10
july
- Lisa S
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Introduction and challenges of home health software scheduler
A lot of people require consistent medical treatment at their homes. Hence, the demand for home health care and home health agency scheduling services is growing. According to a recent research home health conducted in the US, reasons for this trend are manifold. First, more people suffer from chronic illnesses or physical disabilities. Second, people recovering surgery or acute illnesses often need further treatment at home. Third, the number of frail elderly people is rising due to the higher life expectancy. These people do need consistent health care service and support to remain at home.
Home Health Scheduling:
Scheduling aims to improve the match between healthcare resources (doctors, nurses, rooms, equipment, and medicines) and patient needs. A good scheduling system reduces waits for patients while also improving the utilization of critical resources. It does this by tracking the availability of resources, projecting future demands for service and automating the assignment of resources to needs. Scheduling systems also produce needed data, such as how many surgeries were performed and of what sort, how long it takes per procedure and differences between doctors.
Software is the tool to implement a schedule and accompanying analytics. The software provides interfaces to: schedulers who set appointments and assign resources, doctors who may wish to input preferences and constraints, patients who sometimes book their own appointments and management who monitor and control performance as well as allocate resources. The software can also support the automated acquisition and recording of data. And software can provide a tool for communication among and between departments, so that the arrival of patients and allocation of resources can be anticipated with greater accuracy.
Healthcare providers look for cost savings when they purchase scheduling software. Scheduling systems do much more than the traditional “white board” on the wall. Because they run on computer platforms, they can utilize and generate data that produce better schedules in a more flexible format, as well as link scheduling to the health needs of patients.
Scheduling Challenges:
The keys to good scheduling in healthcare are data, analytics, systems, software, culture and management. Data combines with analytics to track historical trends and forecast the future, answering questions such as:
How long will a particular procedure take for a given patient, with a given doctor, on a particular day?
How many patients can we expect to present for care in an emergency department on a given day of the week, time of day and day of year?
How likely is it that a particular patient will be a no-show for a scheduled appointment made a set number of weeks in advance?
In all of these examples, the need is to maximize the precision by which healthcare is delivered to match demonstrated patterns of need. Analytics, combined with systems, enable a schedule to be optimized against defined objectives related to the cost of offering service, the quality of the service provided and health outcomes, while also meeting defined constraints.
What we Offer:
Are you facing a shortage of skilled care givers? Does scheduling floating staff eat up too much time? Whether you’re scheduling nurses at a hospital or trying to staff qualified home care specialists across group homes — you must ensure every shift is filled by a professional with the right skills, certifications and permissions. Our home health scheduling software gives you the best way to:
Fill shifts quickly and accurately — ensure every job is filled by a nurse or care giver with the right skills and certifications. Improve communication with your contractors or employees, who could be in-house but all over the hospital, or out in the field and rarely in the office. Cut out the phone & email loop with your distributed staff. Enable travelling nurses and home care specialists to find new client locations online — even from their mobile device.
Improve hiring and retention by giving nurses and skilled healthcare professionals more flexibility and control over their schedules.
Give your clients more real-time visibility and confidence by allowing them to view their schedule status, get faster response times, and increased transparency.
Keep track of credentialing or integrate your current human resource management and credentialing system
In conclusion, supportive culture and management are essential to implementing any new system for healthcare scheduling. Without support from the top and from the people who rely on the schedule, needed changes will not occur.