Your Ultimate Guide to Home Care Scheduling Software

Ah scheduling, it’s beautiful when it works—but really irritating when it doesn’t. Take a deep breath and destress as we unpack best practices for choosing and using home care scheduling software.

Scheduling is the third most common reason for caregiver turnover. Caregivers work in an incredibly complex and taxing environment. As a home care agency, your team is responsible for finding and providing them the hours they need.

We’ll go over:

• How to evaluate home care scheduling software
• Best practices for scheduling caregivers
• Best practices for your admin team

How to evaluate home care scheduling software

When you’re looking to change platforms—or it’s your first time searching for one, finding the right scheduling platform can truly make or break your operations.

Schedules are the engine that keep your agency going, right at the intersection of your hiring and business development processes. Here are a few things to look for as you evaluate scheduling software options:

• Ease of use: This is, subjectively, the most important component of the search process. There are multiple stakeholders to think through. As a customer, you’re looking for ease of use for your admin team members, having to do daily schedule adjustments, seeing live views of client shifts, and adding new schedules as new caregivers come on board. More importantly, caregivers are consumers and primary end users of your chosen platform. Make sure that you select a platform that is not only easy for you to use but also easy for caregivers to use for clock-ins, notes, and more.
• Visit Status: When evaluating scheduling software, you’ll need visibility into different shift statuses, such as open shifts, scheduled shifts, active shifts, past shifts, etc… Make sure that you use a system that clearly codes or colors each status and is simple enough for your team to understand and navigate.
• Shift Information Visibility: When you click into a shift, you want to be able to see at a glance detailed information on what happened and when.
• Pricing: Being able to reasonably afford the programs you use is important, however, keep in mind that you can pass along the costs of the systems you use into your private pay client rates. In addition, create some communications or a flyer around the platform you use to help families realize the value of your agency beyond the care itself.

Best practices for scheduling caregivers

When trying to match caregivers, it’s important for your home care scheduling software to offer a few different functionalities for recommending the best caregiver for a shift. Some of those factors include:

• Availability
• Distance to client
• Training/Relevant experience or other qualifications
• Client preferences

Utilizing technology in this way gets you most of the way through the process. Aside from how your agency management system can support getting your caregivers new shifts, scheduling is both an art and a science.

The science part is being more exact and formulaic, plugging in desired hours, and trying your best to fill them.

The art side is helping caregivers get acquainted with their clients’ care plans. Or how their schedules might get stacked if they’re working a few short shifts a day—you get the idea.

Your scheduler’s job is to help move a caregiver from their assigned schedule (on paper) to an accepted schedule and ready-to-work status (in practice).

Here are a few tips for scheduling caregivers:

• Be upfront with them in the hiring process about the viability of their available hours.
• Maintain a dynamic of honesty and transparency when sharing client care plans and what to expect when they go in the home.
• Ensure that all clients and caregivers are formally introduced as much as possible. Of course, there are going to be situations that arise that make this impossible, but maintaining this best practice improves satisfaction across the board.

Best practices for you and your admin team

A scheduler’s position is also at high risk for turnover—similar to caregivers—so much so that Home Care Pulse reports that for every scheduler who leaves, five caregivers leave with them.

Some agencies have a 95% turnover rate for their admin team. Schedulers are one of the most important keys to efficient operations. They:

• Evaluate client needs
• Assess caregiver needs
• Find where these needs intersect
• Resolve conflicts

Scheduling is often referred to as a puzzle that you have to put together and take apart often. You could also consider it a Rubik’s cube to represent the multiple dimensions and sides of care situations.

Here are some best practices to streamline operations to retain your schedulers for the long haul:

• Give your schedulers an opportunity to initiate positive interactions with caregivers (outside of giving them additional shifts). That could mean wishing them a happy birthday or sharing positive client feedback.

[READ MORE: 12 Ways to Appreciate Your Caregivers 

Outside of National Caregivers Day]

• Equip your schedulers with the resources they need to do their job effectively. They might work well when they’re incentivized and connected to a certain KPI. One example of this goal is a 95% shift fill rate equating to a 2% quarterly raise. This could also be as simple as asking if they want a project management system, more time off, coffee in the break room, etc.
• Leverage all of the features that your home care scheduling software offers. Take the time to show each of your schedulers (or have a designated in-house training person) how to use each feature, why it’s helpful, and hacks to maintain productivity with less input.

Caregiver recruitment and retention have taken center stage in the home care narrative. However, it’s important to avoid neglecting your admin team at the same rate. 

Balancing these crucial priorities is delicate but well worth the investment. “Investing in your team means investing in your future success—and leads to a healthier work-life balance for you as an owner,” shared Julio Barea, head of sales.

Use a scheduling platform that’s scheduler and caregiver-friendly. 

If scheduling were easy, everyone would do it. Scheduling takes a very unique skill set of interacting with caregivers and clients as well as making quick, executive decisions to improve care. 

By equipping your team with the right resources and technology, you can take your team to the next level. 

If your team is ready to level up and reach a new revenue milestone, or you’re just ready to streamline operations so you can spend more time away from the office, consider switching to CareTime.