Best Practices For Home Care Operators: How To Use Your Agency Management System To The Max

Whether you are new to the home care business or you’re a veteran, we’ve put together tips that can help you maximize your efficiency.

Not all home care agency management systems are created equal, however, when you use the right one, it’ll propel your operations to the max. 

What does that mean? Ultimately, it means having more time to improve your caregiver and client experience, like Dr. Malik with his agency, America A Care.

Billing done right, the first time around.

It’s usually not the most fun part of business, but arguably one of the most important. You can’t provide care nor pay caregivers without cash coming in the door. 

Your agency management system should be equipped to bill multiple payers, while enabling you to check on the status of claims, and what needs to be fixed for proper submission.

Why this is important is because if you use one system for managing your agency’s operations and a separate platform for billing purposes, there is a larger potential margin of error. Whether it’s from manual data transfer or duplicate data, this is slowing your billing down. 

As you evaluate and assess your agency’s needs, make sure that you’re working with a software partner that integrates seamlessly with all of your billing needs. 

This starts with knowing what your successful claim submission rate is. If you’re not at 95% or above, this is a call to action for you and your billing team to re-evaluate how things are done.

READ MORE: 3 Signs It’s Time to Update Your Billing Process

Not only does billing have to be done right the first time, your agency management system should be built to support multiple payers. This consolidates the number of programs and accounts you need while enabling you to expand into other revenue sources and service lines. 

Automate manual tasks.

Whether it’s reporting or putting schedules on autopilot, automate what you can! This saves your human productivity time on more important and necessary activities that can’t be outsourced like your employer brand management and client quality assurance. 

What’s the importance of automation anyway? Salesforce did some digging on this and found that when used properly, automation can save teams 23 working days each year. It’s not just scheduling emails, they cite specific use cases within accounting, marketing, human resources, and sales, etc. 

With CareTime V3, we were able to introduce the Automated Rules Engine, which allows home care owners and billers to input specific rules for payers like billing units or frequency so that invoices can be sent out promptly after services are provided with limited claims review.

“Automation is a powerful mindset shift I have seen and hope to see more of in the future with home care owners. With the introduction of our Automated Rules Engine, I like to think of it as Grammarly but for your EVV and claims work,” shared Julio Barea, head of sales.

“I see teams spending so much time reviewing manual clock-in information or task inputs, and that is valuable time that could be spent on more critical functions. Aside from claims review, automation can be a powerful office retention tool for office team members. They can do research and identify new ways or tools to automate other tasks that can save them time.”

With automation, you and your team can take back valuable time each week that you can spend on client care. Dr. Malik shared, “Using Caretime has given him the freedom to work on building customer relationships and listening to their stories, instead of being bogged down with billing or EVV.” What would having more time back in your day do for you?

Offline visit visibility.

One agency management system feature that is often underutilized in home care agencies is offline visit visibility. For clients that live in areas without cellular reception or WiFi, there has to be a better way to verify the visit other than manual data entry by the caregiver or scheduler after the fact. 

Why is this important? Entering visit information in real-time provides an added layer of protection to a caregiver and your agency. It also helps payers and family members see what is going on and better manage expectations for what happens during a visit.

Let’s say you have a 2-hour visit and the client needs a shower. This means that they also have to do a load of clothes which might not fit within the shift window. Having the task time stamps can help you advocate for more hours to adequately complete all of the tasks that a client needs support with. 

Having the tools to support offline visits gives caregivers and your team the information they need, like a care plan, address information, contact information, and more. This saves a lot of back and forth if a caregiver needs to reference a care plan or if they need to clock out in real time, it saves them from having to wander too far from the house to get cellular reception. 

Efficient home care operations mean more time for relationships.

Maybe you haven’t had the chance to sit down and think at a high level about ways to save time and staff resources. One of the first things you should look toward for support is your agency management system, because it should work for you—not the other way around. 

You don’t have take too much time away from essential functions for this. Just start by writing down what you are currently using your system for, and in a separate column, put down the tasks that your agency management system can perform (that you’re not using). 

What from the second column can you implement that would save you or your team’s time? If you’re looking for an agency management system that can better serve your home care agency’s needs, learn more about CareTime.