Important considerations to make when starting a home care agency: Part 3 – Quality of Care

In many ways, the standard of care you provide as a new home care agency will define your growth. It is the fundamental factor you exist; it is the primary service you provide to your clients, and it will be the basis for building your strong referral network.

Understanding the factors that contribute to a high quality of care and building a strategy for each one, then, is imperative to success.

Here’s what you need to know about delivering a high quality of care to your clients.

1. Match the client with the right caregiver

Some caregiver relationships are a match made in heaven – the client builds a close relationship with their caregiver, and vice versa.

While care management remains front and center for both a client and a caregiver, the goal is to match up your employees with the right clients so they can begin to build close working relationships that may even extend outside of the workplace.

But this isn’t an easy thing to do. For one reason or another, some personalities just clash. In other instances, caregivers might lack the qualifications needed to care for clients with particular needs.

As Agency Manager, it’s your responsibility to pair the specific needs of clients with the right caregivers to ensure maximum success. To do this effectively, look for a Home Care management software that can take this pairing process to an advanced level. You will need a solution that provides clarity over caregiver skills, and that matches them against client needs.

A solution that continues to learn over time with feedback from the client, family, and caregiver. Without the right insights into caregiver to client matching, you’re essentially making care management decisions in the dark.

The best home care systems on the market today will go far beyond simple caregiver to client matching.  Advanced matching solutions make it easy to see the right fit. These solutions will use Machine Learning (ML) to continue to assess if you have the right caregiver matched to the right client.

 They will provide suggestions and percent predictions with dashboard clarity for this important operational activity that affects care quality. Having the right match insights, in turn, leads to a higher quality of care.

2. Maintain licensing

To standardize the quality of care at your Care Home Agency, everyone must go through the required training to perform their job as effectively as possible. Your onboarding process and checkless form the foundation of this training.

This, combined with your training plans and tutorials that are similar for everyone, brings a level of standardization to your staff that improves the quality of care.

The home care business model includes a payer mix, including private pay and government (i.e. Medicaid) that will make up your primary payer source. It is critically important that your business obtains all the proper state and local certifications as you start.

In the US, the home care license and operation requirements and standards will vary from state to state.

The best way to make sure you have your bases covered is by contacting your State Department of Health for assistance. They will outline the licensing requirements for the types of services you will be providing.

Once obtained, it’s important to keep these files on record, and your complete home care management software can hold all of the necessary documentation for your agency. This way, when you are asked to produce documents, you can easily find what you need to prove your quality of care.

3. Ensure you live up to client expectations

Setting and managing the expectations of your clients is imperative to the success of your Home Care Agency. They are, after all, paying for a service you provide, and they will expect that service to meet the appropriate standard.

But expectations will vary from client to client. Some clients are focused on the specifics of a caregiver’s routine, including whether they are on time and respectful. Others will focus on appropriate caregiver skills and make judgment calls based on how qualified a caregiver is to perform the job.

Whatever the case, being able to tailor your care to these nuances is critical to ensure that you meet each client’s expectation, and to do this effectively, you need a management solution that captures these details and references them to that easily showcases these intricacies of client care so you can make the most informed decision possible.

4. Finally, build a client feedback loop

A Home Care Agency has many moving parts, and in most instances, it’s not easy to measure the success of each of these parts. However, there’s one fact that stands out as a good benchmark – client experience and satisfaction feedback.

Positive client feedback is imperative to your Home Care Agency. A high satisfaction rate will generate referral customers and improve client retention, helping you to grow your agency.

Without the right system in place, though, getting clients and their families to provide timely and effective feedback isn’t easy. Oftentimes, feedback is temporary and, while appreciated in the moment, it can be hard to collect and analyze.

This makes it hard to spot downward or upward trends in care quality, which makes it even harder to mitigate against risks or adapt based on feedback.

Capturing client and family feedback within your Home Care management software will give you real-time feedback on how your customers perceive you and the face of your agency, the caregiver.

It will also give you quick operational insights that are easily accessible to both you and your staff. Through this powerful feedback, you can begin to learn from those who matter most, and only then can you begin to grow your agency.

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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