Is your home care agency leaving money on the table?
From our consulting experience, home care agencies have been leaving money on the table, not realizing how much they are losing in revenue and adding costs to their overhead. We have identified five common ways that home care agencies leave money on the table.
1. Having too many inexperienced staff
From management to billing and coordination, a lack of home care experience can significantly hurt your business. It's more than just having someone complete “tasks." Home care is a niche-based business. We have our own terminology and our unique ways of doing things. This doesn't mean that you can't hire staff that is new to home care however, it does mean you must invest in the training and education of your new staff to meet the needs of your customers, vendors, regulator bodies, and business associates. Ownership must understand how management can support the new hire effectively, and most importantly, monitor them closely so that they continue to be an excellent fit for your company.
Emmanuel Consulting Agency has been in the industry since 2015, helping to educate, train, and consult with agencies, build effective teams, and cut agency costs. This has been our mission to help agencies thrive, stay in compliance, and increase revenues. Don't skim on investing and training competent staff. Your patients will boast about your agency all on their own! (Great way to effectively market for free!) Learn about our LHCSA Executive training.
2. Not developing a clear job description, workflow, and or system
Many agencies have been doing the same things for years just because "that is how our old DPS or Manager did it." Techniques are broken, inefficient, or even nonexistent. How do you know if a staff member should be rewarded with a bonus or raise? How do you measure employee success without a workflow or blueprint? Some Management staff members have no idea what staff members actually do all day or how long a task generally takes to complete. So how can you be an effective manager if you do not know what it takes to do it? So many times, we have seen duplications in tasks by different departments, no accountability causing more money spent, confusion, and decreased company morale. Creating a step-by-step workflow enhances productivity, enforces accountability, and makes work more efficient, thus increasing revenue and increasing profitability. We develop concrete departmental workflows and Standard Operational Procedures.
Let us help you create a workflow to streamline your processes, and tighten loopholes or workarounds. Identifying clear roles and tweaking job descriptions will be a great benefit to improve your overall operations. Your agency will be in a better position if someone suddenly quits, has to be terminated, or needs a new hire to identify their duties and understand their responsibilities clearly. It would also make training new staff more seamless and a tangible tool to reference when needed to decrease learning curves. This will give them a great chance at success in their new role! Going a step further and customizing these workflows and blueprints in your employees' top languages can take your business to a new level!
3. Not working with third-party Consultants to help lower risks, stay in compliance, and identify ways to grow your business
Consultants can help your business in many ways. We have seen what works and what doesn't. We have learned, understood, and received clarity on home care regulations. We train, analyze, project-manage, identify and solve agency issues. Hiring a Home Care business Consultant can help you identify your agency's strengths and weaknesses and position yourself for growth or continued growth. Conclusion: many types of consultants can include Clinical, Compliance, Accounting, Risk Assessment, Human Resources, Quality, Business, and Regulatory Consultants. Investing in your business to ensure you are meeting all compliance, protecting your business, growing/streamlining processes through technological advancements, language advancements, recruitment/ career growth, or acquisition will position your agency to maximize profits.
4. Not going digital/ or fully digital
Since EVV was for Medicaid recipients, we have seen improvements in technological advancements and how computers/software can be more efficient and take fewer employees to do the most work if used correctly. However, remember always to utilize all the features of digital products to maximize your investment. Many times, agencies will use one component in a software system but still do other things manually. This also hurts your bottom line. If you are not using all the features, you can to improve your agency, you could be losing money. All software systems are different, so work with your vendors to get things the way you need them for your own customer/agency experience. Taking the time to do this is worth all of the money. Not implementing all the computer systems and their components has been significant in leaving dollars on the table. You are paying the entire bill for the system but not using all the aspects to help your business grow. Take the time to train staff, implement, monitor, and evaluate the systems fully to get the best value. We can help project manage to get you in full implementation mode.
5. Not using all the reporting features on compliance software - features made to help you analyze your agency compliance and productivity.
Management should utilize reporting features, analyze them against previous reports, and quantify the trends to improve your home care program. Numbers help you to understand how your business is functioning. If you do not have a baseline or the ability to analyze progress continuously, it will be tough for your staff to understand where they are falling short or doing well. It also prevents managers from providing support to staff effectively on a day-to-day basis. You may see that employees may continuously fall into the same issues, which leads to burnout. It's like running a business blindly. It is important to measure if you are using all of the authorized hours allocated for each patient, or how to prevent overtime or utilization in hours by running reports. Moreover, reports that help identify how many caregivers visited a patient in a specified time frame can show if continuity and quality care is being rendered.
Additionally, reports that identify when authorizations are received to when services are rendered can show timeliness in receiving care. Similar information on the recruitment and retention side can also determine how fast you are onboarding new caregivers or where in the process you may be losing prospective employees. This can help you save on big bucks when you realize loopholes in your human resource department and recruitment or perhaps identify your competitors' advantages. Who wants to have an orientation class of 50 new employees but only 5 employees are hired and work with your agency? That means that your HR department kept busy onboarding people who never made one dollar for your company. You're falling way in the negative from paying your HR salary, paying overhead on space, software, fingerprinting, and so many other areas.
If you need assistance structuring your home care agency and getting compliant contact us.