When home care agencies begin to grow and expand, many variables – from confusing technology compliance updates to sky-high administrative expenses – often hinder even the best intentions. But getting lost in the details – such as to how best schedule your caregivers based on a client’s specific gender or language preferences – only holds you back from growing intelligently.
Home care agencies are becoming an important facet of society, especially as baby boomers, now a sizable 13 percent of the U.S. population, are already requiring high quality, independent, patient-centered home care, and that demand will grow in coming years. If you are a home care agency ready to grow in size to keep up with future demand, a workflow by exception software platform that dramatically increases your agency’s efficiency and scale is critical.
Home care agencies face a slew of challenges when it comes to meeting drawn-out, inconsistent compliance regulations. For example, this July, home care agencies’ Medicare and Medicaid participation requirements – having gone untouched for nearly two decades – are getting a makeover. Home care agencies’ Medicare and Medicaid Conditions of Participation (CoP) will soon change due to a new finalized rule from The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). But this CMS rule – as is commonly the case – took a whopping three years to come to fruition.
Regarding another example, the CURES Act, which has drawn scrutiny for its lack of clarity, leaves it up to individual states to determine how to implement electronic visit verification (EVV). In a theme echoing the CoP rule, perhaps adding to the confusion is that time is not of the essence – home care services apparently have until 2023 to make up their minds – though individual states can set the deadlines much earlier.
Fortunately, cost-effective solutions to ongoing complications like these are readily available, and easily accessible. If you need to dive deeper into your daily and long-term operations, consider letting technology do the hard work for you. Many home care agencies use one-stop, cloud-based platforms to streamline operations. These systems provide real-time, personalized information about upcoming federal, state, and local standards and regulations. An enterprise solution may provide more detailed insight into whether or not your agency’s finances and staffing needs comply with newly updated laws. This way your staff can effortlessly stay up-to-date on new legislation.
And a personalized, streamlined interface means managing a variety of systems simultaneously is a thing of the past. When daily tasks become automated, valuable human resources are freed up to work on what matters. Technology also makes performance metrics and staff assessment tools more transparent so you can better identify your home care agency’s weaknesses and strengths. Heightened organizational transparency may also intelligently reduce your full-time staff, save time, and increase ROI – all while ensuring you perform at maximum efficiency with minimal effort.
A cloud-based platform can help your team stay on top of what you do not have time to manage. Free and cutting-edge features – such as performance metrics, aggregated reporting, billing audits, business intelligence, basic scalability, smooth integration and adaptability and an open architecture theme – mean our system saves you money the more you grow by decreasing cost per patient over time.
Successful home care agencies understand growth boils down to having the very best tools right at your fingertips. Equip yourself with tools that allow you to step away from the nitty gritty, nightmarish details to recognize that we need caregivers now more than ever before. Nearly seventy-five million baby boomers gave birth to seventy-five million more millennials. Status quo in terms of home care agency growth is not an option if the industry is to support our nation’s aging population.
Learn more about how your agency can drive growth with a workflow by exception software platform.
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