How Can You Provide Quality Home Care Service With Fewer Caregivers?

If you are in home care business, you know that finding potential clients is not a matter of concern; the challenging aspect is finding caregivers to provide services when the need arises. The obvious solution to such a crisis is hiring, training and retaining new caregivers to fulfill the home care demand. You need to upgrade your management tools and provide your existing staff with all the resources to fulfill client-servicing requests. Here are some ways in which your private duty home care agency can escalate deployment and productivity levels of the existing staff without hiring new ones.

Utilize the Potential of Home Care Management Software Systems
Equip your team of caregivers with productivity-enhancing tools. It is 2018, and the world has witnessed many technological innovations in every field and industry. Gone are the times when caregivers used to fill out time sheets, take notes and need to appear physically to submit reports. When you start harnessing the power and capabilities of a Private Duty Home Care Software that allows managing your business on the go, you also enhance the efficiency of your existing pool of caregivers. Now that everything is on mobile devices, you can adopt a BYOD (Bring your own device) work culture that will help caregivers to access schedules, claim new visits and shifts, document at the point of care, punch in/out, view client’s health records and prescribed care, and much more.

Keep Track of Shift/Visit Schedule
When you integrate a cloud-based home health care software, it should record and compute variables and parameters such as –

  • The skills, licenses and certifications of the staff
  • Necessary soft skills, personality traits and individual likes and dislikes
  • Experience, seniority and rank of the staff
  • Home proximity, travel time, distance and mode of transportation of employees
  • Capacity, deployment and labor restrictions such as overtime, labor regulations, etc.
  • Access to pre-existing care data, for situations when a previous caregiver has provided services to a client

Forecasting Availability and Unavailability
Your home care software should have the capability of forecasting the availability and unavailability of staff and caregivers for better efficiency. It will help to manage your business operations and provide instant access to this information, so that all parties know when and where a caregiver can be assigned. This is helpful when you have fewer home care workers to meet the needs of a growing number of home care clients, a key aspect in every home care business that needs routine efforts if not managed by technology solutions.

Appreciate and Reward the Hard Work
When you start praising your existing pool of performance-driven caregivers for their dedication and extra efforts, you will see them giving more time to meet the demands and taking initiatives to work as if it is their own business. Reward them for their discipline, low absenteeism, positive client feedback and recruiting new clients. For caregivers, this enthusiasm will help them to earn more, thereby alleviating the pressure to recruit more staff.

Motivating, engaging and providing tools to existing employees so that you can manage home care demands without hiring new staff is important, but there are other innovative home care solutions, which can help you focus on your core business objectives and reduce the burden of managing other operations such as billing/invoicing, accounting, reporting, recruitment, marketing and more.In your line of business, it is crucial to keep your clients satisfied and employees motivated without any feeling of stress and workload.

By Elena Jonathon
Elena Jonathon