Why You Need Home Care Software

Your agency needs home care staffing software. Why? Read on to learn the top benefits of home care staffing software.

Running a home care agency comes with an array of managerial challenges. These are essential to the operations of the business. These challenges include:

• Creating daily, weekly, and monthly schedules
• Keeping track of your staff and the hours they work
• Calculating payroll and overtime compensation
• Ensuring your staff’s certifications and papers are always up to date
• Most home care businesses are unaware of the benefits of home care staffing software.

As a result, they perform these duties by hand. Performing these duties manually takes a toll on your time. This affects your ability to provide care for clients. Hence, you need to automate the processes.

Ask your managerial staff to log hours spent on administrative activities.

• How long did they spend filling shifts this week, month, or year?
• How long does the average claim take to make? How many claims do they generate in a year?
• How long does conducting payroll take? Do they look at hours logged and have to calculate totals themselves? Was your clock in/out software down one day, forcing them to manually input hours?

Ask your clinicians to log hours spent on administrative activities.

• How long does it take to document the care given for each visit? 
• How long does it take to access previous care given? 
• How long does it take to sign up or search for a shift?

What a Home Care Software Can Do for You 

Simplify Scheduling

Scheduling involves matching staff skill sets with clients who are in need. Extra factors such as staff availability play a major role in the scheduling process. It is time-consuming to write down a schedule by hand. You have to call your staff and confirm they are available. Hence, the amount of time spent on creating and planning schedules can get utilized in other areas of the business.

With home care staffing software, scheduling is fast and easy. For example, a client may have the same four-day-a-week schedule for the next three months. Do you really want to enter 51 visits individually in the system? Of course not, with recurring schedules, you can enter those 51 visits in about 5 minutes versus potentially over 2 hours for entering each shift.

Additionally, the software makes a timetable. This ensures clients get their services and employees work for reasonable hours. A bonus is being able to download caregiver schedules in PDF format so they can be easily sent out. 

Accurate Record Keeping

Record keeping is an integral part of a home care business. You have to keep track of:

• The number of hours your staff works including overtime
• Supplies utilized
• Transport allowances
• Client needs such as medication
• Time your staff arrive at a client's residence and when they leave

Maintaining an accurate record of all the above is difficult without adequate home care staffing software.

If you make an error in the hours worked, you could overpay or underpay your staff. Additionally, if you can’t verify if your staff met their client appointments on time or fully utilized the scheduled hours, it could have a negative impact on your business.

Home staffing software allows you to maintain a consistently accurate record of every aspect of your business. Instead of manually writing down employee hours, and arrival and departure times, the software allows you to utilize a cloud-based input system.

The system enables clients to let you know

• When your staff arrived
• The duties they performed
• The supplies they utilized or replenished for the client
• The time they left

With such records, you can easily identify the staff members who are consistently late or underperforming in their duties.

Payroll and Bonus Calculations

When handling a large number of staff members, it often gets tricky to keep track of how much they are owed. This is especially so for home care businesses that run multiple shits and employees are occasionally swapping shifts.

Another factor that affects accurate payroll is compensation for overtime hours as well as bonuses for the best employees. When using a manual system to calculate payroll, a lot of time is involved. Additionally, man is to error and hence there will be cases of omission and commission.

A primary benefit of staffing software is that payroll calculation gets done automatically based on the data provided. Hence, the software keeps track of all hours worked, bonuses owed, and all compensation relating to each employee.

Hence with home care software, your employees do not have to wait for you to manually calculate their salaries. Additionally, there are no conflicts resulting from errors made in payroll calculations.

Smooth Transitions During Shift Swaps and Time Off

Occasionally, employees have to face personal emergencies and hence they swap their shifts with colleagues. Shift swaps are some of the toughest scenarios to keep accurate track of because they lead to a reorganization of the schedule.

Additionally, when employees take leave, it is essential to ensure that all clients are still served irrespective of the fewer staff members. Arranging a schedule is a daunting task, now imagine rearranging the entire schedule so as to compensate for employees who are on leave. In addition to this, you also have to arrange and rearrange the schedule for personnel who have swapped their shifts.

With a manual system, this usually takes a lot of time to pull off accurately. However, home care staffing software eases the burden. The software’s algorithm has the ability to provide solutions for time-off and shift swapping so that no client gets neglected. This ensures that irrespective of employee attendance; your business still runs smoothly without any hiccups.

Additional Integrated Features of Home Care Staffing Software

Nowadays, there are a lot of features and systems that are available to help businesses meet their goals. In the case of a home care business, staffing software can have features or integrations with:

1. Mapping

Google maps and Satellite navigation can assist employees to easily find their clients. In addition to directing staff to their destination, these systems can map out the shortest route as well as provide live traffic data so that employees can get to clients without delays.

2. Electronic Visit Verification

If you are in the home health business, chances are you’ve at least heard of EVV. So, what is it and why should you care?

EVV stands for Electronic Visit Verification. Essentially, it is a technology that verifies where and when a caregiver begins services for a client and when they clock-out. This provides a breadcrumb trail that provides the basis for billing.

The need arose from abuse from some providers inflating and making up time sheets. It became too easy for an unethical agency owner to pencil in false service times and then bill Medicaid / Medicare for the services. The result was that billions of dollars were being fraudulently or inappropriately collected by agencies.

Now with EVV technology, there is no disputing that a caregiver is in the location they checked in from (via GPS or registered land lines). You can imagine the millions of dollars this has already saved the healthcare system.

Many states have already begun requiring electronic visit verification for registered agencies, but the EVV requirement is about to become a national mandate. Pertaining to home health, the Cures Act will require that all home health agencies and personal care services that accept government reimbursements will have to have an EVV solution in place by the end of 2019 (now 2020 due to the delay signed by Congress) for personal care and 2023 for home health agencies.

3. Alerts

Alerts can be essential in reminding your employees when the next appointment is scheduled. Alerting them in good time ensures they are able to prep beforehand and thus arrive on time. Another helpful alert is being notified when any certification is about to expire. 

The more home care software can get integrated with other systems, the easier it is to run your business. Hence, when looking for staffing software ask about the integrations or built-in features. 

BONUS: Limit your overtime expenses. 

Although having hourly caregivers will result in some overtime, you can try to limit overtime expense by having alerts in your home care staffing software that tell you when a caregiver is about to go into overtime. This can save you a huge amount of expenses and add to your bottom line. Ask your software provider about alerts for overtime.

Conclusion on The Benefits of Home Care Staffing Software

There are numerous benefits of home care staffing software that your business can enjoy. Hence, when looking for suitable home care software, ensure that the software benefits outweigh the needs of your business.

Save money and time with CareTime 

CareTime is a web-based home care software company for home health, home care, hospice, and other healthcare organizations. We help you take back control of time, track caregivers, cut expenses, and generate more revenue. Our platform excels in making it easy for home care, home health administrators, and caregivers to use it. Manage point-of-care delivery with visit verification (EVV), care documentation, and maps, manage your caregivers and their schedules, bill with accuracy, and run reports to improve your business.