What Is Community-Based Care & Why Is It Important?
Community-based care is an emerging branch of home care that focuses on providing services in group settings. Traditional home care, which is administered at a patient’s residence, has plenty of advantages: highly personalized service, a reduced need for patients to travel back and forth for appointments, and the ability for individuals to age comfortably at home.
On the other hand, it also comes with its share of challenges. Given that in-home caregivers are only able to serve one patient at a time, agencies are required to stretch limited resources across a vast pool of individuals.
Community-based care takes the best principles of home care—namely personalized, one-to-one service—and applies them in a group home setting. This allows more people to receive essential non-medical support. As one of the fastest-growing trends for 2024, let’s break down what makes community-based care worth pursuing, including a few examples of community health services.
1. Proximity To Patients & Reduced Travel Costs
One of the main limitations with home-based care is the need for caregivers to travel from location to location. Transportation requires a significant investment of time and money, all while adding a layer of unpredictability to the mix due to factors like traffic and road closures.
Offering services in a community context, like a senior residence or community, allows practitioners to provide more support to a larger number of patients in a shorter period of time. They can easily move from room to room, administering care at more frequent intervals and on a more ad hoc basis. Meanwhile, this increased proximity reduces the cost of travel—that means patients can enjoy less expensive service, and agencies can improve their bottom line.
2. Patient-Centered Approach With Improved Patient Education
Administering non-medical services in a group setting provides just as many opportunities for one-to-one connection as in-home care. With community-based care, patients are encouraged to actively participate in the creation and maintenance of their care plans through dialogue with their caregiving team. When individuals have a say in how their care unfolds, they feel more empowered and are more likely to adhere to their plan over time.
What’s more, in a community-based environment, registered healthcare providers and other health professionals are often available under the same roof. This eliminates the need to transfer information between disparate facilities, which in turn improves the accuracy, continuity, and efficiency of care in one fell swoop.
3. Lower Overall Home Care Costs
Individualized service is expensive, but in the health space, it’s also essential. So, how do you strike the right balance? Community-based care lowers the overall cost of providing home care by enabling more efficient resource allocation. It walks the line between providing personalized care and attending to as many patients as possible in a more condensed time frame.
As mentioned previously, it also completely eliminates the need for travel and all associated expenses. Agencies who choose community-based care can also benefit from economies of scale, including bulk purchasing of supplies and services.
4. Ability to Provide for a Large Number of Patients
In a traditional home care setting, caregivers can only attend to one patient at a time. With community care, one caregiver can provide for a larger number of patients at once, serving larger groups of individuals during a single shift instead of individual appointments.
Keeping everything under one roof increases flexibility and fluidity, giving practitioners the ability to easily move between rooms and provide ad-hoc intervention whenever needed. While in-home care can only take place during the allotted appointment time, community-based services allow patients to engage with the caregiver on duty whenever they need assistance.
5. Tailored Care For Diverse Populations
In a hospital or clinical setting, patients are more likely to receive prescriptive care that suits a broader population. Given the sheer volume of patients and the intensity of the environment, these settings are less conducive to personalization. In-home and community-based care, on the other hand, gives caregivers the flexibility to tailor their services to the unique needs of diverse populations.
When caregivers have the time and space to connect with individual patients, they can explore cultural, social, and economic factors that might influence certain care decisions. This paves the way for care plans that are culturally and situationally sensitive, improving patient engagement and overall satisfaction.
Streamline & Improve Your Community Care Management With AxisCare
Community-based care offers a compelling alternative – or complementary service – to traditional home care by overcoming some of its key limitations. Providing care in a group setting boosts efficiency, reduces costs, and allows caregivers to serve a larger population without compromising on quality. As this model continues to become increasingly popular, it presents a promising path forward for agencies and patients alike.
Want to get in on the ground floor? Our community care management software, AxisCare CCM, is designed to make everyday operations a breeze for providers. Request a live demo with one of our experts to learn more about how we can tailor our solution to your needs.
