Brittany Isaacs
Jan 24 2023
Reading Time: 3 minutes
By: Brittany Isaacs, MS, RN, IgCN, Customer Success Manager,Team Lead, CitusHealth
Home-based care organizations are facing an aging population, a rising labor shortage, and growing consumer demands among patients. How are these providers reducing burnout, improving operations, and streamlining the care process during this challenging time? By embracing the right technology, home-based care organizations can experience better staff productivity and patient health outcomes.
In many cases, home care has struggled with adopting technology. Staff are often not tech savvy due to years of paper charts and documentation, so encouraging them to transition creates frustration and burnout. Here are five ways digital tools can help reduce these frustrations.
Technology can optimize time.
Improving operational processes and workflows through technologies allows clinicians to optimize their time and touchpoints between visits to hopefully curtail any larger problems that could arise. Additionally, chasing down physician or patient signatures can now be done electronically, which saves staff extra trips or time on the phone. These things can all equate to reduced burnout.
Technology can reduce repetitive tasks.
The ability to pre-populate fields helps nurses avoid reentering the same key information about the patient, and they can also do a confirm-complete type of action so that the nurse reviewing the last entry confirms it and moves forward. This helps prevent redundancy, expedites charting, and ultimately speeds up reimbursement. It also helps streamline supply and refill management with the ability to transfer real-time information from the caregiver to a home health company or pharmacy.
Technology can foster care team collaboration.
Utilization reports can be shared with the customer that include data such as how many forms or documents are sent, how many messages are sent, and the return rates. This information can help drive conversations within care teams to enhance what they’re currently doing and how they get to the next level.
Technology can help reduce unnecessary visits.
Patients can submit a secure message to be routed to their nurse and their nurse can provide real-time feedback. These updates have a big presence in scheduling supplies and medication shipments. In addition, patients can get updates, delivery confirmations or even the opportunity to select their preferred delivery date. Giving patients the ability to see their next visit information with their home health care provider, nurse or aid, reduces questions about when their next appointments are going to be. Furthermore, they can check the status of a completed form or document in real time, look at their past results or look at education materials — all at their fingertips.
Technology can improve the financial side of home-based care.
Visit forms drive a lot from a reimbursement perspective. When the staff member completes their form prior to leaving a patient’s home, it then gets back to the office within minutes and the reimbursement team can review and submit for reimbursement simultaneously.
Delayed submissions of paper documentation to either fax into the office or hand deliver puts providers significantly behind in billing. Now that process can happen in hours, starting with the nurse completing and submitting documentation before leaving the patient’s home. The reimbursement team gets a notification, sees that they have something to process, and they can execute it in the same day. The same can be said for nursing time sheets and patient paperwork.
No technology is a silver bullet. But when maximized, it can be an invaluable tool that can reduce staff burden. Schedule a demo today to experience the CitusHealth tools built to improve operations and staff satisfaction.
