Home care is commonly viewed as a one-to-one model that assigns individual caregivers to individual patients. Services are rendered at the client’s residence during a specific appointment time. Community care, on the other hand, assigns caregivers to a group of patients, making it a great fit for older adults who need less intervention.
The Core Principles of Community-Based Care
Community care is designed to foster independence, above all, by helping patients manage their daily responsibilities while living a lifestyle they enjoy.
These visits are often shorter than traditional home care appointments because practitioners can easily pop in and out of patients’ rooms and common areas. That also means caregivers have the flexibility to check in more frequently with anyone who might need more assistance whenever they need it.
In the context of aging community living, a community caregiver can provide ongoing service to an entire floor or building. During their shift, they will help many patients with daily tasks, from medication reminders to assistance with washing up.
Community-based care also aims to promote service integration and coordination: benefits like meal preparation and entertainment programming are usually available on-site, and the inclusion of non-medical care makes patients’ lives even more seamless and convenient.
How a Community-Based Focus Is Changing Home Care
Given the growing demand for at-home care alongside the opposing strain of staff shortages, agencies have no choice but to expertly allocate their resources. Community care can be used to bridge the availability gap for patients who need less support than others, allowing one caregiver to serve many.
Resource Allocation
Community-based care focuses on providing just the right level of support for seniors who need minimal intervention to live a fulfilling life. Instead of dedicating extensive resources to every patient, this approach tailors the level of assistance to what individuals actually need.
For example, if a resident requires medication reminders twice a day, a traditional at-home visit would be a clear waste of time and resources. With community-based care, practitioners can simply knock on their door and wrap up the visit within a few minutes. This prevents caregiving staff from experiencing unnecessary strain, freeing up resources for those who need them most.
Access to Patients
Providing care at individual patients’ homes comes with its share of challenges: commuting from appointment to appointment, fighting traffic, and optimizing routes, to name a few. Community care provides access to many clients under the same roof, cutting down on both time and money spent on travel. While decreasing resource expenditure, community-based care also increases each patient’s ability to receive more frequent visits from their caregivers.
Streamlined Systems
With scheduling, billing, payroll, and more unified into one system, agencies can streamline their home care systems into one platform that seamlessly manages their home care operations as well as community-based care coordination. This enhances and optimizes caregiver utility.
Improved Care Coordination
Since community-based care is administered in a single location, it enables much more cooperation between healthcare providers, social workers, and community organizations. Instead of sharing health information and updates through disparate channels, they can easily address patients’ needs as a team, ensuring each aspect of their care is aligned while eliminating redundancies or inconsistencies.
Cost-Effective Care
Community-based care is a proactive methodology that emphasizes preventive care, therefore reducing the need for hospital admissions. By addressing issues early on and managing conditions within the community, this approach helps prevent costly emergency interventions and prolonged hospital stays, reducing patients’ expenses.
How Community-Based Care Helps Caregivers
There are plenty of ways in which this care methodology makes patients’ lives easier. However, caregivers also stand to benefit, particularly due to easily accessible information and an enhanced ability to deliver high volumes of quality care.
Easily Access Schedules for a Large Number of Patients at Once
As community-based caregivers move through a given facility during their shift, they can efficiently assess and treat a large number of patients simultaneously. In contrast to at-home care, which directs a caregiver’s full attention toward a single patient, this streamlined approach enables caregivers to maximize their time and resource allocation. The result: timely and effective care for all.
Gain a Holistic View of Agency Operations
Community care is all about centralization. If patient services are provided under one roof, shouldn’t the same principles be applied to data management? Software that’s purpose-built for community-based care gives every stakeholder a clear, holistic overview of their operations:
- Directors can easily keep tabs on agency performance, leveraging a wealth of information and historical KPI data to make informed decisions that drive sustainable growth.
- Administrators can tap into features like real-time visual scheduling and drag-and-drop shift management to allocate human resources efficiently and quickly adapt to changes.
- Caregivers can use their mobile devices to access essential tools and information on the go, providing seamless and well-informed care as they move from room to room.
Diversify Your Revenue Streams & Leverage Community Care Management With AxisCare
Before you enter the community-based care space, it’s important to have the right tools on your side. That way, you can step into new markets with total confidence backed by an airtight management strategy. AxisCare has been serving home care agencies for years, and we have all the resources you need to nail your expansion into community-based care.
Ready to discover how we can help? Request a live demo with one of our experts.
