Important Considerations To Make When Starting a Home Care Agency: Part 2 – Managing your Home Care Agency

With such high turnover, managing and growing a successful home care agency is no easy feat. A management role at a home care agency is oftentimes labor-intensive – filled with onboarding new employees, form filling, backfilling schedules, invoicing and, on top of it, maintaining all other aspects of the agency.

As your home care agency begins to grow, it’s imperative that you implement robust systems and business processes that can shoulder some of the management burden and help you focus on what matters most: growing the agency.

Here are a few considerations to make if you manage a home care agency and how Smartcare can help.

1. Managing caregivers

Most home care agency clients require support for at least a few hours at a time. As you grow and take on new clients, then, you must have a reliable and widespread roster of caregivers who you can trust. Fundamentally, this team must deliver a service to your clients up to the standard you’re happy with, and more importantly, both the client and their family are satisfied with. To do this effectively, it requires the right training, the right team members, right automation, and enough time in the day so that each and every client receives the care and attention they need.

Of course, as you scale up, managing the number of caregivers you have can become a full-time job in itself. To help save you time, you’ll likely to start looking for a software solution for scheduling and staff management. There are some simple steps to finding the best home care platform for your needs. First and foremost, you’ll need a tool that can electronically house all your documents in one place, and that can provide easy scheduling visibility that is at the heart of your platform. You’ll also need a complete solution that will automate all parts of the agency operations, too, like onboarding, front and back-office tasks, EVV, and mobile point-of-care communications.

 Without this, you’re running the risk of spreading thin and failing to manage your staff and caregivers effectively, and that means you’re running the risk of delivering a poor service to your clients.

2. Managing your referral partners

A large part of managing a home care agency is ensuring you have the information you need for each client so that your partners can quickly and easily understand the tailored care you and your team provide.

Caregivers are there to arrange specific care and support your clients’ mental and physical requirements. If you want to successfully scale your home care agency, then, this information has to be readily available to them for each client, so that the right care can be delivered at the right time by the most suited caregiver.

Understanding and managing this is essential, and to do so, your management software must present client information in a way that is accessible and digestible to all who need to access it. Medical conditions, specific support and all required care tasks, for example, should be outlined, up to date, and available remotely by your caregivers.

3. Managing your clients

The management of your clients will determine whether your home care agency grows or not. Besides caregiver management, this is the other important aspect of the business that must be meticulously managed.

Some clients, for example, will have more demanding physical care requirements, while others may need more emotional or cognitive support. But with so many varying requests for all of your clients, without an effective home care platform, it can be easy for your team to get bogged down, overwhelmed and, consequently, become ineffective. A missed request from a client is a failure in providing care, and understanding how automation can minimize any client service interruption so that no calls slip through is critical to your home care’s success.

With the right home care platform software at your disposal, you’ll have an ‘all-in-one’ solution that means your agency staff and caregivers can use best-practices to manage care recording detailed activities and notes (that are visible to all relevant parties), understand client-specific priorities and, most importantly, visibility see each client’s request so that they can act upon it quickly and provide expert care.

4. Managing your internal teams

Besides caregivers, your agency will have many staff behind the scenes who are responsible for scheduling shifts for caregivers, placing order requests, working with referral partners, growing your potential client pipeline, and recruiting and managing payroll.

As you scale, finding an effective way to manage the day-to-day operations of your agency becomes more and more important. These people are the lifeblood of your agency, and it’s up to you as an owner or administrative manager to find a streamlined solution to handle their requests and make their jobs more efficient. If you don’t, you run the risk of losing integral team members, and that will impact (and impede) your ability to scale.

Understand (and analyze) the metrics

While finding ways to manage the day-to-day operations of your home care agency is extremely important, it’s also necessary to analyze how your agency works so that you can make improvements for the future.

With the right management platform, you can easily begin to gather important insights and metrics like client turnover, staff turnover and client onboarding rates, as well as monitoring real-time things like late or no-show clock-ins by caregivers.

With this data and insights at your disposal, you can make informed and educated decisions that will have a lasting impact on your home care agency. Better yet, you can begin to double down on the areas of your business that require the most attention, and it’s through continuous improvement that allows you to do the thing that matters most: growing your agency.

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To find out how Smartcare can help your home care agency manage and automate the day-to-day, as well as provide valuable insights into your operations, contact us today.

Smartcare is a Complete Home Care Platform with Just the Right Amount of Everything Designed by Caregivers for Caregivers. With Smartcare, you can manage, schedule, and operate everything you need for your home care business. Achieve better outcomes, higher satisfaction, and increase caregiver retention with a system that supports your business and its goals.

Smartcare is currently offering our COVID-19 Toolset at no charge to all home care agencies. The Toolset App includes reminders, agency notices, symptom checks, contact tracing and other important virus risk mitigation tools to help you manage your response to the pandemic.

We are in this together. To find out more about Smartcare Software, email covid19@smartcaresoftware.com and let us know how we can help.

To find out how SmartCare™ software and support can help you differentiate your service and strategy, please contact us at 1+ (800) 450-9104 or via email: hello@smartcaresoftware.com