-less signatures, have become essential to expediting documents such as treatment consents, election of benefits, physician certifications, and change of care notices. This helps to speed up the process and streamlines EMR integration.
- Auto-escalation
- In an urgent situation, the ability for a family caregiver to reach your staff quickly can mean avoiding an unnecessary ER visit. Auto-escalation protocols help ensure that urgent inbound communications are quickly routed to someone who can address needs immediately.
- Broadcast messages
- Instantly broadcasting important information (such as emergency announcements) to the entire census and their families saves valuable time. Whether it’s safety information or a natural disaster, the ability to instantly communicate to a mobile device is critical.
- Educational outreach
- Since families and caregivers have a greater responsibility for patient care, making it possible for them to easily access customized educational materials at any time, any place, on any device helps them properly support the care plan.
- Multi-lingual support
- Patients and their families may be most comfortable communicating in their native tongue. Auto-translate features can reduce delays in care when receiving inbound communications.
- EMR integration
- Integration into a provider’s electronic medical records (EMR) solution helps ensure critical information is captured on the patient record. CMS promotes the use of FHIR-based APIs, which are critical to integration and supported by CitusHealth.
When these services are tightly integrated, home-based care providers can receive maximum return on investment. Only CitusHealth offers a completely integrated platform solution that helps to enable better care, greater efficiencies, and happier patients and families.
Virtual patient care can have a significant impact on satisfaction, which is why it should be a priority for your organization. Schedule a demo to see for yourself how we can help home-based care providers increase support for patients and collaboration for care teams.
