The Ultimate Home Health & Home Care Experience: Understanding What Patients Want

Providing the best possible home care experience starts with understanding what patients value most. While home care agencies may focus on caregiver qualifications, many patients look for something different. They prefer a personalized and compassionate home care service that they have a say in.

Because a patient invites caregivers into their home, they want to know that they’ll still have control over their lives. They want to select the type of care services they receive, they want to choose when they’ll receive care services, and they want a caregiver they like and feel safe with.

How Can Home Care Agencies Deliver the Ultimate Home Care Service Quality?

Home care agencies must continue to focus on service quality, patient safety, and caregiver management. However, they should also prioritize finding ways to empower their patients and deliver individualized care. 

This means incorporating patient feedback into care plans, actively involving patients in decision-making processes, and tailoring services to meet each patient's unique needs and preferences. 

This patient-centered approach not only respects patients’ autonomy and dignity, but also contributes to better care outcomes and greater patient satisfaction.

4 Practical Ways to Improve Patient Care Quality 

#1 Create Detailed Documentation for Personalized Patient Care 

Documentation is key to quality home care services. It helps your care team understand each patient’s unique needs and goals so they can provide the ultimate home care services.

Use your home care software to enable caregivers to view their scheduled patient’s essential documents, including the care plan and recent notes. Ideally, your home care software will come with a mobile app so caregivers can access this documentation on the go.

You can further improve your documentation by creating templates. A consistent document structure will make it easier for your team to find the information they’re looking for, plus it will ensure that important details aren’t left out of your patient records.

#2 Track Progress Toward Customized Goals 

No two patients are the same: even though they might have similar conditions, they often have different hopes and goals for their home health services. That’s why individual goal setting and progress tracking should be a cornerstone of your patient care plans.

As part of your patient onboarding and care plan creation, outline patients’ goals and add them to your patient record. Remember that goals are more achievable when they’re specific and measurable. “Shower and brush hair daily” is a better goal than “improved personal hygiene,” for example.

Then, add goal tracking to your care note template so that caregivers can record the patient’s progress. Doing so on a five-point grading scale will make it easy to see improvements over time.

#3 Patient-Led Caregiver Matching and Scheduling

Receiving home care and home health services can be a vulnerable and at times intimate experience, which means allocating the right caregiver is essential for a positive patient care experience.

Your home care software’s filters will help you create a shortlist of appropriate caregivers for each patient. But even more important than your shortlist is being receptive to your patients’ requests. Encourage them to set their preferred caregivers via the client-facing side of your home care software.

Make sure scheduled services also fit around your patients’ lifestyles and needs. Your scheduling software should give you an at-a-glance understanding of when a patient’s preferred caregivers are available so you can build the ideal schedule.

#4 Keep Patients’ Loved Ones in the Loop

When a patient’s informal support network is involved in their care, it typically leads to improved care outcomes and a better patient care experience. Plus, feedback from a patient’s family and friends can help you better understand the patient’s needs and preferences.

Home care agencies should make sharing updates a priority. Provide approved family members and loved ones with access to your home care software’s client-facing portal, and then use it to share care notes, progress toward goals, billing details, and scheduled home care services.

Boost Care Quality Standards with the Right Tools

ShiftCare’s home care software is a complete solution for agencies looking to reduce their admin work, improve their caregiver management, and deliver a higher standard of care. It has powerful tools for matching patients and caregivers, sharing client details, adding care notes, scheduling, billing, and more. 

Plus, the ShiftCare Connect portal helps your patients’ family members and loved ones stay up to date with their care. Discover how you can deliver more personalized patient care. Try ShiftCare for free.