Overview

Effective Communication for Home Health Care Agencies to Improve Quality of Care

Home Care Services include a wide range of skilled and non-medical services provided at patients’ homes or where the patient is living. Home Care Services enable patients to live independently and safely at home instead of a Skilled Nursing Facility or a Group Home. Providing care at home significantly improves patient satisfaction and outcomes while reducing the overall cost of care. Home Care Services can help patients who need long-term assistance with activities of daily living, recover from short hospitalization, or have special needs and ongoing disabilities. Nurses, Therapists, Medical Social Workers, Home Health Aides, and Personal Care Workers provide long-term or short-term care for patients based on their needs.

Millions of patients receive home care every year. Providing quality patient care is critical for home care agencies for patient satisfaction and growth while complying with regulatory requirements. The quality and effectiveness of patient care is a collaborative effort from the entire organization. Communication plays a critical role in improving collaboration, quality of care, and compliance. Home Health Care Agencies need to communicate securely, effectively, and efficiently to ensure the highest quality and level of service.

In addition to effective communication, providing the most current information to care providers will also improve the quality of care and patient satisfaction.

Communication Challenges for Home Health Care Agencies

Many agencies use email, text, or phone calls to communicate with employees and patients. 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 in the device of the employees. Emails often get saved on the local drives of the laptop. When these devices are lost or when employees leave the agency, these messages go with them. It will be very difficult to retrieve these messages for the agency’s record, along with the risk of PHI violations.

Agency employees usually communicate with patients, employees, health care professionals, or other care providers. Agencies typically do not have one common place to document these communications and access them in the future.

When a patient receives care from clinicians or clinicians of different disciplines, passing a note from one visit/shift to the next visit/shift is essential. Many agencies do not have an effective mechanism to pass notes from one visit to the next visit.

Home Health Care Agencies, especially Private Duty Nursing and Non-Medical Agencies, usually deal with a high volume of schedules and changes to these schedules. Sometimes, it is a big challenge to communicate all the changes to employees and patients before the visit or shift.

Private Duty Nursing and Non-Medical Personal Care Agencies usually have a large number of schedules. Agencies struggle with confirming these schedules and sending reminders to patients and employees. It is critical to promptly communicate medication changes or care plan changes to the clinicians at the point of care. As agencies strive to ensure that patients receive correct, effective, and quality care, they face the challenge of communicating care plan changes promptly.

Agencies also find it challenging to provide a holistic view of complete clinical information about a patient to clinicians providing care.

On a daily basis, 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. Often, agencies find out later the employee did not show up for the shift or complete their assigned tasks.

All these communication challenges lead to 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 health care agency improve quality of care and patient satisfaction.

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 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 software platform for home care agencies must have:

Secure Messaging

Integrated, HIPAA Compliant and internal messaging functionalities create effective communication and improve coordination within the agency. With an internal application, the messages are only for users, employees, and patients. The contents of the message stay within the application and 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 employees 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, the care team, and external health care 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 employees. Some of these conversations may have confidential information. A software platform should provide the ability to log and view all the communications in one area. It should also give the option to limit access to these logs based on employees’ roles.

Schedule Reminders

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

Patient Care Changes

During patient care, there will be changes to the care based on how the treatment is working. Clinicians will prescribe new medications from time to time and discontinue or modify current medications. When the patient’s condition improves or changes, the clinicians will make appropriate changes 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 the point of care in real-time.

Holistic View of the Patient’s Care Plan and Records

Clinicians need to have a holistic view of the patient’s care plan and medical records at the point of care. They must have software functionality to access patient information, schedules, medications, care plans, and past clinical notes without jumping 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 in communicating with the patient, patient’s family, and employees. These portals will provide access to schedules and other information for patients, families, 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, 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

A software platform should provide the necessary communication tools to improve quality of care, patient satisfaction, compliance, and employee satisfaction.

CareVoyant for Home Care is an integrated, cloud-based software platform with easy-to-use communication tools for Home Health Care Agencies offering multiple services – Private Duty Nursing, Non-Medical, Personal Care, and Home Health - under ONE Patient and ONE Employee making it a Single System of Record.

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.