Tricks And Treats for Your Home Care Halloween

This Halloween, you can skip the cold weather trick-or-treating. We’re coming to you from the convenience of your phone or laptop to share some tricks, and of course, treats that will make your Q4, the best quarter yet. 

Q4 is a time when families begin to visit their older loved ones more often and inquiry calls spike. Make sure that you prepare your team members for an influx of new leads and hire caregivers at a quicker pace than other seasons. 

In this article, we’ll share some pro tips and tricks to keep your home care agency growing into next year, including: 

• Engaging with friendly competitors
• Check-in on your care notes
• Don’t sleep on EVV

Dropping off treats with competitors

Friendly competition is a necessity in home care, especially for more concentrated, metropolitan markets. Make sure to drop off a tasty treat with your business card or a flyer that lets them know you're here and thinking about them. 

Since it's fall, you might want to pick up some: 

• Frosted pumpkin and ghost-shaped cookies 
• Caramel apples 
• Or you might have better luck making something at home—or having someone on your team do it if they're so inclined—like a char-boo-terie board.

When referral sources might be tied to driving business to one home care agency or a small list, your neighborhood home care agencies likely are dealing with similar client acquisition issues. 

“Playing friendly with neighboring competitors is a growth lever that many of our customers are tapping into. It might not happen on the first try, but it’s well-worth developing those positive relationships,” shared Julio Barea, Head of Sales.

If you establish good rapport with your competitors, they’ll send you clients that they’re unable to service. 

Maintain a regular cadence of communication/outreach with your referral partner base

You probably have a decent-sized log of referral partners in your community somewhere, whether it’s in your CRM or in a notebook. Make sure to keep that in a place you’ll reference constantly. 

It’s easy to forget about a referral source if they haven’t kept up in contact with you. On the flip side, many people in your network have likely changed jobs in the last year. 

That should be a motivator to keep in contact with more than one person at each place. Once you’ve identified a group that you want to contact, establish a regular timeframe that you’re going to contact them and decide what channel is the most effective.

Here are a few: 

• Email
• Direct mail 
• Phone call

Once you’ve picked a channel and method of contact, put together some content that would be helpful and useful—and tie it back to how you can support them. The key here is making it about them. 

Boost your referrals for the rest of this year by keeping your home care agency top of mind. 

Check-in on your care notes

When your schedule is full of in-home assessments and other administrative tasks, it is easy to neglect reviewing shift notes from caregivers. 

If you make it a discipline to review notes, even if it’s 15 minutes every other day, this will get you in the habit of:

• Receiving caregiver feedback
• Staying up-to-date on client changes in condition
• Mitigating issues before they start 

For example, a client moving to senior living is often—from a home care agency’s perspective—abrupt and unexpected. Fall, however, is the peak time when seniors move into senior living. 

By paying attention to caregiver shift notes, and educating them on what the leading indicators of a move might be, you and your team can stay ahead of the moves and changes in condition. 

If you’re noticing that caregivers often don’t leave shift notes, educate them on what you’re looking for and what would be helpful. In a recent study, researchers found that 51% of health professionals documented. Here are some of the core factors they determined were in play: 

• Motivation
• Knowledge 
• Training
• Systems used

Where home care comes into play is positioning a client’s home as a database of information waiting to be discovered and shared. Once your caregivers are taught how to document and have sufficient knowledge of what to share, you’ll find that care notes are an important source of client information you might not have known otherwise. 

With CareTime’s Care Portal, you’ll find robust features that make it easy to create custom care plans and view caregiver notes. On the caregiver side, they’ll see a simple user interface that is easy to navigate for all. 

Don’t sleep on EVV

Implementing EVV was one deal, but maintaining and keeping up with it is another. 

Caregivers have a lot of tasks on their plate to complete physically, and checking off the boxes in your agency management system may slip their minds. You may have a binder in the client’s home that has a paper checklist, but be sure to incentivize and reward caregivers for checking off all tasks as completed throughout the shift. 

It can be tempting to leave the tasks until they clock out, but the task completion times serve as a timeline of the shift and a record of events. 

To combat these challenges, host a quarterly education and meet ‘n greet to recognize your caregivers for the work that they do, while helping them to brush up on EVV best practices. This could include:

• To clock in and clock out they’re inside the home with a client. Work with them to adjust the geofence radius if the client is in the hospital or a long-term care community that won’t pick up a location as easily. 
• To document in shift notes if they take a client outside of the home or to run errands outside of the home. Managed Care Organizations entrust home care companies to share proper information on what clients are doing and how tasks are being completed, and EVV is tied directly to a client’s home address. 

Candyce Slusher of Slusher Consulting sums it up perfectly, “You don't have to document like a nurse. However, what goes on in the agency with your clients, with your staff, with your caregivers, with their families, anything that could affect your agency, the client's care, and your staff needs to be documented in some way simply for transparency.” 

This is underscored when you think about an event like a fall. If a caregiver is on shift with one of your clients and has a fall, the caregiver shift notes and subsequent communications are critical. 

Here is an example that they can model when they’re on shift: 

When I arrived, John was sitting down in the kitchen having coffee. He was in good spirits and anxious to help me prepare a few meals. After getting those done, we watched TV in the living room together and I encouraged fluids and reminded him to take his medications. We did a few of his physical therapy exercises and then I swept up his bedroom and the bathroom. When I left, John was seated in the living room reading the newspaper. 

Happy Home Care Halloween!

From all of us at CareTime, we wish you a happy—and spooky—Halloween full of inquiries, filled shifts, and great applicants. 

By following these simple tips and tricks, we hope that you kick Q4 off with a big hit. If you’re looking for a platform that can support your current and growing needs, our platform is built to grow with you at all levels. 

Reach out today to learn more about CareTime V3.