For home health agencies, working with inefficient or outdated software can make your job unnecessarily complicated. Relying on multiple scheduling, billing, electronic health records (EHR), and other systems creates bottlenecks that can delay patient care. Using technology for workflow automation and healthcare document management can simplify your processes, reduce your manual workload, and help your team work more efficiently.
The Cost of Outdated Workflows
Working with outdated systems is likely costing you time and money. Your administrative staff and caregiving professionals have to navigate fragmented systems to compile patient charts and other critical documents.
If you’re trying to coordinate care among a team of specialists, manual documentation adds time to the intake and transfer processes. It can also make coordinated care less effective, since you risk asking patients the same questions multiple times or missing crucial information.
Outdated software can also put you at risk for non-compliance with HIPAA and other regulations, particularly if you’re not patching and updating it. Some of this software is more vulnerable to hacks and data breaches, putting piles of patient data at risk.
Update your software to improve operational stability and increase your level of patient care.
Referral Intake Automation
Efficient referral processing is important to coordinating care. As a home health care agency, much of your business likely comes from referrals. Automating the intake process helps you capture the correct information for each new patient, verify insurance, and match patients with the best caregivers based on their needs.
Home health technology trends, including AI-powered software. These systems can automatically scan intake forms to identify missing or incomplete data and route them to the right department. This reduces back-and-forth communication between the clinical and admin teams, thereby speeding up patient care.
Document Management Integration
Your admin and clinical teams handle a vast amount of paperwork for each patient. They are often consolidating intake forms, billing and claims documentation, and EHR records throughout the day. A centralized healthcare document management system puts this information at your team’s fingertips while maintaining HIPAA compliance.
Integrated document management systems offer permission controls and other safety features so each member of the team can access what they need without compromising patient privacy. Your team can find paperwork faster and minimize duplicate files and lost paperwork.
Order Tracking Automation
Ineffective workflow management often causes bottlenecks in the order tracking process. These delays can result in missed or delayed patient services. They also hold up payments on the back end of service delivery.
Patient care technology can automate order tracking. You can program your system to automatically update and submit orders or set notifications when you receive a new one. Your clinicians can focus on patient care instead of filling out and submitting paperwork, and they can track orders already in progress.
Signature Workflows
While home health documentation can take a lot of time and energy from your staff, it helps you treat patients safely and provides a paper trail for legal and regulatory compliance. Still, passing a document back and forth for multiple signatures is tedious.
Healthcare automation tools include electronic signatures for care plans, orders, and patient consent. Once a clinician or patient signs a form, the system can automatically route it to the right person, which reduces wait times.
Reporting and Analytics
Older healthcare software platforms often lack sophisticated reporting tools. Home healthcare automation solutions have built-in dashboards that compile key statistics into graphs and charts. Use these insights to measure and improve your performance.
For example, consistently long wait times can signal bottlenecks in your intake processes. In this case, you would track various parts of the process to identify and fix the issue.
Cross-Team Communication Tools
In home health, your patients often see multiple specialists. Giving them all real-time access to patient data is a must for effective, safe treatment. Your clinicians also have to communicate with your administrators and compliance team during the billing process, audits, and more.
An integrated home health automation tool offers a single, secure communication tool. Your clinicians and administrators aren’t navigating multiple systems to find patient data. They can also quickly identify potential treatment gaps or use a messaging system to identify and resolve patient issues faster.
Audit Prep Automation
Audits are a way of life in home health, and you want to be well prepared. A home health automation tool can automatically flag missing documentation in patient records, billing documents, and more. These systems will also notify you when someone’s credentials are expiring.
By identifying and resolving compliance issues when they occur, you can prepare for audits in hours instead of spending days combing through paper documents and flagging errors.
Small Changes, Big Gains
Automating parts of your system has a visible impact on your whole agency. As you implement small changes to various workflows, your team has more time to evaluate other parts of their daily processes.
Each automation makes the team faster and more effective. Your patients receive a higher standard of care with shorter wait times and fewer insurance surprises. WorldView offers healthcare workflow automation solutions you can implement without a full system overhaul.
Explore WorldView’s solutions, and contact us for a demo.
