Telephony-The Right Solution for Cost Effective Documentation by HHA’s, Homemakers & Companions
Posted on July 13, 2010 in Featured-writers
by Don O'Rourke
The post acute care market has undergone significant changes in the last fifteen years and all indications are that those changes will continue and be exacerbated as healthcare dollars become more precious and the glut of aging post war baby boomers put added pressure on existing infrastructures. The favorable economic factors associated with delivering healthcare in the patient's home, coupled with the fact that most patients would prefer to receive care in their own home, has and will continue to propel considerable growth for home healthcare entities. A recent study by a national concern provides an excellent example of this impending growth. Two of the three fasting growing job categories by percentage between 2006 and 2016 were in the home healthcare arena - home health aides and personal / homecare aides.
What is even more compelling about this study is that both those job categories started with by far the largest base number of job holders (approximately 765,000 in each of those two categories) and both grew to in excess of 1,150,000 - for percentage increases of 48.7% and 50.6% respectfully. A total gross job growth of in excess of three quarters of a million workers are and will be entering the ranks on homecare employees by 2016.
Telephony documentation by HHA's, personal care staff, and homemakers has a multitude of benefits, which put it in the lead above other documentation methods.
- 1.) Legislatures confronted with ever tightening budgets are looking at ways of minimizing fraudulent and abusive documentation associated with visits, especially alleged visits or visit lengths by non professionals. Telephony documentation systems provide hard to spoof electronic records verifying both the visit and the visit length. Numerous jurisdictions either already have or are contemplating mandating documentation systems, such as telephony, that minimize fraud and abuse.
2.) Home care agencies face budget constraints as well. They must find ways to do more with less. Telephony systems offer unique advantages when utilized with non skilled workers.
- a.) There is generally no initial capital outlay associated with telephony systems, making them most attractive to capital strapped home care agencies. Other systems utilizing laptops and hand held devices come at a considerable initial expense. Those costs do not end with the initial purchase however. Maintenance and replacement costs associated with such devices can often be considerably more over time than the initial capital outlay.
- b.) Numerous detailed cost benefits analyses have repeatedly demonstrated that properly employed telephony systems save agencies in excess of twice what said systems cost. Savings are garnered in numerous areas, including but not limited to:
- i.) Greater productivity by central office staff - the same core of central office staff can accommodate many more field staff visits
- ii.) Real time visit data from the field means quicker turn around on billing
- iii.) Cost savings associated with the elimination of paper notes can be substantial
- iv.) Other costs associated with paper notes, such as files, file drawers, office space and off-site storage costs can be virtually eliminated with the telephony electronic visit note;
- v.) Timely payroll for field staff enhances employee relationships and helps minimize turnover, a significant cost that few agencies consider but all can ill afford
- vi.) Because telephony systems offer real time analysis of field staff activities or non-activities, agencies can, upon implementation of fairly basic processes and procedures, minimize or eliminate missed visits. In today's market environment agencies can ill afford to forego billing opportunities as a result of missed visits;
- vii.) For those agencies that reimburse mileage, postage or other costs associated with employees returning visit notes to the office, the savings can be dramatic.
- 3.) More sophisticated systems often fail in key areas when applied to the non skilled workforce in the home healthcare arena.
- a.)Training a home health employee on telephony can be completed in 30 minutes, and prepares them to utilize the system in the field immediately vs. training on laptops, handhelds and related devices which can entail multiple and lengthy training sessions. As a rule, turnover in employment within the non skilled ranks is considerable and thus time consuming and costly training within that segment of the workforce is wasteful.
- b.) Training for central office staff when telephony is employed for home health aides, homemakers and companions is generally not intense. Many telephony systems seamlessly integrate with an agency's existing backend system performing billing, payroll and scheduling functions. Accordingly, training for central office staff is minimized to unique telephony features such as announcement capabilities and unique reports associated with the telephony system. In most cases, central office staff training can be performed in less than two hours
- c.) In many cases non skilled workers will shun employment if required to employ devices they fear are too technical for their capabilities
- d.) Studies indicate that patients often sense more technical devices employed by non skilled workers in the home create a barrier to their personal care
- e.) Unfortunately due to the high turnover and related issues faced by agencies relative to non professional staff, expensive devices are often lost or never returned to the agency
- f.) Unlike telephony, often the more technical devices do not provide a means or cost effective approach to verifying the caregiver was actually in the home or was there for the length of time being billed, thus exposing the agency to fraud and abuse claims.
- g.) Often to be effective, such sophisticated technical devices require infrastructure, like wi fi or G3 connectivity to function as designed and to-date those infrastructure systems are not uniform or come at a significant additional monthly cost.
- 4.) Several telephony systems offer an effective means of communicating with non-skilled field staff. Those telephony vendors offer an announcement feature that allows the central office to create and deliver messages for their field staff. At least one system offers a mechanism whereby unique messages germane to the patient's care can also be cost effectively delivered to workers in that patient's home. No cell phones and costly monthly contracts are necessary to effectuate that solution.
For these and other reasons, homecare agencies wishing to benefit from the rapid growth being experienced by the industry, especially in the areas of home health aide, homemaker and companion visits, would do well to consider utilizing a telephony system for the documentation of such visits.
©2010 Don O'Rourke. All rights reserved.
Don O'Rourke has been the President of Dial-N-Document® since the company's founding in 1997. He graduated from law school in 1973 and served as a law clerk to the senior judge for the US Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals and thereafter enjoyed a successful career as a senior partner for a law firm. In 1984 Mr. O'Rourke started focusing exclusively on activities involving the healthcare industry and in 1997 became a cofounder of Dial-N-Document®, a telephony-based clinical documentation system focused primarily on the home healthcare industry. Dial-N-Document® has partnership relationships with several of PPS Plus Software partners, including HealthMEDX and Sansio.
Get In Touch
Call us at 888-897-9136 about support, assistance, service issues or any other questions. Or...
Contact Us Online