Best Practices For Home Care Scheduling: How To Use Your Home Care Software To Utilize Your Caregivers

No matter what stage of business you’re in, scheduling is one of the most important functions that keeps your agency running. 

Scheduling is one of the most daunting parts of the home care agency management process for good reason. It’s a delicate dance and balance of needs.

You have to find schedules that make sense for client needs, whether the shift times are because of medication times or family being away from home. On the same coin, you have to find caregivers with availability during those times, with the right skills/preferences, who can get to the client’s location without difficulty.

Here are some best practices to keep up with scheduling—and how to more effectively utilize your home care software.

Centralize your scheduling in one place.

If you have multiple schedulers or multiple ways of handling things, it can make the process harder. Let’s use paper notes as an example. You have one scheduler that writes call notes regarding scheduling changes down on a piece of paper. If those notes don’t make it into your agency management system, those changes won’t be made, and they’re not visible to other team members. 

Having these processes in place to have one central source of truth for scheduling can make it:

• Easier to navigate as an executive for a high-level overview
• Simpler for team members to manage (especially if someone’s off for a day)
• Relieves the need to check multiple places for the same type of information

By using a home care software with the right scheduling features, you can digitize your operations and avoid manual notes and errors. 

READ MORE: Your Ultimate Guide to Home Care Scheduling Software

Regularly review overtime reporting.

One of the core metrics you and your team should use to assess scheduling efficacy is managing overtime. According to Becker’s, you should maintain as low of a ratio as possible (but aim to not exceed 3%). 

You can calculate overtime percentage—for an individual caregiver—by taking the number of hours of overtime in one pay period: let’s say 4 hours. Then divide that by the number of hours in one pay period: 80 hours (for a 2-week pay period). 4/80 = 5%. That would put this caregiver’s overtime ratio at 5%, which is on the higher end of the benchmark. 

Why is it so important to pay attention to overtime? Not only does this significantly impact your agency’s bottom line, it also hinders caregiver productivity and efficacy. 

On its face, yes, a caregiver picking up a shift of overtime can (in some cases) promote continuity of care. On the other hand, overtime compounds. It can lead to burnout, promote coming to work while sick, and also decreases productivity. In some cases, it can also impair cognitive abilities and judgement. 

By keeping a careful eye on overtime reporting in your home care software, you can not only improve your bottom line, but redistribute hours to caregivers who aren’t meeting their weekly requirements. 

READ MORE: The Magic Behind Caregiver Scheduling

Manage scheduling expectations with caregivers and clients.

Your agency management system should make it easy for you and your team to identify the best-fit caregivers for each client and shift. Sometimes, the best fit isn’t the first caregiver to pop up in your matching tool. 

That’s where managing expectations come in. You might have some clients and caregivers on a set-it-and-forget-it, crockpot-style schedule—and that’s great.

For others, though, when a last-minute need comes up, or overtime comes into play, you may have to step in for executive decision-making. 

Sometimes, continuity of care (having only one recurring caregiver) is a good thing. Other times, it creates an unhealthy dynamic if a caregiver goes on vacation or is needed for a client who is better suited to their skills. 

In these instances, it’s important to build flexibility and accountability in your service agreements and in your employment agreements. That can look different for every agency; the important part is making sure that you build a realistic expectation for all involved. 

Think about what that means for your home care agency and how you want to build schedules that best serve client needs. With the high turnover nature of home care work, it’s necessary to build training programs that help to onboard new caregivers into a client’s care. That way, if you have a shift open up and the favorite caregiver isn’t available, that you have readily available, back-up options. 

WATCH ON-DEMAND: Effortless Connections: Maximizing Scheduling 

Efficiency with CareMatch

Home care scheduling can be easy.

With the right home care software in place, you and your office staff can make the most of your caregiver team. 

Scheduling is a consistent pain point that caregivers report as a top reason for turnover. And it doesn’t have to be this way. By properly pairing their skills, availability, and location to the same needs of clients, you and your team can make calculated decisions—with the assistance of technology—to make both parties satisfied. 

Are you ready for a platform that can make your scheduling life easier? Check us out today and learn more.