WEBINAR RECORDING

Grow Your Agency Focusing On Improving Communication and Employee Efficiency

How can patient-centered messaging drive efficiency, reduce burnout, and improve visibility across your agency? Partners Hucu.ai and WorldView come together with Dr. Karen Paules, Owner of Nest In Place to talk through common challenges faced in Home Care and how intuitive communication technology can help.

WEBINAR TRANSCRIPT

Well, hello, everyone. I'm happy to welcome you to our webinar today, on title entitled grow your agency focusing on improving communication and employee efficiency. Excuse me. Tongue tied this morning a little bit.

I'm really excited today to introduce, Dr. Karen Pauls of Nest in Place and Laura McKee of HUCU AI, and do wanna establish just a couple ground rules, for this webinar. So please use the q and a panel, the question panel, for any questions that you have. There will be a q and a at the end of the discussion, and, I'm just gonna go ahead and show you our agenda. So first, I'd like to do a quick introduction of myself. So I'm Jim Lezzer. I'm the direct, the vice president of strategic partnerships here at Worldview, and I'm really excited to have my colleagues join us today and share their insight, from implement implementing HUCU.AI and the impact that it's had. So with that, let me have Dr. Laura Pauls, introduce herself, please.

I'm gonna assume you meant Laura McKee, and then Karen Pauls next.

So I'll go ahead and then, Karen, since she's the main event, can, can follow on. I'm Laura McKee, cofounder of HUCU.AI. It's short for hook cure, care anywhere in Latin. And we are committed to making lives easier for health care professionals with secure, easy to use communication with separate patient family chat. So, I'm so pleased to hear from Karen how HUCU has helped her and, the reason we're here is we look, to help more people like Karen, and make person centered care really ubiquitous.

Thank you.

I actually have my own slide so you can advance that.

Nest in Place's Experience

So, yes, my name is Dr. Karen Palas. I'm a physical therapist. I have, twenty two years of experience working in health care under my belt, and I've done everything from inpatient to outpatient, skilled nursing to home care, and ended up in a position where I was doing geriatric house calls, which you think would prepare me for my own dad to be diagnosed with a rare form of dementia, but it didn't. It was still a steep learning curve. And so through my professional experience and my personal experience, I really felt like I had gained a lot of experience and knowledge that could help a lot of people.

So I opened, Nest in Place, a nonmedical home care agency in twenty nineteen.

And, actually, when COVID started, I had two clients and no employees. So the whole thing has been built through COVID.

We have eighty some clients now and the caregivers to match, and, we're growing at a very good rate. The one thing that I think has become most, most important and the reason why we're here today is through my previous experience and then also with my experience owning a home care agency, communication really is the key to quality. It's the most important thing. Communication is kind of sketchy within organizations in health care, but between organizations in health care, it's rare and often, you know, not done very well. So our first real, goal was to find a really good source of communication.

And, so moving to the next slide, we looked for all these solutions that failed us. So when we first started the company, we were doing group texting, which is obviously not HIPAA compliant. So then, you know, you're using initials, j s, and it it just was really inefficient because as we were growing, every time we added somebody onto the staff, we had to create another thread. So next thing you know, I have twenty twenty message threads, and nobody knows what chat to put anything what message to put anything in. It was just as we grew, it became very inefficient.

We do have a VoIP, Internet phone for our company because we grew everything through COVID. We probably are more technologically strapped than most agencies out there because we're all mobile. So we've they have a texting platform as well. We tried that.

That didn't work. The notebook in the home, that's pretty much the standard in the industry. You walk into someone's home. There's a notebook.

The agency puts little notes in it. However, like, I have a client who has four daughters.

Three live local. One lives in New York. Those three daughters rotate what night they stay with mom, and then the fourth daughter comes one week out of the month. So, really, that information in that notebook is only valuable to the person who's seeing it, which is one daughter every third day, and then the daughter in New York gets no information.

What whereas with whoo coo, it's really a living, breathing, you know, communication device that everybody's on the same page, the all the family, all the caregivers who see that client, and then us as managers. So we've really taken that notebook in the home, digitized it, and made it a living, breathing piece of information that we can use on a daily basis to help our clients.

Obviously, as we grow, you know, I do get phone calls from clients. I do make phone calls to clients and text with them. Our our VoIP, again, is text capable. However, one to one, it really is just in a an inefficient way as we grow to do business.

We do have one of the very standard EHR systems or CRM systems for nonmedical home care agencies.

Probably the standard in the industry you would call it. It does have a family portal family room.

However, in exploring that, we found we would send a message to the family.

They would receive that as an email. The address that it came from looked like spam, and it would end up in their spam folders.

So, again, in exploring that, we pretty much easily diagnosed that that was not gonna be something that was gonna help us.

Common Challenges Facing​ Home Care

So when we talk about the common challenges that all of us face as home care agency owners, whether we're home health, medical, or, you know, private duty nonmedical, It's all the same information. How do you create a great culture?

In this industry, we really want to make sure that there's a book called Reculturing if you, ever wanna pick up something that's great reading. And it's all about not just how to create a great culture within your company, but how to maintain that and how to do it not just as a policy that's written in your handbook, but as a plan and as something that you take action on every day.

And, you know, things that are planned to that are your employee satisfaction.

We know how hard it is to get good people in this industry. So how do we get those people feeling supported, feeling like they're productive, like they're really truly making a difference?

I've been to several conferences, and the one thing you hear over and over again is I just wanna make a difference. And that that showing them how they can make a difference and them walking away at the end of the day really feeling like they're making a difference is just key to number three, which is employee retention. Because once we get good people, we wanna keep those people. And any any seminar or information that you read about, the caregiver shortage and all of that, it flat out says it is way easier to keep your good people than to try to go out and find new ones. So that's really what a lot of people are focusing on, especially since, obviously, the COVID epidemic.

And so when you drive those those three things, then you're providing a high quality service, and that's a much better experience for patients and their family members. And then, you know, just really driving that all up to the top of that pyramid is how you grow as a company.

How do I create a sense of culture when people are mostly in the field serving clients?​

So we're gonna take a little bit of a deeper dive into each one of those and how Huku has solved those challenges. So how do we create a sense of culture? So our sense of culture starts on day one.

And this is really the practical application of it. So we take a new employee. We assign them into HUCU, and the first place that they go is all employees.

Excuse me. And once they're in all employees, which is, if you look at the left side of your screen, it's a channel. So all of the employees that work for us, all the managers, all the employees, everybody's in that channel, and it's a little chat. So we will have a manager go in and say, hey. Welcome to Mary, our new caregiver.

And then all of the other caregivers say, oh, Mary. It's so good to have you here. You're gonna love it here. Welcome.

Welcome. You know? Thanks for joining us. You you're gonna love this team. And so here you so then the caregiver is already starting to feel part of the team because they have this greeting.

And we're, you know, obviously, in an industry where they don't see each other because everybody's in homes, one caregiver, one client, one hour.

So then the next thing that they do is, in my company, we have I love my pet. And we all love our pets, so they go down to that next channel you can see on your screen. And then they click on I love my pet. And then they see all these really cute pictures of all the of the employees, have put in there of their pets.

So then they take a picture of their pet, and then they add it into the chat. And then all the employees are saying, oh, how cute. That's so adorable. Oh, really cute.

Yeah. That's wonderful. And there you have an employee on day one, hasn't even seen a client yet, and they already feel like they're part of the team.

How do I support my employees so they are productive and satisfied?

So then we go to problem number two and how, who who solves that. So then we take that same new caregiver, and we start sending them out to a client. They get assigned a client. So they click on the client's name, which is the blue screen, and they are in a caregiver chat with all the other caregivers who see that client.

What you don't see is there's a little house with a heart at the top next to the name that they click on, and then that puts them in a family chat. The banner's yellow. So now they're communicating directly with the family. But everybody leaves little shift reports in there at the end of the day. And, if they take them outside, if they watch a movie, if they do a craft, they put little pictures in there. So the caregiver who is going to be seeing that client goes into their HUCU.chat, and they can not only see what happened in the last visit. They can see weeks, months, sometimes years worth of HUCU.and what has happened with that client.

So they can see, oh, they take them outside. That's so nice. Oh, they they did a craft for Easter. Oh, that was so nice.

And so then they go to their first shift. And then on the family side, we may have a daughter that says, hey. Can you clean out under mom's nails today? And so then that caregiver knows what one of their goals is for that day.

So they clean out their nails, and then they start thinking, this group really goes above and beyond. So then they start painting this lady's nails. And then sooner or later, the red lipstick comes out because you gotta add red lipstick to that. And then they put on an adorable hat, and then they take a picture.

Now pictures in HUCU are stored in the app, not in the caregiver's phone. So in whoo coo, there's a camera they click on, they take a picture. That's all HIPAA compliant. It stays within the app, and then they send that out.

All the caregivers who see that client got that, you know, picture in that chat, and so does the daughter. So then the caregivers are, again, providing positive reinforcement. Oh, she looks beautiful. That's so wonderful.

Thank you so much. The daughter's ecstatic. Mom loved lipstick for special occasions, and it's so nice to see her smiling. And and so now you have a new employee on day one who has gone above and beyond and provided amazing service to your client, and they've gotten positive reinforcement not only from their peers, but from the family and also from the management staff.

And that is how we grow the culture, drive the culture, and really, you know, have our employees right from the get go feeling productive and satisfied like they're truly making a difference.

How do I retain my employees so I can focus on scaling and growing my business?​

So, again, if we start at number one, we have that positive culture, and we create them into supportive teams. You know? I always tell my employees, it's not the standard in health care. Well, night shift did this.

Well, day shift did this. Well, night shift has more time. Well, day shift has more people. You know, we don't really play that.

It's all about what can I do to make night shifts night easier? What information can I provide to them?

What information do I need? And maybe the night shift person didn't know they were supposed to you know, maybe the remote control is missing, and who was the last person to see it. So they can communicate as teams and support each other, and it just really drives that positive culture.

And, you know, just making sure everybody is aligned with the vision, and it makes them very satisfied with their jobs, and it really allows us to focus on the growth of the company.

How do we provide better experience for patients and their family members?​

And so how do we provide a better experience for patients and family members? Another thing. You know, we have information exchanged at the right time. So all of our managers are also in all of the HUCU channels.

So let's just say we have a caregiver who gives a shift report, and that shift report says, hey. John was walking to his chair, and I just felt like he was a little tired today. So as managers, you know, my management staff will read all of those, and then they may, like, just kinda put a pin in that in their head. Okay. They're not gonna do anything. They're just gonna take a note that John's not walking great today. Maybe he's just tired.

The next day, a totally different caregiver can say, hey. I really had a hard time getting John out of the chair today.

Okay. So now there's two pieces of information that we have that are not even really related because it's two different caregivers giving two different shift reports. But now we'll have a manager follow-up on that somehow. Stop by, check John out. You know? And then at that point, we may have a daughter who's involved who will say, okay. Well, dad's nurse practitioner is coming out to the house tomorrow.

And so then we will communicate with them and say, hey. You know? Well, maybe you should find out if they can just check his urine while they're out there. We also have the ability to add external collaborators. So it's very possible that his nurse practitioner is already in that chat as an external collaborator.

So we can just communicate right to them. Hey, Nancy. When you go out tomorrow, do you think it would be unreasonable to check as you're in? Nancy says, no. That's perfectly fine. We're gonna do that. And so then we're gonna catch a UTI, and that's how we keep people out of the hospital.

How do I get better visibility and data insights, driving growth?​

So then, as far as visibility and data, like, who could give us a lot of data? I can actually go into my HUCU, admin panel and see who's engaging with HUCU. And we can kinda predict people who are falling off the grid as far as employees go.

They just kinda stop engaging all a lot. They stop, giving a lot of reports, and they stop.

I can even see the last date that they that they opened it up and they were on it. And so then if there's a problem as far as maybe it's a personal problem or maybe it's actually there's something that's not right with between them and that client. So then we can reach out to them and say, is there something we need to be aware of? Are you having some personal difficulties? We can help you. Whatever it is. So we can track their engagement, and we really see that when that engagement falls off a little bit, it's pretty much an indication that something is amiss.

They have that healthy competition where they see people putting pictures in. They want to go above and beyond. They wanna give a shift report. And, you know, if somebody's out there and they're not giving good care, they're not gonna put that in who could.

So then when we see someone who just again and again is not not again and again, we don't let it go that far, but several times is not giving shift reports in HUCU, then we wanna know why. Because if you're doing great work, you want everybody to know that. If you're not doing great work, then you're not gonna really advertise that. So every once in a while, if we do make a hire that's not in align with the vision of our company, we tease it out really fast and handle it.

And then performance recognition, it's part of the culture of our company that the managers, go into every single shift and thank the employee. Okay. When I was a physical therapist, I did agency work, and agency work is a nice life because you're the fill in person. You walk in the door, they say, thank you so much for coming.

Oh, thank you. We're so happy you're here. Oh, this is such such a big help. And at the end of the day, oh, thank you.

Thank you so much. We really appreciate everything you did. It was such a huge help. It's just great.

Well, then you go to your normal job, and how often does that happen?

That never happens. So it's actually part of my manager's job to go in and, you know, to say to all of the shifts, hey. Thank you so much for your good work. You know?

Thank you for doing that, recognizing the good things that they're doing. And it doesn't matter if it's ten o'clock on a Tuesday or especially at ten thirty on a Saturday night. When we have caregivers who are out there, we definitely wanna recognize those people. And, you know, there's many nights when I may be just sitting on my couch at eleven o'clock at night, and I'll recognize them.

Because when you're that person who's out there seeing that client by yourself at ten thirty, eleven o'clock on a Saturday night, it's really just nice that somebody's noticing that you're actually out there working, let alone the fact that you're doing good work. And, it just makes them feel like they're not out there by themselves.

So that's actually part of their job as far as my management staff is concerned.

And so those are really, pretty much all of the reasons why we chose HUCU.

It allows us to do all of that. And then I also run it as a back office. Just as an aside, I have my accountants hooked up to HUCU as external collaborators.

So any client receipts, if we buy something for a client, if my managers buy anything for the company, all those receipts, pictures get taken, and they get, put into HUCU. And then my, bookkeeper and accounting staff can go right in and, take those take that information. Not only do we have a paper trail in case we ever get audited, but, also, it's very easy for that information to come forth when the bookkeeper is doing, you know, the monthly books. She can say, oh, okay. I see that eighty nine dollars and forty four cents was a grocery shop that they did for this client.

We have channels for incident reports, so they can just click on a button, click on an incident report, and fill it out and submit it. We have it for, if our our lovely CRM, our, clock in and out system is not working correctly, they can go into HUCU, and they will just put, hey. Here's my shift times so that we can follow-up on that. So we found a lot of different back office ways to use HUCU. So it's really kinda become a virtual office to us, and I'm always you can ask Laura. I'm always coming up with new and inventive ways, things that we can do with the with the platform.

So that is pretty much us.

Thank you, Karen. That

HUCU.AI Overview​

was, great to get the insight from your perspective and and really appreciate that. Definitely wanna give Laura an opportunity to share a little bit more about HUCU.AI with you as well.

Thanks so much, Karen, and thanks, Jim, for the opportunity. We're sharing here, feedback from a third party review site called g two that's identified who can as a high performer with the fastest implementation, the easiest setup, easiest admin, easiest to do business with, and a real momentum leader in the space of care coordination and HIPAA compliant communication.

So we are eager to get the word out that others can have the kind of results that Karen had and enable their teams to really work together at the highest levels and deliver truly patient centered care.

WorldView Overview​

Awesome. Thank you, Laura. And I'd like to just share a little bit about Worldview.

For those of you who who aren't familiar with Worldview, we are a process and workflow automation platform, and, really, our goal is to help create efficiencies provider organizations and agencies.

Our goals are to do things like help increase cash flow and facilitate growth for your organization.

And and we work from intake to completion of care to organize, track, and automate, document processing. And this gives you the ability to focus on patient care and clinician satisfaction.

And you'll see there's a couple bullets there that we we highlight talking about strong partnerships. For example, we work with both EMRs and clients, and we seek to develop deep partnerships that are gonna drive product growth and development for our platform.

And, also, really, the end goal is to help you overcome the ever evolving challenges that you're facing.

We also look at creating broader offerings, and a great example of that is going beyond the out of box solutions that that some solutions provide.

And we look at things like the opportunity to partner with HUCU.AI and bring that collaboration together to make life even easier for your, agency or your organization to communicate across all teams. And lastly, from a white glove service perspective, we believe we're as much of a service organization as we are a technology company. And so we've got we we want to have full adoption of our solution and provide twenty four seven support to help our clients ensure that they get answers when they need them.

Questions

And so with that, what I'd like to do is say thank you and open up the questions and answers. And, I do have one question that came through already, for, Karen, this would be for you. So the question is, how does HUCU and your use of HUCU impact your clinical documentation efforts for your team?

Yeah. That's actually a really great question. As far as my agency goes, we are nonmedical, so we don't have the stringent documentation requirements that medical has. But in either case, we do work with, completion of tasks for long term care insurance. So I think that hoo hoo is way more about, the task list, scrub a body, serve a meal. Really, we can put in there all the little things that are so important to people as far as this lady likes four squirts of perfume, and this gentleman, you know, likes not too much butter on his toes, which I didn't know that was a thing, but okay.

And so people really are communicating anyway, and this hooker really allows us to just, put those shift reports in there. And, really, if you're doing an assessment on the client, then I think that in any space, you can always do, like, a copy and paste of the assessment and put that in as a time saver. But who can is just so much more because, because, again, it's not just that last visit, that visit before, because it's run like a chat. You really can kinda go back and see the historical, the historical data on that. Not just, again, not just the past week, but the past month, the past years if you want to, and how that has all transpired. So I think that it takes that flat information that just gets stored because that's kinda what we do in health care is collect information and store it. And it just turns it into a living, breathing, piece of information that is gonna help people in real time.

Excellent. Thank you.

Another question that did come through, is how does HUCU Worldview and HUCU AI integrate, or is this just sharing out a great tool for your partner agencies to consider?

So currently, we are not integrated today. Wanna be fully transparent on that. But who can I and Worldview are looking to have an integration in place and live by the end of the year? We're working together on road maps and getting through that process.

But I think one of the key things that agencies and and providers should look at is that the lack of integration doesn't prevent adoption of both solutions right now. Both can act stand alone and help you not only manage the referrals and medical records and tracking orders, but who can get your team communicating with secure communication across, you know, any number of organizations.

And I I'd love to have Laura dive in on that a little bit further in and basically care how you can care for that patient and accelerate getting a patient transition from, say, acute care into post acute care.

Yeah. Absolutely. So, so our vision is to make that communication ubiquitous ubiquitous across the care continuum. And we have created APIs to integrate with EHRs so that the, they're single sign on and that basic information can be shared. But as Karen pointed out, even if we're not yet integrated with your EHR, people find the value comes in the saving of time that you would otherwise be spending on faxing, phoning, calling, waiting for calls back, etcetera.

So, you know, that's that's really, you know, our vision for integrating with the other technology that you use and then complementing it with, unique capabilities.

Excellent. Thank you, Laura.

Karen, the a question came through pointed, directly at you, asking saying, hey. Our workers are not tech savvy. How easy is it for staff to pick this up and start using it?

Yeah. I would say, it's actually not difficult at all.

I have caregivers of all different ages and also the, the families of my of my clients. So, I mean, I think that anybody who can download an app can can, you know, use this technology. And once they're in it, it's pretty intuitive. There's really not too much of a learning curve to it.

So Excellent.

Thank you.

Another question came through. Laura, I think this is, for you asking about, can a physician provide telehealth services through the platform?

Absolutely. We have quite a few, customers who use who can as their telehealth platform because we've integrated with Zoom, and you can use any alternative video conference link, with one touch to launch the Zoom, meeting link, and all those in the channel have the ability to join that telehealth session. So it also makes it easy for, you know, say, a floor nurse who wants to reach out to a medical director to press one flag and notify the appropriate person on call who can then drop the Zoom link in and have the visual visit, the virtual visit so that you can avoid any unnecessary hospitalizations and keep patients as comfortable as possible in their home settings, whether that's, you know, their home or a skilled nursing facility, assisted living, or other senior living setting.

Awesome. Thank you.

I also just if I could just jump in real quick and just say, we also use the video platform a lot, especially during COVID lockdown for people who were in assisted living, and we still do use it. If a family goes on vacation, things like that. So they really have access to that video with their loved ones in that HIPAA compliant environment. So that's been successful for us as well.

Awesome. Thank you. Well and one other question that I just wanted to put out there, and and ask directly.

Taryn, you talked about adoption for your users and how quickly they got on board. Laura, could you just give us an idea if if somebody were looking to roll this out, how quickly can they be up and running?

Yeah. So and I I just posted, a link to our website in a response to another question that was asked about how the pricing works because HUCU is unique in offering a free basic version that gives you a lot of the powerful features that Karen described.

And, and, it really takes minutes to, you know, create your location, download the app, invite your team members, and and off you go.

We also, you know, offer the same kind of white glove service that Worldview does for a nominal per patient per month fee. We'll help you configure, the exact setup that makes your team most effective and efficient and saves you the most time. Those configurations are really simple to do, but, you know, they can make the solution even more powerful for you.

Excellent. Thank you.

Well, it looks like that's all the questions that we have. We can give another minute or two for people to pop any last ones in. But if not, we're more than welcome to, more than happy to say thank you so much for attending our webinar today.

Karen and Laura, it's great to work with pros, and you could tell that you two are and, you know, still still trying. So, but it's been an absolute pleasure working with you and and presenting this, material today.

Thank you so much for convening the webinar, Jim.

It's great to get the chance to talk with folks and to hear more from Karen.

Excellent. Well, thank you, everyone. Have a wonderful rest of your day.

You too. Bye bye. Bye.