Care Coordination - How HomeAdvantage^TM Can Help

State and accreditation surveyors love that buzz word - care coordination. It’s not always an easy thing to achieve, but HomeAdvantage^TM gives you some tools to assist you in this task.

With our new security, not only can you authenticate your own web users, but you can pinpoint the things they are allowed to see and do. For example, if you give your assessment nurses or other professional clinical staff access to view visit logs, they can read exactly what their home health aides are doing for their patients and respond immediately by augmenting the care plan if they have permission to do so. This not only makes for great care coordination but will also save your agency time and money because of the elimination of having a clerical person data enter this information on the web from a clinicians’ hand written note or phone message.

Another new feature, Care Instructions is helpful in care coordination. This new feature allows you to enter specific information via the web regarding a patient that will be heard by your staff during their arrival call. This message will always be there to remind them of something important to do for that patient-- it cannot be deleted or skipped by the caller. Should the care instruction become outdated, you can make it inactive and the care instruction will no longer be heard on the call. For example, a care instruction could be to not get a dressing wet during a bath or a reminder to listen to the care plan because changes were made.

Voice messaging is another vehicle for care coordination. By leaving a message for a staff person by using the phone or on the web by text messaging, the care coordination process can be illustrated to a surveyor.

Our upcoming scheduling module is another example of good care coordination. Automating scheduling will allow your scheduler to coordinate different discipline visits to a patient, making sure that there are no conflicts, that visit plans are being followed, and that consistency in staff seeing the patient is occurring. They will also be alerted when a staff person fails to make their arrival call from a patient they were scheduled to see a certain time.

Your agency will benefit greatly by utilizing the features offered by HomeAdvantage^TM, not just by impressing your state and accreditation surveyors but also by giving your staff the tools that allows them to render quality care to your patients. Back >>

Features You May Have Forgotten About

Care Plans by Visit Reason - be able to have specific care plans dependent on payer, discipline, and time of care. No more trying to rectify a skipped task report. Field staff knows just what to do when.

Locate Staff - one of those forgotten buttons in the staff file when clicked will tell you where their last location was along with the time and what type of transaction was called in.

Call-in Flag - when clicked in the staff file will initiate a prompt the next time they call into the system, telling them they need to call the office. Once they pick up the message, the check mark in the file re-sets itself. Another way of communicating to your staff in the field.

Reports Subscriptions & Thresholds - pick and choose different reports and threshold monitors that will come to your in-box on HomeAdvantage^TM every morning. Currently, we have several reports and thresholds to choose from but we are looking for user feedback on what you find useful and what you don’t. Back >>

Text-to-Speech Technology Is Here

HomeAdvantage^TM introduces a major, new technology to the service. Text-To-Speech technology will enable several new features and that will enhance the productivity of your staff even more.

Basically, TTS technology transcribes what you have typed verbatim to your staff over the phone. By using this technology we’ll now be able to give you the ability of:

• Delivering phone messages to your staff after you have typed them on the HomeAdvantage^TM service
• Having your staff hear care instructions on arrival calls
• Repeating back to the caller, the name of the patient from the patient code they put in (see patient name verification).
• Reading the care plan on arrival call with not just the task numbers but the task descriptions
• On departure calls, the ability to give the user unauthorized tasks done, skipped tasks, and the current care plan with not only the task numbers but also the task description with the ability to go back and add more tasks after hearing this.

TTS also enables two other useful features-- directions and patient name verification. By entering directions in the patient file, your staff will be able to hear your directions on a special transaction call. This eliminates extra time spent on the phone reaching your clerical staff and giving out verbal directions to patients’ homes and it is accessible 24 hours/day, 7 days/week.

Patient Name Verification mitigates data input errors. It’s common for staff to enter incorrect transactions by transposing the wrong patient number. When Patient Name Verification is activated, the system will replay the name of the patient and will prompt the staff person to verify affirmatively. Back >>