Communication
technology in home health care is critical to consumer satisfaction, yet many
providers remain behind the times — something all-too-obvious to their
customers. In all other aspects of their lives, home-based care customers are
accustomed to real-time communication with easy-to-use technology.

Yet
when these same people are dealing with a home health agency, that experience
is vastly different.

A
July 2020 survey from Citus Health and Home
Health Care News revealed that while 74% of home-based care providers hope
that a deeper investment in technology will increase patient and family
satisfaction, 44% of providers do not yet use a platform to directly engage
these stakeholders, while only about a quarter of these agencies claimed to be
“completely satisfied” with their current family engagement technology.

Home health patients and
their families consider this a problem. After all, if people can get real-time
updates on the pizza they’ve ordered or a package being delivered, they in turn
believe they should get that same level of timely communication when they are
receiving care in the home.

This difference between
the experience these patients and family members have with communication tools
in their daily lives compared to the experience they have with home health
providers creates a significant communication gap.

“Unfortunately, home
health and hospice industries are largely communicating with patients and
caregivers through legacy methods such as phone and email,” says Rob Stoltz,
Vice President of Business Development at Citus Health. “We haven’t kept up
with the families that surround those patients, who are running their
day-to-day lives using more modern technology.”

It
is time for agencies to focus on improving the experience of patients and
family caregivers through secure, real-time messaging, video chats, custom
forms that conduct surveys and assessments, electronic signatures and other
tools that expedite important communication and documentation — all flowing
directly into the provider’s electronic health record (EHR). Here is a look at
what that communication gap looks like for home health providers, and how they
can close it.

COVID-19 exposes home
health’s communication technology gap

Face-to-face meetings
between home health agencies and patients and their caregivers are essential to
giving people a positive experience during troubling times. COVID-19 has
obviously limited those. Yet the pandemic did not create home health’s
communication challenge, Stoltz says. It merely amplified it — for two reasons.

First, as people adjust
to a socially distanced lifestyle, they are becoming more accustomed to virtual
communications, and the real-time immediacy it comes with.

Second, face-to-face
health meetings might diminish, but the needs that those meetings filled have
not. These needs might be directly care-based — the telehealth component — but
there are documentation needs, such as signing physician orders, or confirming
delivery of durable medical equipment.

“Patients and family members
want a solution that enables virtual communication, and once they find out how
convenient that is, the demand grows,” Stoltz says. “This need for real-time
communication will stick around well past COVID.”

Implementing a modern
technology solution

Home health agencies now
have many solutions at their disposal to address these communication
challenges, meaning they can modernize their technology tools while
consolidating others. These tools deliver a range of benefits, with different
value and functions. Virtual visits and video chats bring a personalized,
reassuring touch in between in-person visits. Electronic documentation tools
improve logistical challenges by making it easier to capture signatures.

Secure text messaging,
meanwhile, is ideal for real-time communications. As Stoltz notes, that
capability now runs in both directions, from the provider to the caregiver and
the caregiver to the provider.

“How are we responding
to patients and family caregivers today? If the answer is that we’re playing
phone tag, that’s not a great answer,” Stoltz says. “If families can reach out
electronically and we can get them an immediate response, that’s incredibly
valuable.”

Stoltz explains that for
home health care providers, rather than employing several tools to address
these needs, many are turning to Citus Health to deliver all of this in just
one solution. Providers can accomplish all of their critical communication
needs in one easy-to-use option, while empowering patients and caregivers to be
more proactive in their care efforts.

Capturing best outcomes

Improving communication
in all areas of the home health care engagement leads to a series of vital
outcomes that providers want. Above all else, of course, are reduced
hospitalizations, as home health agencies are able to address urgent patient
needs immediately, before the family caregiver dials 911.

Consumer satisfaction
also rises, since increased communication means that treatment happens faster
for patients, as do modifications for that treatment. This leads to happier
patients, happier caregivers and, ultimately, stronger ties to referral
sources.

Consumers may also
reward home health agencies that deliver real-time communication with a higher
census and better reviews. In a striking result of the September 2020 report
published by Citus Health and Porter Research, 80% of hospice family caregivers stated that they would select one hospice
provider over another — and give that hospice higher ratings on the CAHPS
hospice survey — based on whether that hospice enabled real-time communication
via computer, tablet and smartphone.

While this was a hospice
study, logic says that the same applies to home health agencies who depend on
HHCAHPS scores to best position themselves for more referrals. For home health
agencies, a high level of consumer satisfaction may also lead to a repeat
customer down the road.

“It
just makes sense from a patient and caregiver perspective, that if I as a
family caregiver can interact quickly with my care team in real time, I’m going
to give your agency higher satisfaction scores,” Stolz says. “And in the future
if I need home health care, I’m going to remember how easy it was to work with
you. In this way, the home health care consumer behaves like they do with every
other consumer facing industry.”

To learn more about how Citus Health can help your
company enhance its virtual care delivery, visit CitusHealth.com.