Melissa Kozak
Nov 15 2022
Reading Time: 3 minutes
By: Melissa Kozak, RN, BSN, President & Co-Founder, CitusHealth
Many home-based care organizations want to improve their business with software, but they don’t know where to begin. From making a business case to prioritizing the timing of implementation, there is a lot to consider when it comes to adopting a new digital solution.
Here, we discuss a starting point for this technology journey and how you can help ensure success with your software vendor through five initial steps you can start taking right now.
1. Ask your employees the hard questions.
Whether it’s clinicians or non-clinical staff, get their perspective on the repetitive tasks taking up their time, preventing them from taking on more patients and forcing them to take work home. C-suite leadership often make assumptions about the nature of those types of inefficiencies, but fail to ask the frontline team about their personal experiences. By learning the real challenges that face staff — such as coordinating deliveries of supplies, scheduling visits, scanning paper documentation into the EHR, etc. — organizations can identify what needs to be automated.
2. Develop an ROI-driven business case.
No organization can fit a software purchase into their budget unless it pays for itself. By developing an expectation for return on investment, you can consider where software should give time back to staff so they can handle the scale from new patients and new revenue.
3. Vet your software provider.
Your software provider should be able to integrate into your current EHR system, reducing duplicate data entry as well as risk of missing important patient updates. Vetting your software partner for interoperability capabilities helps to ensure that they can set you up for long-term success by seamlessly integrating important patient data and addressing the ongoing needs of staff.
4. Assign a project manager.
Where many organizations fall short is thinking it doesn’t take commitment from their team to successfully implement new software. Having a project manager in place helps to solidify a focused project plan, which includes onboarding and training, policy and procedure updates, and establishing scopes of practice.
5. Communicate your goals with staff.
It’s never too early to inform your staff about your plans to invest in their ability to do their jobs with more efficiency — and this message should come from the top down. C-suite leadership should communicate how new workflows can ease the burden of their daily tasks, how implementation is a process, and what they should expect in terms of training and onboarding. Having these conversations early on will make staff feel valued and a part of the process, and will help foster buy-in once it’s time for them to adopt new technology processes.
When organizations take these initial steps, the rollout of new digital tools can happen in a structured way, with staff buy-in during every phase of implementation.
Schedule a CitusHealth demo today to see why organizations trust our team to guide them through the implementation and onboarding process, helping to ensure long-term success with your technology investment.
