Most agency owners are driven to enter the home care industry for similar reasons: to deliver exceptionally compassionate care, as they want their own family to receive. And their clients thrive receiving empathetic, expert care from these organizations. But the owners’ evenings and weekends? Not so much.
Home care agencies often start on paper and become more digital by gradually adding scheduling programs, online document drives, billing spreadsheets and other apps. While these features promise to save time and make your life easier, they often don’t deliver.
These were some of the challenges faced by Sonja Schreiner, Co-Owner and Director of Care at Beyond Expectations, a private duty home care agency located in Minneapolis, MN.
Home care is in Sonja’s blood – her mother Lesa has been a private home care nurse for 30 years. After becoming a Registered Nurse herself and working in assisted living for several years, Sonja and her husband Brett opened Beyond Expectations in 2015 under Lesa’s mentorship.
While some agency owners measure success as the number of clients served or staff employed, Sonja Schreiner is driven by quality. For Sonja and her team, “making every day the best it can be” is their ultimate bottom line. And the results speak for themselves. And many of Beyond Expectations’ referrals are the family members of other clinicians collaborating with Sonja’s team.
Sonja and Brett used various resources to manage the agency –a scheduling app, Google Drive with paper back-up copies, billing via spreadsheets and manual payroll tracking. There were issues – you couldn’t tell when someone else had updated a document, forms were saved in inconsistent locations and it wasn’t completely secure. But it worked well enough. Until Beyond Expectations was audited.
The Schreiners spent several stressful weeks chasing down documents across Google Drive, computer folders and physical copies in their filing cabinets. They knew they had all the information but were frustrated by the hassle of finding it. While they passed the audit with flying colors, the process left a bitter taste in Sonja’s mouth.
Hoping to get all Beyond Expectations’ tasks, processes and forms into one program, she looked into home care software options. Most were too medical and many seemed like they would be hard to learn. “I didn’t want anyone to feel flustered,” shares Sonja.
When Rafael Pavlovic from FirstVisit reached out, Sonja was immediately impressed. FirstVisit seemed intuitive, easy-to-use and customized to Beyond Expectation’s service lines.
Using FirstVisit, agency owners and caregivers can access the information they need to deliver exceptional and efficient care to their clients. Home care is profoundly personal. Caregivers need to focus on their clients, not on troubleshooting technology.
FirstVisit enables agencies like Beyond Expectations to deliver higher quality care with intuitive yet powerful client management features like visit history, ADL checklists, cloud document storage and care plans. All easily and quickly accessed on the caregiver mobile app. It simplifies home care leaders’ lives with insightful reporting features and flexible scheduling support, including push notification shift offers, integrated invoicing and more.
Sonja was ready to get started after a few demos and team discussions. They onboarded quickly, but adjusting to a new system was tough during a busy period.
Making operational changes, such as new software, often comes with surprises for any business. And FirstVisit’s team turned this challenge into an opportunity to provide exceptional service and support.
Sonja’s account manager immediately took action to ensure her team had an excellent experience and to enhance the platform’s features for other private duty agencies. “Sonja was pivotal in forming how we test and develop new features for our customers,” says FirstVisit Product Manager – Ryan Holaday.
In consultation with the Beyond Expectations team, FirstVisit developed and released several features that agencies love:
Now that Beyond Expectations is running on FirstVisit, their clients, staff and leaders are experiencing the benefits:
As other business owners know, taking time off work is often nearly impossible. But now that Beyond Expectations is running more efficiently, Sonja and Brett were able to step away for a family vacation.
So what’s next for them?
Agencies using FirstVisit’s platform, designed for small to medium-sized private duty agencies, spend less time on billing, payroll and scheduling and spend more time delivering excellent care to their clients. Join them.
Learn more about the compassionate, high-quality services provided by Beyond Expectations.
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