Overview

Millions of patients receive home care every year. For Home Care Agencies, timely and effective communication among the care team plays a critical role in providing quality patient care. Connected Care Team will lead to successful patient outcomes, improved patient satisfaction, improved employee satisfaction, and growth while being compliant with regulatory requirements. Using disparate means of communication will lead to poor communication, inefficient process, and care team members working in silos.

For a home care agency, communication should include access to all patient information when needed in addition to exchanging messages among the care team. Home Care Agencies can make care team communication more efficient by using an integrated software platform with communication options built within the software. In addition to effective communication, providing the complete and most current information to the care team will also improve the quality of care, patient satisfaction, and employee satisfaction.

Care Team Communication Challenges for Home Health Care Agencies:

Many home care agencies use email, texts, phone calls, or even paper notes to communicate with care team members and patients. Using multiple modes of communication in addition to the EMR system will require clinicians to spend more effort to collect all the information regarding the patient. This leads to inefficiencies in communication potentially impacting patient care, patient safety, and clinical outcomes.

The following are some of the challenges home care agencies face in their communications.

Information Silos

Home Care Agencies usually keep all the clinical information in the Agency Management System. They also use other tools (texts, emails, etc.) for communication with Care Team Members and other employees. This process leads to patient clinical and communication information being kept in different platforms leading to silos of information. Pulling all the information together regularly will be a huge challenge.

Potential HIPAA Issues

One of the challenges with using email and text is the potential for sending the Protected Health Information (PHI) of patients over the internet or phones. Text messages usually get saved on the device of the employees. There is a potential email that may also be saved in the local drives on a laptop. When these devices are lost or employees leave the agency, these messages go with them.

Access

In addition to all the communications regarding patient care, sometimes home care agencies find it challenging to provide access to a complete set of clinical information to the clinician at the point of care. Not having access to all the information will lead to inefficiencies in patient care.

Changes

One of the challenges Home Care Agencies faces is communicating changes in medication, treatment, care plan, and schedules to the care team. Not having a current and complete information on the patient will lead to inadequate or missed care leading to potentially poor outcomes.

Missed Tasks

Home Care Agencies find it challenging to track if the employees showed up for the shift on time, completed the tasks, and left the shifts on time. Quite often, agencies find out later that the employee did not show up for the shift or did not complete the tasks that were supposed to be completed leading to a reduction in patient satisfaction.

All these communication challenges lead to the degradation of the quality of care and patient satisfaction. It also leads to potential issues with compliance. A software platform that addresses most of these challenges will help a home healthcare agency to improve the quality of care and patient satisfaction.

Care Team Communication Tools for Home Health Care Agencies:

A comprehensive, integrated software platform that provides multiple communication tools that are easy to use is essential for effective communication to improve the quality of care, patient satisfaction, operational efficiency, and compliance. Home Health Care Agencies should take a holistic view of the communication needs of the agency before selecting a software platform that will meet the communication requirements.

The following are some of the communication tools a comprehensive and integrated home care agency software platform should have to improve Care Team Communications.

Secure Messaging

An integrated, HIPAA Compliant, and internal messaging application are essential to improve communication within the agency that is effective. With an internal application, the messages are only for users, employees, and patients. The contents of the message stay within the application and are saved in the database. The messages are not stored on the local POC devices, and they are not sent over the internet thus enhancing the security of the messages. The messaging application should have one common area to view all the messages and notifications. It should also be accessible from key screens enabling the users to initiate a message from any data entry screen. Push notifications and email reminders when new messages arrive will be helpful to Care Team members to keep up with and follow up on messages.

Communication Logs

During an episode of care, it is normal to have conversations with patients, employees, care team members, and external healthcare professionals regarding patient care, scheduling preferences, and billing options. It will be essential to record some of these conversations and attach them to patients and/or employees. Some of these conversations may have confidential information. A software platform should provide the ability to log and view all communications in one area. It should also provide an option to limit access to these logs based on employees’ roles.

Schedule Reminders

It will be nice to have the options to send schedule reminders to patients and employees the day before the visit or shift. This will reduce the potential for missed visits or shifts. It will be essential for Private Duty Nursing and Non-Medical Home Care Agencies with the high volume of patients and shifts.

Patient Care Changes

During the course of patient care, there will be changes to the care based on how the treatments are working. New medications may be prescribed while current medications may be changed or discontinued. As and when the patient's condition improves or changes, appropriate changes will be made to the care plan and treatments. These changes should reflect at the point of care in real-time. A software platform should push these changes to point of care in real-time.

Wholistic View of the patient

Clinicians should have a holistic view of the patient at the point of care. They should be able to access patient information, schedules, medications, care plan, and past clinical notes without having to jump through many screens. This information should be available before starting the visit/shift or during the visit/shift. A software platform should provide easy access to patient clinical information.

Portals

Integrated Family and Employee Portals will be very useful to communicate with the patient, the patient's family, and employees. These portals will provide access to schedules and other information for patients, patient's family, and employees. A software platform should have integrated portal options, not third-party options.

Schedule Monitor

The ability to monitor schedules in real-time will be essential to make sure visits/shifts start on time, and all the assigned tasks are completed and end on time. This function will be very useful for Private Duty Nursing and Non-Medical agencies with a high volume of visits/shifts.

Conclusion

Providing the right communication tools that are integrated with Home Agency Management and EHR software platform will the Care Teams to communicate efficiently leading to a successful outcome for the patient. A software platform should have built-in tools to improve the quality of care, patient satisfaction, compliance, and employee satisfaction.

ABOUT CAREVOYANT

CareVoyant is a leading provider of cloud-based integrated enterprise-scale home health care software that can support all home-based services under ONE Software, ONE Patient, and ONE Employee, making it a Single System of Record. We support all home based services, including Home Care, Private Duty Nursing, Private Duty Non-Medical, Home and Community Based Services (HCBS), Home Health, Pediatric Home Care, and Outpatient Therapy at Home.

CareVoyant functions – Intake, Authorization Management, Scheduling, Clinical with Mobile options, eMAR/eTAR, Electronic Visit Verification (EVV), Billing/AR, Secure Messaging, Notification, Reporting, and Dashboards – streamline workflow, meet regulatory requirements, improve quality of care, optimize reimbursement, improve operational efficiency and agency bottom line.

For more information, please visit CareVoyant.com or call us at 1-888-463-6797.