The surging aged population, rising personal disposable income, and declining elderly support ratio are among the leading factors contributing to the exponential growth of the U.S. home healthcare sector.
Reports suggest that almost 12 million people in the U.S. today receive paid home care, and the number will grow in the coming years. The value of care delivered outside healthcare facilities has gone from a convenience to a necessity in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic. It reduces exposure risk for post-acute and chronically ill patients.
However, home healthcare service providers are struggling to address this increase in demand while at the same time, seamlessly maintaining their everyday agency operations. This is compounded by the lack of seasoned and experienced caregivers, with an industry average retention rate of less than 20 percent.
At the same time, the current technology available to serve the industry is limited in scope requiring agencies to cobble together disconnected, disparate systems to run day-to-day operations and deliver care. As agencies grow their ability to scale is tempered due to the limitations of their current tech. To this end, home care providers need to have a fully integrated caregiver, financial, and business intelligence solution that enables providers to find new clients, manage homecare operations, and ensure compliance and care quality.
The most comprehensive systems also equip home care providers with the capability to recruit, engage, and retain the very best caregivers. Home care success is enhanced through robust all-in-one solutions with best-practice workflows. That’s where companies like Smartcare Software make a difference! Founded by long-time healthcare industry experts, Scott Zielski and Bill Mattle, Smartcare.
Software has carved a niche in the home healthcare industry by providing a single system for managing CRM, caregiver/ patient engagement, scheduling, clinical documentation, payroll, HR operations, electronic claim submission, and revenue cycle management.
“Our seniors want the best care possible, and they want it in their homes. Smartcare was founded on the notion of providing unparalleled care, improving outcomes, and helping people lead a better life in the comfort of their own homes,” says Scott Zielski, the Cofounder and CEO at Smartcare.
Smarter Agency Management with Smartcare
The primary objective of Smartcare is to simplify home care through innovative technology that helps home care providers maintain best practices with streamlined workflows, empowering providers and caregivers to deliver improved care.
The cloud-based software is entirely configurable and can be tailored for each provider’s operations, offering intuitive scheduling and communication systems from a single platform and equipping administrators with the capability to efficiently manage customer engagement schedules along with back-office operations.
Enhanced Caregiver-Client Matching
The relationship between the caregiver, patient, and their family is a key variable contributing to a home care provider’s customer satisfaction levels, increased caregiver retention, and overall business success.
To support these objectives, the ML-backed Smartcare platform uses advanced intelligence to help home care providers match the right caregiver based on patient preferences, training needs, certification requirements, customizable traits, and personality type.
Hiring and Retaining Caregivers
Finding and retaining caregivers is one of the biggest challenges in home care. It is also critical to the growth, profitability and success of any provider. Having an effective applicant management and HR suite embedded in the software designed exclusively for home care makes a significant difference in quickly turning applicants into hires and tracking referral sources. Then using the software system to engage caregivers, providing them with mobile point-of-care Apps and loyalty tools, makes all the difference to caregiver retention levels.
“Having a system that focuses on elevating the patient and caregiver experience supports higher overall satisfaction and outcome levels,” said Bill Mattle, Co-founder and COO of Smartcare. “Smartcare’s focus on caregiver engagement through technology leads to results, our customers report retention levels significantly above the rest of the industry.”
Electronic Billing Built-in
Another key challenge for home care service providers has been the complexities of billing long term care insurers, Medicaid, VA and other 3rd party payers. Even Private Pay can be complicated when you have several members of a family that want to share financial responsibility. With traditional software, manual input is required after every client engagement, data entry or at the least there is a timeconsuming shift approval process.
Smartcare completely automates electronic claims processing, e-billing, and payment processing. Smartcare provides real-time revenue cycle visibility by payer and by client. As a result, providers spend less time on back-office tasks and focus more on improving care, growing client satisfaction and caregiver retention.
Thriving in this competitive market isn’t just about streamlining business back-office operations, home care service providers also need to find and efficiently add clients in order to lead in their markets. It has become essential at a time when the home healthcare market is seeing increased competition and rising demand for services.
Smartcare’s software incorporates cutting-edge CRM, and sales and marketing tools designed specifically for home care that enable a provider build their business, manage prospects, develop referral partners faster in a single platform, saving the cost and integration issues commonly experienced when using third-party CRM tools. Smartcare also empowers clients and their families to closely track, manage and securely communicate with their caregivers through a family portal. Having one platform that focuses on the provider’s sales pipeline plays a vital role in profitable business growth.
Intuitive
The Smartcare platform is extremely easy-to-use and comes with an up-to-date simple-to-understand user drag-and-drop interface. Users do not require any special training, and the company maintains an in-house 24/7 dedicated customer success team who are always ready to help clients address their business specific needs.
Leading the Battle against COVID-19
In March 2020, Smartcare responded quickly to help our customers fight against the coronavirus introducing the Smartcare’s COVID-19 Toolset. A full suite of app enabled functionality that helps home care providers monitor, manage exposure risk, and improve safety while providing care. “Our development and leadership teams quickly responded to the crisis. We discovered what was needed and then quickly delivered our COVID-19 Toolset,” says Zielski. The company then extended its reach industry wide offering the solution to all home care providers at no-cost.
A dedication towards best-practice workflows forged with a passion to lead innovation in line with market needs has enabled Smartcare to cater to a legion of clients over the years. Their focus on creating the best experience for provider clients and caregivers has led to bottom-line results for their agency providers.
“Before COVID-19, Smartcare was delivering double-digit increases in staff productivity and reducing costs while enabling greater caregiver retention and better overall job satisfaction,” said Joseph Pierce, Team Love, Lake Geneva, WI.
“Now, Smartcare’s platform is helping us address the pandemic with tools that have helped as we have shifted our back-office team to working remotely while allowing us to better monitor and connect with our caregivers as they work with clients and their families in their homes. Their App has enabled us to advance our response, quickly engaging our clients and caregivers to help increase safety and provide better care.”
“Smartcare was developed to truly help home care providers solve the biggest operational challenges they face; finding and retaining caregivers, becoming more profitable, and increasing patient/client satisfaction”, comments Zielski.
“Our platform was created by caregivers for caregivers. We incorporated best practices in home care and added leading innovation unique to Smartcare to give the market the most complete home care solution, seamlessly addressing every challenge that home care providers come across. We will continue to expand our platform to solve the modern-day challenges facing home care,” Zielski concludes.