How Repetitive Tasks Can Prevent Your Home Health Agency From Growing

Time is valuable, especially if you're running a growing business. When your back-office team spends hours on manual tasks, they have less time available for supporting your caregivers and helping you scale your business.

Large numbers of repetitive tasks increase your per-client costs and make it harder to take on additional clients without hiring more members of staff. This can create a bottleneck: your growth is stifled because you aren't yet earning enough to employ more people, but you can't sign on more clients so that your income increases.

These monotonous tasks can also result in higher rates of human error. From typos in customer care plans and nursing notes to scheduling conflicts, there's plenty that can go wrong when your team is experiencing task fatigue — and in health care, this can have disastrous effects. 

As one 2016 study reports, if medical error was treated like a disease, it would be the third leading cause of death in the US. 

Repetitive tasks are also dull. They can significantly reduce employee engagement rates and contribute to high turnover levels. This can lead to you spending more time on hiring and training instead of on marketing your business.

Reducing the time spent on repetitive tasks will enable your home agency to grow quicker. It will decrease your labor costs, free up time that can be better used in improving care quality, produce fewer errors, and help you boost employee engagement rates.

The Main Repetitive Tasks Home Health Agencies Should Worry About — And How to Automate Them

The time spent on manual tasks can be massive, whether your team is copying and pasting data from shift records to invoices or checking that proof of eligibility to work documentation is up to date. But which tasks should you tackle first? Let's explore the worst offenders.

Scheduling

Manually checking your team’s availability, creating schedules, sharing them, and then confirming their receipt can take up hours of your back office team’s week. And the more patients and caregivers you have, the more complex your schedule will become.

Automate your scheduling by making it easy for your team to set their preferred availability, check schedules, and bid on new shifts. Look for home health care scheduling software with a mobile caregiver app so that you can send out push notifications instead of wasting time on back-and-forth emails.

Set up team and recurring shifts so that you only need to make small tweaks to each week’s schedule. You'll save time and reduce the likelihood of scheduling errors and no-shows.

Billing and Payroll

Correct invoicing and payroll are essential for avoiding fines and rejected bills. However, manually creating invoices is both time-consuming and vulnerable to human error.

The right care management systems will be able to auto-generate correct invoices and payroll based on your shift records. Ideally, you’ll also be able to add service codes directly to the schedule, so that the shift record contains all the information required for your invoices. 

Look for software that allows your team to attach expenses details to their shifts so that there's even less information for you to manually update. 

Documentation Access Updates

Controlling access to patient documentation is critical to protecting patients' data privacy and confidentiality. Any errors here can lead to HIPAA violations and costly fines.

If you're manually sharing patient files or updating online access, there's a high risk of a data breach or leak. Even if you avoid this, your team can lose hours each week in updating access permissions.

Solve this issue by using secure care management software that only allows scheduled team members to access a patient's protected information. By automating this, you can guarantee that there won't be any delays in removing or updating access. For extra security, look for HIPAA-compliant home health care software that keeps all information in the app.

How to Implement Home Health Software

Home health agency software can automate repetitive tasks so that your team can focus on care delivery instead of paperwork. But to make the most of it, don’t forget to:

Take Advantage of the Free Trial

Most home care software providers will offer a free trial. Double-check that you’ve found the best home care software for your team’s needs by thoroughly testing it. 

Set It Up Correctly

Invest time in setting up your software so that you can save time later on. In particular, create detailed staff and client profiles for better client-caregiver matching, build document templates and checklists for improved documentation, and add all your service codes and pricing so that billing is easier.

Train Your Staff

You’ll see the biggest benefits when your staff knows how to best use your home health care software. Create training materials and SOP documentation. Store them in an easily accessible location.

Reduce the Time You Spend on Repetitive Tasks

The right home health care software will take care of the admin side of running your business, so you can focus on what matters: providing quality care services and growing your agency.

ShiftCare's home care software provides a complete solution for home health agencies. From caregiver-patient matching to scheduling, billing, time-tracking, documentation, and compliance, it will help you automate key tasks and save hours each week. Our clients find they can reduce the time spent on tasks like invoicing by up to 90%.

Discover how much time you could save. Try ShiftCare for free.