The Challenges Home Health Agencies Face

Home health agencies are an increasingly vital part of delivering high-quality healthcare to patients and our communities. But home healthcare providers face a number of difficult challenges in delivering timely, efficient and effective care.

Home health workers have a challenging job with a large number of patients to visit. They need to be clinically effective and help deliver positive outcomes for patients, but they have to do it efficiently, minimize risk and liability, and document all the work they do.

Home health agency leaders need to ensure that patient safety and best practices are never compromised, and they need to ensure patient and worker satisfaction. But they have to do it all while making sure the agency is financially cost-effective in a traditionally low-margin industry.

Ultimately, every agency must meet the needs and address the concerns of all of its stakeholders, including the patient, the home health worker, and executive leadership.

The Patient

Wants safe, high-quality care with positive outcomes
Wants more time with care providers
Wants health information to be readily available
Wants a smooth and patient-friendly experience

The Home Health Worker

Wants to deliver safe, high-quality care with positive outcomes
Wants to spend more time with patients and less on documentation
Needs real-time access to updated patient info and decision support
Needs systems and tools to streamline, simplify, and de-stress their job

The Executive Leader

Wants to deliver safe, high-quality care
Wants to maximize revenue and contain costs
Needs to minimize medical errors, liabilities and risks
Needs to ensure patient and provider satisfaction

Balancing and delivering on all of these needs and concerns is no easy task. Many home health agencies are already overwhelmed with delivering patient care and day-to-day operations. But digital and mobile technologies offer some of the best ways to meet these needs and address the concerns of all stakeholders while optimizing all aspects of home healthcare delivery. And they can be deployed by working with a managed services provider who can help you transform your operations without taking on the burden yourself.

From the point of care and the patient experience to decision support, documentation, and the bottom line, a digital and mobile technology strategy helps home health agencies transform their operations for better speed, efficiency, accuracy and safety.

In this strategy brief, we’ll explore four major ways that the latest automated data capture, clinical mobility, and tracking technologies enable this. We’ll explore real-world examples from our work with Zebra, a global leader in healthcare data capture and mobile computing technologies, and we’ll show you how home health agencies are leveraging Zebra solutions to optimize their operations, retain employees, increase their daily census, and meet the needs of all their key stakeholders.

We’ll examine how you can dramatically improve patient outcomes and satisfaction and minimize costs, risks and liabilities while empowering your home health workers to deliver safer and more efficient care with less stress and fewer hassles.

Let’s jump in and take a look at how digitization and mobility make it all possible.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ONE: Automating Documentation and Improving Patient Safety with Data Capture
TWO: Streamlining the Point of Care with Clinical Mobility
THREE: Minimizing Costs and Maximizing Growth with Technology-Driven Efficiency
FOUR: Improving Worker Satisfaction and Retention with Digital Convenience and Efficiency