You pride yourself on providing your patients with the highest standard of professional medical care. To make that happen, you hire premium staff and ensure that their training meets or exceeds all standards.
In addition to ensuring their competence and high morale, you should also take steps to build a strong health care payments software infrastructure to support your company, enhance worker and customer satisfaction and protect yourself from security breaches.
Here are seven features that should be high on the list for your agency:
1. Patient portal
As a service-oriented company, a patient-centered focus is one of your hallmarks. One of the best ways to put this mission into practice is to work with a suite of software that allows you to offer a dedicated portal for patients and their families.
This feature allows everyone in the patient’s care circle to share a host of relevant information ranging from health updates to billing details.
It also allows loved ones who may live far away to be a part of things and to feel a connection with your company and the staff who are directly involved on a daily basis. In order to maintain patient privacy, be sure that your software allows security settings that allow you to set varied levels of access for different users.
2. Efficient scheduling
Scheduling is the backbone of your business. When it is humming on all cylinders, it will lead to consistently high satisfaction rates for patients and their families, heightened staff morale and increased profits.
The payment processing for healthcare agencies software you choose can make all the difference. Pick an option that optimizes matching care providers with patients by only showing caregivers who are available.
This makes it easier for you to set up shifts, including recurring and group jobs. Additionally, your staff should be able to input their vacation and shift change requests intuitively into your system, eliminating the errors that so often come with manual entry.
3. Notes function
Progress notes are crucial communication vehicles that allow all colleagues responsible for a patient’s care to remain informed and involved. These mechanisms are vital in documenting any incidents or concerns, tracking progress and expressing any noteworthy details.
As you examine different software options, investigate how easy the progress notes function is to use. The best solutions allow caregivers to input details into the system from anywhere, often even via dictation if they prefer.
The system should allow those with permission to access the notes easily while simultaneously storing it securely in the cloud to protect the privacy and integrity of the data.
4. Documentation manager
There is a saying in the health care sector that if something is not documented, it didn’t happen. Your software’s documentation manager function should serve both your staff and the patients you care for.
On the caregiver side, the system should be equipped to securely store sensitive personal details including the worker’s vaccination status, citizenship data and qualifications.
Additionally, the software should contain a built-in system that notifies you of document expirations, particularly those pertaining to immigration status.
For patients, the software should function as a secure repository for important information including progress notes, care plans and invoicing data. Caregivers who have been given the relevant permissions should be able to easily access these important records from anywhere.
5. Timekeeping and cost summaries
Change is a daily reality in the home health care landscape. Therefore, your software should be equipped to meet the challenges that come along with these fluctuations. It should contain built-in ways to track staff time to ensure that hours are accurate and that families can be billed in a precise and timely fashion.
If the software also has an integrated mobile app, it should use location-based capabilities that make verification easy and increase the accountability of providers.
The software should make it a no-brainer for you and your staff to keep track of costs as they occur. Photo uploading capabilities furnish you with another way to verify expenditures as they happen.
6. Accounting and invoicing integration
You have different options when it comes to the invoicing software portion of your health care management package. You can choose a system that enables you to conduct direct billing from the platform, or you can opt to get a package that integrates with third-party invoicing software.
In a similar fashion, your software can either have built-in accounting features or be capable of interfacing with the third-party option you already use.
Some systems also come with reporting capabilities that give you a way to keep track of valuable metrics such as staff productivity, billable hours and patient attendance levels. Use this information to guide your business goals and steer your spending and staffing decisions.
7. Mobile app
Increasingly, people are relying on their cellphones to guide them through virtually every aspect of their lives, including their work. Therefore, your software should interface with a mobile app that caregivers can rely on to obtain and update patient details from anywhere.
The software should be configured to allow staff to log in and out and submit expenses as they happen. Furthermore, the system’s onboard GPS capabilities will help to foster accountability.
When the time arrives and you have made a home health care software selection, be sure that you are given the chance to try it out before you sign on the dotted line. While there will most likely be a learning curve, it should not be so steep that you and your staff are overwhelmed or unable to take full advantage of the system’s range of features.
Incorporating top-shelf healthcare software into your agency can optimize working conditions for your staff, enhance the experiences your patients and their families have with you and make back-office tasks such as billing, accounting and reporting accurate and efficient.
Investing your time today in choosing the best software can give your company the infrastructure and tools you need to move forward in this vital sector of patient care.
