With the demand for homecare continually rising, there’s a huge opportunity for homecare businesses to scale. However, it’s important to find the balance between prioritising growth and addressing the rising pressures facing carers to ensure team retention and long-term business success. Here Mike Williams, managing director of homeware software firm Tagtronics, considers the various benefits a paperless system can bring to homecare businesses.
The future of homecare is undoubtedly digital, with the CQC now embracing the need for a paperless operating system to achieve an ‘outstanding’ homecare rating. However, this shift doesn’t have to be complicated, and it’ll provide your homecare business with more benefits than simply ‘box ticking’ to meet CQC standards.
Person-centred care
Offering person-centred care is the primary aim for many homecare businesses, however time, capacity and budget constraints can make this difficult to achieve.
A digital approach to care will free up valuable time, allowing your carers to deliver a better service to your patients. A paperless system can minimise admin time, allowing carers to get up to speed on service users’ care quickly, complete digital pre-set forms and upload documents to a central reporting system in real-time. In turn, this boosts your overall patient experience, which will show on your business’ bottom line.
A digital care system can also ensure consistency of care, learning from a service user’s preference and integrating data with rotas to ensure a regular team of carers for patients.
Minimise mistakes
Paper-based systems are often subject to human error, such as missed visits or medication errors, due to the heavy reliance on carers interpreting other’s handwriting or notes. Additionally, when these errors occur, it can take time to identify them – as paper logs are often only collected weekly, or even monthly. This creates an update lag, which postpones when care managers will receive critical information and delays essential care plan updates.
A digital system will centralise patient data – pooling it in a single place for complete visibility. This ultimately takes the pressure off carers, by giving the responsible individual the information they need to identify and rectify any mistakes. Additionally, should an incident arise, your carers can record this instantly with a digital system, ensuring it’s escalated quickly to the relevant person.
Real-time insights and reporting
A paperless system can give complete data transparency and offer real time quality assurance. This allows easy identification of any areas to improve ahead of care quality inspections. You’ll also be able to see critical performance metrics, as well as care information and notification of updates, such as when a carer’s qualifications need renewing or resources are maxed out.
Save time and improve efficiency
In a paper-based system, nearly every daily care activity has an impact on capacity (carer time) and/or budget (eg fuel and transport expenses). The impact of this can be reduced with a digital approach:
- Updating care plans – these can be remotely updated by care managers, allowing for more frequent and timely updates.
- Collecting/replacing MAR charts/daily care notes – rather than storing these in patients’ homes, they’ll be kept centrally within a cloud-based system, so documents are available instantly, from anywhere.
- Staff rotas – digital systems can create, update and distribute rotas seamlessly. These will also be recommended based on care continuity, carer location, team capacity and service user preferences. Rotas are able to be revised at any point, with carers seeing the latest versions immediately.
- Updated timesheets – you’ll be able to keep track of timesheets in real-time, allowing you to integrate them with your payroll and billing processes.
- Generating care reports – your performance data can all be kept in one place with an easy-to-understand dashboard, so you’re able to access and present important information to care regulators and management teams at any point.
Identify pockets of capacity
By centralising your homecare data, you can highlight potential ‘pockets of capacity’, such as where you could save carer time, by allocating carers based on geographical proximity, minimising travel time and maximising existing resources, for example. This enables homecare businesses to cover care packages more efficiently, a critical aspect when planning to scale.
Team satisfaction
It’s common knowledge that homecare workers are overstretched, and recruitment is becoming more difficult, which makes team retention all the more important.
You can get a deeper insight into your team’s capacity with a digital system, allow them to submit feedback and listen to their preferences. It can also help you with new initiatives to support your team, by showing you how these impact on capacity and productivity. An example of this is the new four-day care week currently being trialled by some homecare businesses in the UK.
Going paperless – where to begin?
- Understand the data you already have:
- How do you record care data?
- How often is this updated?
- Where are your records kept?
- Which documents need immediate access to?
- Centralise the data – collect all of your data in one place, including reports, schedules and care plans, using a system that suits you.
- Select the right system for your business – it’s not about reinventing the wheel. Your system should integrate closely with your existing processes to smooth its adoption across your business. For example, to keep things simple, your eMAR charts should follow the same steps as your current paper-based MAR charts.
- Talk to your teams – support and train team members to use your new system and open conversations about how things can be improved. This is a critical element of strengthening your culture of care.
Smoothing your paperless journey
It’s not unusual for homecare businesses to feel resistance to change from care managers or registered managers who’ve been operating the same way for years. This is completely understandable, as their paper-based system is second nature to them.
That’s why tailoring your system to your existing processes is essential, so carers don’t have to waste time relearning how to do their jobs. Instead, it creates a different way of recording the same process – to support you as you grow.
