Whether it's home healthcare agencies or their patients, navigating the world of healthcare can be daunting and overwhelming. In this new infographic, CMS highlights the places in which healthcare providers are most likely to experience obstacles when navigating the system. Divided among 7 sections, CMS has identified 21 potential obstacles.
Whether it's paperwork, time-based, or communication challenges. The care and dignity of the patients you serve are at the forefront of our minds every day while still facing these challenges across the care continuum. We understand the challenges your organization faces and we are there to support the end-to-end in-home services you provide.
We have designed the Rainbow Care™ platform to address many of these challenges and can curate it to the needs of your organization.
What is Home Healthcare Agencies?
Home Healthcare Agencies can be intricately described as an organization that primarily engages to provide skilled nursing services and facilities and several other therapeutic services. Home Healthcare Agencies or HHAs usually have outlined and established policies placed by a group of professionals who are associated with the organization. This group includes more than one physician, registered nurses (RNs), and others who govern the services provided.
The main aim of HHAs is to offer supervision for the healthcare services via a registered nurse or a physician. They are involved with maintaining all medical and clinical records of every patient and have an effective overall plan and budget when strategizing for institutions. HHAs need to meet every federal requirement that concerns the health and safety of patients.
As mentioned earlier, our platform assists to address many challenges when navigating a patient’s journey for home healthcare. This includes:
Overall certification and compliance
- Staffing Challenges
- Time Lag Between Disciplines
HHAs struggle to identify, recruit and retain field clinicians and staff with the necessary home health skills.
Nursing or therapy staff shortages can delay the delivery of care, interfering with the overall timing of an episode of care.
There are many reasons organizations that find themselves in these particular predicaments. Should it be through a sudden rush of employees quitting or a sudden onboarding of more patients than your care team can handle, maintaining a well-trained staff is a constant challenge. Often, as we all know, the need can arise before we can find a way to fulfill it. Vetting a clinician or non-clinical staff can take far longer than you wish, meanwhile a patient is waiting to be seen.
Our extension of the care team supports your organization with additional resources to meet your scheduling needs, helping you to overcome staffing shortages and provider burnout. An ecosystem of trained agents on the ground and ready to be scheduled and dispatched can solve this problem before it arises. From EMTs, Nurses, Phlebotomists, and other trained clinicians to vendor coordination for DME, meal delivery, transportation, infusion pharmacy, lab and imaging, and home health aides, can prevent time lag for services and improve the overall patient experience.
Care of delivery
- Lack of Patient or Caregiver Engagement
- Start of Care Visit
The home health care delivery experience goes smoothly if the patient or caregiver takes ownership of the care plan and activities; without it, patient outcomes are a moving target.
Through communication and collaboration, there are many ways to support patients and team members. Finding the best way to fit into a patient’s needs whether in-person, telehealth, or hybrid approach, can help a patient become more engaged in their care. Reminders, follow-up, and nudges can also be sent to reduce the frustration of patients from remembering what their schedule is while ill/recovering. This, along with the scheduler, also keeps the care team aware of what their day-to-day looks like and reduces the number of late and missed appointments on both ends.
HHA field clinicians spend hours on disclosures and consents during Start of Care visits before they can assess the patient; patients are overwhelmed by the process and just want care.
Having an EHR integration capability allows for the quick transfer of records. This seamless interoperability removes the challenges of communicating the most recent data to whichever team member is currently serving the patient.
When devices, systems, and platforms synchronize information across an interoperable interface, every team member receives the data simultaneously regardless of what technology device they are using. Allowing for medical records to be maintained and for fewer mistakes across the board.
Challenges of Home Health Work Environment
HHAs cannot directly control the care environment unsafe neighborhoods, buildings, or facilities put the patient’s health outcomes and HHA field clinicians’ physical wellbeing at risk.
Going into the unknown can be anxiety-inducing. Anything from dogs to an uncooperative patient can put clinicians in a position they may want to get away from quickly. That's where Rainbow Health understands the challenges of your organization and we are there to support the end-to-end in-home services you provide. Rainbow Care™ is designed to address many of these challenges and can curate them to the needs of your organization. Rainbow Care has a built-in SOS button that can be used to prevent an emergency and make your team members feel more secure when entering a new home. Telemed and hybrid appointments can also be used through the Rainbow Health platform if the Plan of Care allows for it.
Care Coordination
- 48-Hour Requirement
HHAs often fight against the clock to obtain sufficient information from the referral source to start care within 48 hours of admitting a patient.
Back-and-Forth with Physician
HHAs struggle to obtain documentation and signatures from referring physicians promptly as physicians are slow or reluctant to sign and can threaten to refer patients elsewhere.
Platforms like RainbowCare that are an extension to EHRs allow the seamless and secure transfer of patient data can secure information faster and reduce the back-and-forth struggle. Having all information encompassed in one place will reduce the time it takes to find the information and prevent problems from missing information. EHR integration will also update the plan of care updating across the platform which will help keep the patient on track for the best recovery.
Scheduling and Coordination
HHAs must coordinate the care delivery schedule around patient and caregiver availability and also have sufficient staff to respond to new referrals on short notice.
Through RainbowCare’s platform, the tiresome back and forth that comes from trying to coordinate everyone’s schedule, hours of lost time, risking no shows, and banging your head against a wall trying to accommodate everyone, is solved with our scheduler. Our scheduler can dramatically cut down the time and headache of scheduling and give you a better view of what's happening with your team and your extended network of vendor partners.
With real-time tracking, you have the advantage in your hands to see where your people or the extended team are. We’ve eliminated the guesswork for who is closest to a patient, who can deliver services fastest keeping quality in mind. The advantage of having this bird's eye overview allows you more control and less wasted time with real-time ETAs.
Now that you know who is available and where they are, you need a way to get them to your patient's homes which leads to better care coordination. RainbowCare’s dispatching capability can send your people where they need to be with all imperative information sent directly to them whether it's email, messages or push notifications.
RainbowCare is built on the 5 key focus areas to unify care coordination - People, processes, technology, supply chain logistics, and analytics. Working together to keep your team on track and your patients happy.
Conclusion
Obstacles will always arise when navigating the complicated Home Healthcare maze. At Rainbow Health we value the trust you place in us and our platform to bring forth the operational, logistical, and care coordination element to support you. Above all our goal remains the same - to serve the patients whose care is in your hands to the best of our ability.
Author's Bio
