Learn More About Home Care Agency Management Software
What is Home Health Care Software?
Home health care providers perform medical services to senior citizens or post-op patients within the comfort of their own homes. Home health care services are generally covered by Medicaid, as home health care providers are medical professionals trained to deliver effective care. These providers rely on home health care software to manage their services. Home health care software must contend with decentralized patient data sources, and manage and organize individual caregivers. Home health care software also helps users content with reimbursement policies and the tracking of equipment and resources.
Home health care does not follow the traditional processes of health care as administered in hospitals or medical practices. Therefore, home health care software cannot be expected to look or act the same as medical practice management software. The biggest benefit that home health care software brings to both the home care agency and the patient is the effective management and automation of client and provider data. The caregiver-client relationship is more intimate and collaborative than that of the traditional provider-client relationship, and software exists to streamline and optimize such relationships.
Key Benefits of Home Health Care Software
- Effectively and efficiently stores, accesses, and shares patient health information
- Coordinates caregiver-patient assignments and keeps track of caregiver-patient activity
- Enables patients to reach full recovery or achieve self-sufficiency
Why Use Home Health Care Software?
Home health care has the capacity to provide a level of care that is as effective as the type of care a patient can receive in a hospital or assisted living facility. This can be further enabled through the effective use of home health care software. The following are some of the benefits a home health care agency and caregiver can expect to reap from home health care software:
Enables the delivery of quality care — Automating workflows and streamlining documentation processes help care providers spend less time on paperwork and more time delivering quality care. Many home health care software solutions are optimized for mobile devices, which make it even easier for medical professionals to keep track of their hours and activities without manually logging everything.
Data management — Home health care software consolidates both patient and provider data, making it easier for dispatched nurses and therapists to successfully meet the health needs of their patients. Home health care supports the input, upload, and synchronization of data, enabling those skilled caregivers to work with data in real time.
Billing management — Because home care exists outside the scope of a hospital or medical practice, billing of services and insurance reimbursement processes look different. Home health care software simplifies the management of bills, management of contractor payrolls, and scheduling of payment to payers and clearinghouses.
Who Uses Home Health Care Software?
Home health care software enables home health care agencies to provide medically assistive care to patients. While patients end up benefiting from the streamlined operations that home health care software brings to them outside of a hospital or practice, the users of the solutions are agencies or the care providers.
Agencies — Home health care agency owners leverage home health care software to receive full visibility into its operations, maintain and secure patient data, and take care of their patients. Agencies use the planning and administrative management modules of home health care software to keep track of their dispatched caregivers.
Aides and caregivers — Home health care professionals are skilled medical professionals who are able to provide medical services to their patients. These professionals include aides, therapists, nurses, and skilled caregivers. Medical professionals utilize the scheduling and documentation functionalities of home health care software, necessary outside the structure and format of a hospital or assisted living facility.
Kinds of Home Health Care software
At its core, home health care provides senior citizens with skilled care without the restrictions of a medical setting. The nuances between in-home care and intermittent house visits, hospice and nursing home, or outpatient therapy services, do not necessarily translate into wildly differing solution offerings. Some home health care software may be more preoccupied with agency or clinical management while others are focused on improving patient outcomes and assessments. Some home health care software may only offer electronic visit verification (EVV), facilitating Medicaid adherence, and fraud protection.
Home Health Care Software Features
Home health care software enables an agency to run more efficiently, ensure accurate clinical documentation, and better manage both its staff and their assigned patient cases.These are the most common features found in all home health care solutions:
Scheduling — Simplifies shift management, automatically assigns caregivers to client, logs client visits and activities, and supports direct uploading of progress notes into the system.
Billing — Provides built-in or seamless integrations with third-party billing and payroll solutions, to ease the process of counting hours of care provided as well as to encourage accountability and transparency of staff.
Documentation and collaboration — Provides easy-to-use clinical documentation templates and resources. Supports communication and messaging between caregiver staff, family and caregiver, and patient and caregiver. Also simplifies communication between caregiver and agency manager, so that all tracked activities are followed through.
Compliance — Ensures that the home health care agency’s operations and plans of care remain in compliance with Medicaid and Medicare.
Additional Home Health Care Features
Mobile access — Optimizes solution for all mobile devices, enabling caregivers to be able to work offline or in the field without worry that their activity isn’t tracked.
Other home health care software features: Skilled Care, Non-Skilled Care.
Potential Issues with Home Health Care Software
Communication and expectations — Because home care agencies assign caregivers to specific clients, there may be gaps in communication with clients and their families in terms of care expectation or cultural sensitivities. Additionally, because patients are referred to home health care agencies via their primary physician, some issues or concerns may not have been communicated prior to the assignment of caregiver to the patient. Such gaps cannot be simply resolved, even with a home health care solution.
Better tools, better technology — Because home health care takes the medical professional out of the hospital setting, this system of care also removes infrastructure and equipment from that professional’s everyday routine. No matter how sophisticated a home health care solution is, if it does not supplement an effective ecosystem, the solution will fail because it will not be able to integrate or communicate with existing infrastructure.
Complicated billing process — The billing process for home health care is complicated. The care given to patients is completely contingent on their needs, regardless of whether that need is recovery-based. A home health care solution that does not have a flexible billing engine cannot support a home care agency or an effective home health care program.
Software and Services Related to Home Health Care Software
Home health care software eases the day-to-day tasks of nurses, aides, and skilled caregivers as they take care of senior citizens in the comfort of their own home. The operational management, scheduling and coordination, and documentation that home health care software supports overlap with similar provisions of care and scope of health care services. The following solutions are used in those similar scenarios:
Private duty home care — Private duty home care software streamlines the scheduling of caregivers to senior citizens, as well as consolidating patient and caregiver information. Private duty home care is similar to home health care in the kinds of services that are offered by home health care agencies. However, the services of home health care are medically driven, while the services of private duty home care are designed to assist senior citizens with their daily lives. That is why while home care is typically covered by Medicare; private duty home care typically is not.
Ancillary care providers — Ancillary care providers facilitate the sharing of patient information between the primary care giver and diagnostic, therapeutic, and custodial providers of care. Patients who need continued care for a prolonged period of time will turn to nursing facilities, hospice centers, or physical therapy practices, which will need to reference patient case information to provide the optimal level of care. Ancillary care providers communicate with home health care agencies to schedule nurses and provide access to patient files.
Assisted living — Assisted living facilities provide senior citizens with housing and care services that do not require skilled nurses or the full faculties of a nursing home. Assisted living software manages the operations of assisted living facilities, ensuring that the needs of their residents are met along with ensuring the activities remain in compliance. The most significant difference between assisted living and home health care is that the latter allows senior citizens to remain in their own homes.
Clinical documentation — Clinical documentation software bolsters the patient information stored in electronic health records (EHRs). Aside from the software’s adherence to workflows and the part in plays in improving both health outcomes and patient experience, clinical documentation software makes the lives of providers and physicians much easier. Medical documents, forms, and even templates are automatically created and stored for later use, and the software supports effective clinical data exchange. In the scenario of home health care, clinical documentation software ensures that home care agencies are equipped with all of the relevant information before taking on a patient.
Patient case management — Patient case management software optimizies and facilitates the coordination of care, regardless of the care being provided at a hospital, smaller practice, or ancillary care clinic. With patient case management software, medical professionals can better determine the health status of a patient. This is helpful for home health care agencies as well, so they know the level and details of care that has already been given to a patient prior to their entrance into the home health care system.
