Let’s face it – “data” may not be the most appealing topic for many of us in homecare, but it is critical to your business growth, and to the value of our industry as a whole.
Gathering the data you need to improve your business and demonstrate your value doesn’t need to be complicated. If you’re a data newbie or just want some tips on key points worth capturing, read on.
Keeping patients healthy within the comfort of their own homes is a homecare agency’s main goal. But according to surveys conducted by Home Care Pulse, less than 20% of providers are currently tracking hospital readmissions.
If you’re successfully meeting your goal month after month, why not track the metrics to prove it?
If you’re coming up short, face the facts (the data), address what’s holding you back, and work to do better the next month.
As we move forward to a comprehensive continuum of care, where homecare, home health and hospice, and skilled nursing groups will work together towards the shared mission of keeping patients out of the hospital, it’s important for all agencies to be able to show their value and the impact they’re having on quality of care.
A company’s success can be measured by its customers’ satisfaction.
While some patients and their families may willingly offer their feedback, you often don’t know how well your agency is really doing unless you ask.
Customer satisfaction surveys push agencies to take an honest look at how they’re running their business and identify where they stand in relation to competitors.
Surveys don’t need to be difficult to build, nor to respond to. An ideal place to start is with a simple question: On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with our agency?
Once you’ve collected your responses, make an action plan. Evaluate your weak areas and outline the steps you’ll take to improve upon them.
Keeping your caregivers happy is just as important as ensuring your clients’ needs are met. Without caregivers, you don’t have a business!
Just as you’d measure customer feedback, consider conducting a survey to gauge your employees’ satisfaction. This will help you proactively manage recruitment and retention, as well as avoid any potential turnover surprises. Employee surveys may even offer some unexpected insights into the overall quality of your business.
Consider presenting the following questions to your caregivers:
Just remember, a survey is only valuable if you take the constructive feedback and follow it up with an action plan.
You know that marketing is essential to promoting your agency, but how do you know that your marketing efforts are successful? In other words, are you getting out more than what you’re putting in?
Be sure to review your Client Acquisition Costs (CAC) on at least a quarterly basis. You can calculate your CAC by dividing the sum of your sales and marketing expenses by the sum of new clients.
If you find your marketing efforts are falling short, change it up and try a different avenue. For example, if you’ve been spending on blog posts but you’re not getting much traction on your website, consider redirecting your efforts to social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter, and maybe even experiment with paid advertising.
As you get more advanced with your online marketing, you can use Google Analytics to track activity like visits to your website and online leads.
Another metric that can offer valuable insight into the overall health of your business is caregiver turnover rate. You can calculate it by dividing the number of caregivers who left your agency during a given timeframe by the total number of caregivers employed during that same timeframe.
According to Home Care Pulse, the average turnover rate was 64% in 2021.
If your agency’s turnover rate falls on or near the average, that’s a good sign. But 64% is still a high percentage, and turnover is expensive. The average caregiver costs a whopping $2,600 to replace.
Stay on top of recruitment and retention, conduct employee surveys, and focus on actions you can take to shrink your turnover rate, month after month. Communicate often, invest in caregiver training, take your staff’s career advancement seriously, and reward your caregivers for a job well done.
You need clients for your business to be successful. One important metric you can track to understand how well you are retaining clients is your client turnover rate. Basic client turnover is calculated by taking the number of clients who stopped services in a given year and dividing it by the average number of clients serviced that year.
Having a high client turnover rate doesn’t necessarily mean your business is doing poorly. In fact, it could be a result of prioritizing your most complex patients and not working with clients who were a bad fit. Regardless of the reason, keeping an eye on client turnover can illuminate important trends for your agency.
A good indication of your agency’s operational efficiency is your revenue per full-time employee. You can calculate this by dividing your total revenue by your total number of full-time office staff and non-caregivers; (count part-time employees as 0.5).
By comparing your revenue per full-time employee against industry averages, you can determine whether your labor costs are too high for the sales you’re bringing in. Being overstaffed could result in numerous obstacles and inefficiencies, from underproductivity and lack of engagement to high turnover.
Keep in mind that being understaffed could have serious consequences for your business as well. Not only could it lead to burnout for your employees, but it could also affect your agency’s ability to grow your client base and improve upon your services.
Overstaffing and understaffing is a delicate balance, but paying regular, close attention to these points can help you get it just right.
Numbers don’t lie, and there’s no better way to determine how healthy your agency is than to gather the data and see for yourself.
Still, we understand agency owners and administrators are often so busy with the day-to-day requirements of running a business that it can be hard to find time to dig into their own data. That’s why HHAeXchange supplies industry-leading homecare business intelligence and reporting capabilities so agencies can automatically pull the reports they need to highlight problem areas and ensure the quality of their business. Learn more about our business intelligence tool today.
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