The Role of Technology in Home Health Care
Technology permeates all aspects of life. It is a resource we rely on to improve our day to day, stretch the amount of time we have available and let us enjoy the things in life that matter. Organizations and companies today have already tapped into this resource and benefited tremendously from technology’s potential.
Amazon has mastered the logistics game for retail and e-commerce. Uber and Lyft have rewritten the playbook for the taxi industry. In health, we’re seeing progress, but movement still can be slow and sluggish.
Even then many household names in tech companies are starting to gear up to accommodate a hot market in health. In October 2020, Microsoft launched Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare. Google Cloud is looking to invest into patient monitoring startups and Amazon Nest is expanding their offerings to provide monitoring tools for the home that checks vitals and other wellness signals.
All of this is exciting but in health care, in its current state, requirements concerning secure patient information and record keeping hinders any changes to a normal day to day process. Even small adjustments can seem reactionary. In working within the limitations, we can design workflows that operate in parallel and in tandem with a home health care agency’s requirements.
CareStitch is the only company offering a workforce management platform in health that works specifically with home health agencies’ requirements.
We built our platform to be HIPAA compliant and removed the stress of making the wrong decisions when assigning clinicians. Right now, as scary as it sounds, when individual behaviors are being tracked through surveillance, one way to make sure everyone is safe is to streamline conduct and operational guidelines and with the ultimate goal of protecting patient information.
Think for a moment: the amount of correspondences in a day to assign the right clinicians to a case can be overwhelming when schedules are mixed up and managed in an analog fashion. There’s no telling which form of communication (text messages, emails, and phone calls on unsecured channels) is going to land an agency in hot water. You need an interface that allows schedulers to operate in a solid environment so no one makes any mistakes or acts in a way that could jeopardize the office.
When you remove all major risks, then can you start to work more efficiently. By using technology to standardize communication and feedback between your agency and mobile clinicians, you’ve set the foundation for success. Dispatches are handled in an organized way. Time is well spent on meeting appointments and providing care. Your workforce is organized in a way that every player is at the right time and place. When the day ends, you can count your accomplishments in a day and wake up the next day knowing exactly what to expect.
With this newfound sense of order, you can start to strategize on how you would achieve growth targets for your agency and yourself. You spend more time monitoring activity rather than being in a constant state of stress. And when you can see stability in everything around you, you can tackle more complex problems leading to another plateau for your enterprise.
We clamor daily for savings in time and resources. But when you finally discover a windfall, how do you re-invest into your day to day? With a workforce management platform, you can increase workload. Perhaps your ground team can take on more cases. Or you have the ability to tap into a new source for intake claims thereby justifying new hires and workers. Or you finally have the time to reinvest in a better process to meet the demands of the latest regulatory changes.
If one were to measure the ROI of increasing internal efficiencies, what would that look like? 100%? 300%? Or 10x’s the return? Our software helps you arrive at these projections. With the ability to keep track of costs, you can manage your workforce in an efficient manner to reduce overhead and create space for more bandwidth. It’s hard not to imagine how much more you would benefit.
Our philosophy is simple: we use technology to help improve the lives of others by closing gaps in operational inefficiencies. Through advances made available in the latest technological revolution, we can shed light on the potential for home healthcare professionals to deliver the highest quality care.
Originally published at https://www.carestitch.com on November 2, 2020.
