Exceptional Home Health Starts with Scheduling

Identifying the Problems

Home healthcare is challenging for both patients and providers. It involves competing schedules, travel challenges, and multiple resource specialties. Unfortunately, the technologies most providers use aren’t helping. Some may rely on a combination of email and spreadsheets for care coordination. In contrast, others have EHRs and clinical systems that aren’t accessible by clinical field workers in the field when they need the information most. For the most part, most providers face the following problems:

Care Coordination Complexity
Because most patients have unique needs, home healthcare usually involves a complex care team, including nurses, therapists, dietitians, and more. Each clinical team member has schedules that may conflict with patient availability, making it difficult to ensure patients get the proper care at the right time.

Dealing with Patient Preferences
Patients often have specific preferences or environmental factors for in-home care. Patient satisfaction can suffer if these preferences aren’t collected at initial scheduling. Additionally, preferences must be documented for the extended care team.

Adjusting for Cancellations
Last-minute cancellations are widespread in home healthcare because patient’s needs often change unexpectedly. This leads to gaps in a clinical team’s busy schedule and greatly harms caregiver utilization.

Travel Challenges
Many home health providers serve broad geographical regions. Traveling between patient homes can be time-consuming and costly, negatively impacting scheduling efficiency. When clinical teams attempt to optimize routes with manual scheduling tools, it often takes their focus off what they do best – providing care.

Solving the Use Case

Solving the scheduling use case requires a centralized scheduling platform that integrates caregiver availability with patient data. At Penrod, we implement Salesforce Health Cloud for our home health clients.

Visit Scheduling
We configure our client’s home health platform to support two types of visits: Initial screenings and recurring visits for ongoing healthcare.

When initial screenings are booked, workflows automatically assign a case to an appropriate intake nurse. Nurses collect information about the patient's immediate care needs and preferences to create a care plan.

After the initial screening, Salesforce Health Cloud uses algorithms to schedule caregivers based on many criteria, including availability, patient requirements, travel logistics, and location. Care team members can create robust care schedules in one place, and the system creates individual visits with the appropriate resources assigned.

The schedules aren’t rigid. Real-time adjustments can be made for various events, including patient cancellations. In the event of changes, the Health Cloud platform automatically adjusts and reallocates care team members, ensuring higher utilization even when changes occur.

Every care team member uses a mobile app to keep track of in-home schedules. They can see their assigned visits and the clinical tasks associated with each patient via work plan templates. Work plans can be as simple as a checklist, or involve advanced flows with nested tasks.

Travel Optimization
Most caregivers have multiple appointments throughout the day. Utilization can be significantly improved by optimizing travel between homes. Health Cloud ensures that caregivers have enough time to travel between locations and that they take the most efficient routes.

Conclusion

Effective coordination and scheduling are crucial to delivering high-quality home patient care. By configuring Salesforce Health Cloud, home health providers can streamline scheduling, significantly improving efficiency and patient experience.

As home healthcare expands, adopting robust digital solutions will be crucial in meeting patient demands and ensuring successful health outcomes. Embracing these advanced tools empowers providers to focus on what matters delivering exceptional care to patients in their homes.