Tip Sheet: 5 Ways to Improve Scheduling for Your Home Care Agency
Understanding the Unique Demands of Home Health Care Scheduling
Home health scheduling is a delicate dance that requires precision, flexibility, and a natural knack for problem-solving. For home care specifically, schedulers must account for a laundry list of factors, including matching caregiver skills to client needs, minimizing travel times between visits, and leaving enough wiggle room to accommodate last-minute changes like cancellations and sick days.
For all these reasons and more, it takes an exceptionally organized individual to be an effective home care scheduler. This dynamic environment demands specialized knowledge of both healthcare and logistics to keep operations running smoothly, supported by powerful digital tools that are tailor-made for an agency’s needs.
Here’s how the right technology can improve caregiver scheduling with automation, communication tools, and data analysis capabilities.
1. Leverage Technology to Centralize and Automate Scheduling
Home care scheduling software reduces the risk of human error while giving staff plenty of digital tools to simplify their assignment flow. It all starts with a clear, intuitive dashboard that gives schedulers an overview of what’s to come, making it easy to navigate their daily, weekly, and monthly visit calendar.
Embedded AI tools replace the manual component of caregiver-client matching, intelligently pairing available staff with unassigned appointments. It can account for factors like preferred hours, specialized skills, distance travelled, overtime hours, and even preferences such as pet allergies to yield a perfect match every time.
Home care mobile apps double down on scheduling convenience, giving in-office staff the ability to send notifications directly to caregivers when open shifts are available. That way, slots can be filled quickly and proactively by interested caregivers, instead of creating friction by sticking someone with a shift they don’t want. These messages can usually be sent via text, email, or in-app messenger, ensuring everyone gets notified on their preferred platform and reducing the odds of a missed notification.
2. Optimize Caregiver-Client Matching and Continuity of Care
Home care software is designed to help schedulers understand which caregivers are the best match for each job, with an added layer of intelligent resource allocation. For example, just because someone is available at a given time doesn’t mean they should automatically be assigned to an open shift. If a generalist caregiver and a dementia-specialized caregiver are free at the same time, it may be wiser to save the specialist for a more complex case.
When caregivers and clients are well-matched, everybody wins. Clients are more likely to feel comfortable and trusting when placed with someone whose skills align closely with their needs, paving the foundation for a fruitful, long-term relationship. Meanwhile, assigning caregivers to visits that are well-aligned with their skill sets them up for success and builds their confidence with each completed appointment. All of this translates to better outcomes and increased retention for all parties involved.
Factor in Travel Time and Route Optimization
Accounting for distance traveled is a key component of home care scheduling. Much of a caregiver’s day is spent in transit, and few things test people’s patience more than being stuck in traffic. Beyond the mental grind of wasting time on the road, idling in traffic, and inefficient routing can add up to major financial losses for agencies.
Schedulers can use software to batch their appointments geographically, and GPS tools can keep tabs on caregivers while collecting data that can be used to optimize future routing decisions. Over time, as your data lake grows, you should even be able to anticipate disruptions like rush hour traffic or bad weather to build a more resilient scheduling strategy.
Perfecting this step means more on-time arrivals for happier clients, and fewer frustrating commutes for busy caregivers.
3. Build Flexibility and Responsiveness into Your Scheduling Process
With caregiver burnout and turnover endemic to the home care industry, flexible scheduling that takes individual needs into account – whether it’s another part-time job, family responsibilities, or general exhaustion due to overtime – can go a long way towards easing that pressure.
Automated scheduling tools and mobile apps can make the dream of flexibility a reality. These technologies give agencies the power to quickly adjust shifts, fill last-minute gaps, and notify staff about what’s happening on the fly. The app allows caregivers to view and accept open shifts, update their availability, and communicate directly with in-office staff.
4. Monitor, Analyze, and Continuously Improve Scheduling Performance
Incorporating technology into daily workflows is the first leap towards a more efficient organization. Once that is set into motion, you’ll need to collect data that measures the effectiveness of your scheduling strategy, then make adjustments over time based on what you find.
Metrics like total overtime hours, missed appointments, and estimated versus real travel time underscore your scheduling approach’s weakest and strongest tenets. Combined with caregiver and client feedback, agencies can use these insights to identify recurring issues and take proactive steps to address them.
There’s also lots to be learned from how these metrics overlap. For example, frequent overtime might indicate that routes aren’t being planned properly, leading to longer travel times and even missed appointments in a worst-case scenario. Over time, these data-driven improvements will create more consistent outputs that leave clients more satisfied with their care and caregivers more aligned with their assigned workloads.
5. Enhance Communication Between Schedulers, Caregivers, and Clients
With so many moving parts to consider, fluid communication is non-negotiable. In-office staff should have a direct line to connect with caregivers while on the road, keeping all parties looped into whatever changes happen as the day unfolds.
If scheduling modifications aren’t communicated quickly, caregivers may find themselves heading in the wrong direction – and at the same time, if shift-filling requests aren’t received, clients simply won’t be served.
Integrated messaging, automated notifications, and regular check-ins can all help prevent disruptions and misunderstandings. When the entire staff is in close contact, team members can troubleshoot and problem-solve together, finding faster and more innovative solutions than they’d have achieved on their own.
Improve Your Home Care Scheduling Process With AxisCare
Every day, home care agencies across the U.S. use AxisCare to streamline their scheduling. From our intuitive software interface to our connected mobile app, we make it easy to assign shifts, manage changes on the fly, and drastically reduce the risk of human error. Request a free demo to learn how we can help your agency make the most of its resources.
