With the Covid-19 pandemic stretching the capacities of healthcare facilities and the U.S. facing a rapidly aging population, there is plenty of business coming to home care providers. As a result, many companies have sprung up to cater to the need for home care services, making it suddenly a very competitive field.
The competition for business means that quality of service and efficiency are the main differentiators from one provider to the next. To stay competitive, you need well-trained and motivated people on your team to ensure you achieve your business goals.
Why Scheduler Training Is Crucial For Your Business
As the first point of contact with your organization, your home care scheduling professionals play a crucial role in the satisfaction of both your clients and caregivers. For this reason, you need to offer a proper training plan that will help new hires and your current scheduling staff.
Adequate training of home care schedulers should focus on consistent and accessible access to care and optimize their cutting-edge scheduling solutions like First Visit. You make work easier for your staff and empower your clients to take control of their well-being.
Mistakes That Well-Trained Schedulers And Reliable Software Can Help You Avoid
Everybody makes mistakes sometimes. Unfortunately, when it comes to business, learning from your mistakes can be extremely costly. Even a simple mistake could cost you money, time, or even worse, a client for a home care agency. Scheduling home care for clients is tricky for many agencies because of many constantly moving pieces to consider, from overtime considerations and client preferences to caregiver availability and more.
Adequate training of your home care schedulers and cutting edge software like First Visit offers optimized, error-free, and HIPAA-compliant services to your clients while helping you avoid the following costly mistakes:
● Bad matchmaking: Matching your caregivers and clients is an essential part of the home care scheduling process. Suppose your agency only focuses on connecting your clients with the next available caregiver without trying to find the best match. In that case, you are missing an essential part of your scheduling process. First Visit allows your schedulers to match the caregiver best suited to your client’s needs by collecting necessary client care documentation.
● Assuming your whole team is in the loop: Caring for your clients involves many people — your caregivers, care managers, healthcare providers, the client’s family, and the scheduler. First Visit offers an innovative scheduling solution that stores and tracks your caregivers’ schedules and your client data within one convenient location that ensures everyone involved has up-to-date information at their fingertips.
● Poor time management: An untrained scheduler could take hours creating a weekly schedule, wasting precious time that your agency should spend offering the best home care experience possible to your clients, building up referral relationships, and grow your business. With First Visit’s home care scheduling solution, you can considerably flatten the learning curve for your team while you reduce the time you spend on your scheduling, so you get more time to spend on other tasks.
Elements Of Effective Training For Home Care Scheduling Professionals
To help your agency avoid the mistakes above, you need to provide training that focuses on:
1. Providing The Soft Skills Needed To Succeed
The term soft skills, also known as interpersonal skills or “people skills,” refers to all of the personal behaviors and attitudes that an individual could use to associate with others productively and professionally.
With good people skills, your home care scheduler will demonstrate self-awareness, problem-solving ability, excellent communication, empathy, flexibility, time management, and a strong work ethic. All these qualities are crucial for the role.
Before bringing a new hire on board, you should realize that it is impossible to teach most of these soft skills, so your hiring manager must ensure that you only employ people with these abilities. On the flip side, if a potential scheduler has excellent interpersonal skills, they would still make a wonderful addition to your team, as long as they receive training in the other aspects of the job.
2. Observe Applicable State Regulations When Training
Home care is a strictly regulated industry that has volumes of compliance requirements and rules. Although the home care business can be lucrative, your team needs to know the rules to ensure that you are operating legally and that you are eligible to receive insurance or Medicare payments.
Your home care agency is subject to regulations that vary from one state to the next, and your schedulers, along with the rest of your staff, need adequate training on what they can and can not do.
Automating your home care scheduling with First Visit takes the guesswork out of your operational processes, ensuring that your team stays compliant by default.
3. Emphasis On Successful Caregiver/Client Matching
As mentioned above, simply connecting whichever caregiver who has an open schedule with the client is likely to result in a mismatch that could be costly to your business. Your training should involve teaching your schedulers to analyze your client’s needs and the caregiver’s abilities so that they can put the right pair together.
According to the research agency Home Care Pulse, there are six critical factors that your training should emphasize to ensure that they can make the best client/caregiver match. Three matches that stand out the most are:
● The client’s medical needs matched their caregiver’s qualifications.
● The client’s physical requirements should match a caregiver’s physical ability.
● The client’s location should match the caregiver’s ability to travel to the site easily.
First Visit Empowers Your Schedulers To Be More Productive
Clearly, training your home care agency’s scheduling staff is critical to the success of your business. However, no matter how well trained the scheduler is, they will occasionally make mistakes or overlook something important if you use a manual system.
However, First Visit Software provides your home care schedulers with powerful tools that will help them work faster and smarter, ensure your company’s compliance with regulations, and maintain the satisfaction of your clients and caregivers.
