Why Go Paperless for Home Care Business Processes
It’s no news that the future of home care is digital. Now, if you own a homecare agency startup, you must be feeling that going fully digital is easier said than done. After all, it requires a significant budget, which a start-up generally does not have.
But what if we tell you that simply by using a home care software solution, you can reap the benefits of automation, which are much more than saving time and removing human error? Besides, making the shift doesn’t even need to be complicated:
Improve efficiency
With paper-based systems, almost every daily care activity – from typing care notes to revising care plans – impacts capacity (carer time) and budgets (for example, fuel or transport expenses). This impact is significantly reduced with a digital system:
- Updating care plans
These can be updated remotely by care managers, enabling frequent and timely updates.
- Creating, updating, and distributing staff rosters
Rosters are recommended based on care continuity, team capacity, carer location, and service user preferences.
Care managers can revise these at any point, with carers immediately seeing the latest versions.
- Collecting/replacing MAR charts or daily care notes
Instead of storing these in individual seniors’ homes, these are kept centrally and backed up using a cloud-based system, so up-to-date documents are available instantly from anywhere.
- Updated timesheets for billing or payroll
As you track timesheets in real time, these integrate with your payroll and billing processes.
- Generating care reports
Your performance data is kept in one place, demonstrated by an easy-to-understand dashboard, so you can access and present it to management teams or care regulators at any time.
- Real-time insights and reporting
Paperless systems give complete data transparency and real-time quality assurance. It allows you to identify improvement areas ahead of care quality inspections.
It can also enable you to see critical performance metrics and care information and notify you with updates, like when carer qualifications need renewing or when resources are fully used.
- Person-centered care
Offering person-centered care is the primary aim for many home care business startups, but time, capacity, and budget constraints can make this challenging.
Ultimately, a digital approach to care frees up valuable time to enable your carers to deliver a better service to seniors. Paperless systems minimize admin time by allowing carers to get up to speed on care recipients’ care, complete pre-set forms digitally, and upload documents to the business reporting system in real-time.
It, in turn, boosts the overall care recipient experience, which will show on your business’s bottom line.
Digital care systems can also help you ensure consistency of care – by learning from senior preferences and integrating the data with caregiver rosters to ensure every senior has a regular team of caregivers. - Team satisfaction
Home care workers are always preoccupied. And the difficulty of recruitment makes team retention all the more important.
Digital systems can give you a real insight into your team’s capacity, allow them to submit feedback, and demonstrate how you listen to their preferences. - Identify potential pockets of capacity
Centralizing your home care data can highlight ‘pockets of capacity’, like where you could preserve carer time by allocating carers to service users based on geographical proximity, minimizing travel time, and maximizing your existing resources.
It enables you to cover your care packages more efficiently, which is critical as you scale.
Summing up
For many home care business start-ups, it’s not unusual for care managers or registered managers to feel resistance from caregivers who have been operating in the same way for many years.
It’s completely understandable – it’s second nature to them.
That’s why your non-medical home care scheduling software needs to be tailored to your existing processes so caregivers don’t need to relearn how to do their jobs.
Instead, it creates a different way of recording the same process, supporting you as you grow.
Related blog posts:
Boosting Agency Efficiency: How CareSmartz360 Saves Time and ResourcesHow Can a Home Care Software Save Agency’s Hours of Admin Work