Home care services require an exceptional amount of coordination. Every day, office staff work hard to match caregivers to patients’ needs, manage scheduling to ensure coverage for all shifts, and enable communication between caregivers, clients, and families – among many, many other tasks.
What’s more, home care agencies need to keep a close watch on employee satisfaction, given the profession’s exceptionally high turnover rate. If they fail to properly coordinate any of the above responsibilities, they risk losing their caregivers to burnout or frustration.
A home care admin app centralizes all of these tasks in a single place, empowering office staff to efficiently manage scheduling, routine tasks, and unexpected changes. Here’s why every agency should replace pen, paper, and email with a unified solution.
The Operational Efficiency Dilemma
Operational efficiency is a challenge across industries, but home care organizations have an especially heavy lift. They often find themselves juggling multiple systems for different functions, and if those systems don’t communicate effectively, it can lead to errors. They also heavily rely on manual processes, like paper-based record-keeping or phone-based appointment scheduling, which can blunt efficiency and reduce transparency across the organization.
All of these challenges typically lead to poor communication between different departments or care teams, which eventually trickles down to the patient level. At worst, these opaque practices can lead to delays or errors when delivering care, as well as inconsistencies and a general sense of confusion among stakeholders.
The Caregiver Retention Crisis
According to a report by Home Care Pulse, the median caregiver turnover rate was just under 65% in 2021. And while everyone’s path to leaving their job looks a little different, there are certainly patterns and commonalities.
- Workload – Caregivers have an exceptionally high workload. They are responsible for multiple patients with diverse and often challenging needs, creating a high-pressure work environment.
- Time management – Due to packed schedules and unpredictable commutes, caregivers may feel rushed during their visits, hindering their ability to deliver adequate and personalized care.
- Scheduling – Rigid scheduling, scheduler biases, and bureaucratic shift-swapping policies can restrict caregivers’ ability to accommodate unexpected changes or personal emergencies.
- Compensation – Caregiving roles are rarely well-paid and do not often come with extensive benefits, which can lead to financial strain and feelings of being undervalued, given the importance of their work.
- Emotional toll – Interfacing with clients who are ill, disabled, or cognitively impaired can take an emotional toll on caregivers and consume most of their mental energy for the day.
Admin Mobile Apps: A Game-Changer
Admin mobile apps help office and admin staff run their operations like a finely oiled machine. It organizes and streamlines day-to-day responsibilities like scheduling satisfaction management and, more despite their location, keeping the entire team connected while on the road.
Impact on Caregiver Retention
Patient satisfaction is only half the equation when it comes to measuring success. Agencies simply wouldn’t exist without their staff, so it’s imperative to enable and actively solicit feedback from caregivers.
Better Staff Communication & Feedback
The most streamlined way to encourage communication and collect input is using a mobile platform. Instead of keeping track of disparate emails or paperwork, AxisCare’s Caregiver Satisfaction Survey feature automates everything.
Agencies can prompt caregivers to evaluate their experience in real-time. The app’s quick, Uber-like rating responses only take a few seconds to fill out and make it easy to promptly address any issues that come up. Taking a proactive approach is far more likely to yield a resolution instead of collecting hard-copy questionnaires that will likely collect dust in a drawer.
Enhanced Flexibility & Autonomy
Managing scheduling on the fly is nearly impossible without technology. Making last-minute changes and accommodating evolving needs requires lots of coordination between all parties involved, meaning it simply cannot be done using outdated analog methods.
Using an app, caregivers and coordinators can receive notifications for open shifts, giving them the chance to swiftly respond. This makes it easier for staff to align their appointments with their preferred work hours, as well as take on extra shifts if they want to earn some extra income. On the flip side, if a caregiver runs into an unexpected issue and needs to offload their shift, they can do so quickly and independently instead of waiting for in-office staff to intervene.
Empowering caregivers to manage their own schedules proactively also contributes to more positive client outcomes, ensuring gaps are filled quickly and preventing open shifts from slipping through the cracks.
Improving Operational Efficiency
As we discussed above, running a business using pen, paper, and email is far from efficient. Using an app, agencies can cumulate all of the information and functions they need under one roof, keeping everyone on the same page and drastically reducing their margin of error.
Streamlined Administrative Processes
Just like apps give caregivers a greater sense of autonomy over their shift management, in-office staff can also significantly streamline their scheduling using an admin app. In the event of a conflict or change in availability, schedulers can quickly get an overview of the appointment calendar and allocate resources in real time.
Apps also serve as a vault for patient data, giving agencies the ability to safely and securely share essential information among caregivers, families, and clients. From care plans to medication reminders, digitization is key to facilitating continuity of care.
Data-Driven Decision Making
Scheduling caregivers is more than just throwing names on a calendar. It means taking a close look at each patient’s needs and making sure to assign a practitioner with a relevant skill set. It’s also important to factor in location since caregivers spend most of their days on the road and must be as efficient as possible with their routes.
A home care scheduling software and its mobile apps use algorithms to identify the best caregiver for a given shift based on skills, availability, overtime, schedule history, and even preferences such as pet allergies. Color coding makes it easy to spot and assign visits, and with the touch of a button, office staff and schedulers can send open visits to select caregivers via text, email, or the app.
Get More Done & Get It Done Faster With an Admin App
Admin apps build a bridge between in-office staff and caregivers on the road. Going digital saves administrators huge amounts of time on scheduling and coordination while tackling some of the most pressing issues that eventually lead to caregiver burnout.
Book a live demo with AxisCare to learn more about AxisCare’s Admin App and how you can leverage it to improve your agency’s operational efficiency and caregiver retention.
