No home care agency makes a major technology change lightly. Brian Arant didn’t. As owner and executive director of Visiting Angels in Pueblo, Colorado, Arant knew that he wanted to improve client experience while making his operation paperless, and he needed a responsive technology partner to do both.

Starting last July and concluding this January, Arant switched his company’s client technology platform to AlayaCare. Now, as spring gives way to summer, the results are clear: happier clients due to increased information transparency, and a weekly time savings of about two to three hours due to the removal of manual data entry.

“The goal is to get the client the best experience they have as quickly as we can,” Arant says. “The less we’re bogged down with paperwork the more we can pay attention to them.”

When clients and family members can more easily access their data in real time, everybody wins. That added transparency is one of three ways that family technology can improve the client experience. The others, quality assurance and EVV compliance, are just as important.

Data transparency

In our modern real-time world, consumers view transparency as table stakes. It’s no wonder then that home care residents and their family members — along with home care staff members and caregivers — want real-time information too, something made possible by technology platforms such as AlayaCare, which Visiting Angels is now using.

“Their system is like the dashboard on your car,” Arant says. “It gives you everything you need.”

AlayaCare’s cloud-based home health care software helps home care agencies such as Visiting Angels optimize operations, scale their business, retain employees and, most importantly, deliver better care.

“I liked the map that they had on their dashboard — that really caught my attention,” Arant says about his first experience with AlayaCare. “It gives you a 20,000-foot view. You can see how far your care staff is spread out across your territory.”

AlayaCare tailors its systems to each client’s specific needs. For Visiting Angels, that includes combatting the low connectivity and cell service in mountainous areas of Colorado. The dashboard is updated in real-time, accessible anywhere, so that communication is uninterrupted. New information is clearly documented so that everyone involved in a client’s care has clarity and shares the same expectations.

Premium features such as AlayaCare’s Family Portal offers a secure, online tool for clients, providers and authorized family members to not only access their health care information from any device, anywhere, but be active participants in their own care plans, too. Clients and their families can manage a host of information, such as their care plans, schedules, medications and vitals, while also completing self-assessments and clinical forms within the portal.

They can even share their medical information with family members, all while remaining safe at home.

Staff members, meanwhile, can access real-time updates on schedules, care plans and payments via AlayaCare’s Family Portal. This brings new levels of efficiency to back-office staff, who no longer need to call individual clients if there are changes to care plans or schedules, along with new insight and visibility for home care executives.

“A lot of clients we deal with are computer-savvy, and they would love to have a portal that they can go into without having to call the office all the time,” he says. “That gives them information whenever they want it, and means that we don’t have to field calls after hours. It makes the sons and daughters happy because they can see this whenever they want.”

Quality assurance and experience management

Providing full transparency goes hand-in-hand with quality care. Having the right technology tools in place are key to enabling quality care, while monitoring and measuring care is a must.

That’s where home care’s leading provider of quality assurance and experience management, Home Care Pulse, comes in.

Home Care Pulse provides both experience surveys and award-winning caregiver training, allowing home care agencies to get clear insights and take definitive action to continually improve the quality of care they provide. Joining forces with AlayaCare helps them deliver actionable data and feedback from clients and caregivers, enabling all involved to work smarter to increase quality of care and improve client satisfaction.

“The success of any home care agency rides on the quality of care it provides to clients,” says Home Care Pulse COO Todd Austin. “A consistent client experience results in more referrals and business growth while inconsistencies result in frustrated clients and loss of business growth.”

“Likewise, the solution to employee turnover is to understand employee experience at a deep level and focus on the areas that matter most,” Austin says. “We integrate with companies like AlayaCare so that agencies can avoid time-consuming manual data entry and rapidly get actionable insights.”

The Home Care Pulse integration automatically keeps client/caregiver lists up to date in the Home Care Pulse system so that agencies receive detailed survey data with very little effort from their own teams. With the legwork done for them by the integration, agencies can focus on using the survey data to pinpoint areas to improve and start taking action.

Understanding data and the trends it reveals enables agencies to make confident decisions and focus on the value they bring to clients, ensuring priorities by clients are consistently met, risk is adequately managed, transparency is maintained and service is customized for each client.

EVV compliance

Quality of care is central to the final way that technology can improve client experience, and that is with electronic visit verification, or EVV. Implementing a home care software solution that includes EVV and real-time updates ensure that providers clock in and out of their visits as scheduled.

AlayaCare’s home care software is an all-in-one, cloud-based solution with an incorporated mobile, GPS-based EVV that works seamlessly across all modules. That flexibility is essential, as home care agencies nationwide continue to grapple with the challenges of EVV as they face down their mandated implementation deadline of January 1, 2023.

For most agencies, those challenges include selecting an EVV vendor, as 41 states operate in an “open” EVV model, in which agencies can select their own EVV solution. For agencies in those states, AlayaCare is compliant with federal requirements and will work with agencies to ensure their compliance needs are met.

EVV, of course, is yet another way that agencies can create even more transparency for all involved in home care and hence continue to improve the client experience.

This article is sponsored by AlayaCare. For more essential steps to establishing a strong client experience, download for free the new, in-depth guide from AlayaCare and Home Care Pulse.