If you run a home care business, it can be to stay on top of things. Between recruiting staff, talking to clients, scheduling your staff, and ensuring excellent homekeeping, you can lose track of time and fail to meet your daily goals. Also, using a paper-based system to plan your day, track activities, and dispersing new timetables to the caregivers becomes harder. Fortunately, with the right home care scheduling software, you can streamline your schedules and make your operations smoother.
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of care agency scheduling software.
1. Time Management
Creating the perfect schedule is a time-consuming process. In the traditional method, you need to contact each caregiver on-call or email, jolt down their availability, and play around with the hours. Once done, you have to call all the caregivers again and hope that they take the schedule. Creating one schedule for the week could take hours, and you’d require more time when a caregiver is unavailable to cover their shift.
Home care scheduling software saves time by providing an easy-to-use modern platform. You can copy, paste, delete, change, and save schedules as needed. With the tap of a button, you can distribute your program to the caregivers and receive immediate responses. When the caregivers accept the program, the software automatically creates a schedule you can share with the team.
2. Better Emergency Management
You never know when a talented caregiver may call in sick or take a sudden leave of absence due to a personal emergency. Finding a replacement and ensuring your client receives the home care they require can be challenging if you rely on personal calls and paper-based schedules.
Fortunately, with the right care agency scheduling software, you can reach out to all available caregivers on a single platform. You can share the message in a business group or send individual chats to each caregiver. The caregivers can respond quickly, and you can fill the schedule at the last minute.
What’s more, you can receive prompt alerts on any changes and improve your response time. This way, your home care business maintains an excellent record with the clients, and you can avoid negative reviews. For example, if one of your clients misses an appointment or is late for one, you can flag the activity as a high priority to quickly have the next caregiver on it
3. Connect The Right Caregiver to The Right Client
Home care is a naturally personal and invasive business. Your caregivers become part of the clients’ lives due to the nature of the activities they handle. In between the homecare, personal care, homemaking, and companionship, a rapport is necessary. This is why you need to schedule each caregiver with the right client.
Should a client prefer a specific caregiver, try as much as possible to match them. Of course, your schedule will also vary based on other criteria, such as:
- Distance: If a caregiver lives close to a client, it’s best to send them to that location and save transport costs
- Availability: You can adapt the schedule to match a caregiver’s availability and a client’s time constraints.
- Experience: Certain clients may require assistance from an experienced caregiver.
It’s easy to record your scheduling criteria and highlight each caregiver and client’s characteristics on software. As you schedule, you’ll remember each factor and prepare your shifts accordingly.
4. Improve Employee Engagement
Due to home care’s intimate nature, it’s essential to check on your employees and ensure that they’re satisfied with your programs. A frustrated caregiver may take out their anger on a client or provide substandard services, reflecting poorly on your home care business. Also, frustrated employees are more likely to quit work and seek employment among competitors.
If your workers end up waiting for you to print tomorrow’s schedule and share it on a notice board every day, they become upset. They want the convenience of a fast, electronic, and standard document to count on during work.
Streamlined schedules save time for the employees and ensure that they receive alerts whenever you adjust the program. What’s more, the management and the caregivers can cut back on administrative tasks that are tiring and time-consuming. For example, without electronic schedules, most caregivers have to call the home care agency and write down their schedules for the week or month.
A simple document available on a laptop or phone saves time during sharing, is easy to view throughout the day and week, and reduces opportunities for errors and misplacement. Ultimately, your workforce becomes satisfied with efficient scheduling systems.
5. Digital Onboarding
When you hire a new caregiver, it’s essential to take them through the onboarding process and prepare them for work. Digital schedules enhance digital onboarding because it’s easier to share plans with the new workers. You can train them on how to quickly use the software and have them receive schedules, share messages, and ask for alternative shifts in no time.
6. Reduce Errors
Do you often find that you scheduled a client for servicing twice or sent a caregiver to the wrong location? How about forgetting to change the shift for an absent worker or calling a caregiver early in the morning to inform them of an error in the schedule they took home? Errors confuse workers and prevent you from providing an excellent experience to both caregivers and clients.
Care agency scheduling software minimizes errors by creating a clear record that’s unchangeable and distributed to all. Once you make a schedule, the software automatically saves it to prevent multiple copies. All the caregivers receive a similar program and send alerts if they notice mistakes. You can make adjustments quickly and reshare one document that’s easy to trace should a problem come up.
With the right documents, it’s also easy to track workers and mistakes as soon as they happen. When you receive a complaint, you can follow it to a specific worker through the schedule and decide on the appropriate action.
FirstVisit Home Care Scheduling Software
Our software helps your care agency business by improving your scheduling. You can cut back on scheduling time and costs, create distribution convenience, make adjustments, and send fast alerts whenever necessary.
Contact us today and find out how FirstVisit creates efficiency in your home care scheduling.
