Has your agency ever experienced the struggle of scheduling the right clinician for the right patient? An important step in providing quality post acute care is having the right home healthcare scheduling software. Without the right tools in your EMR, scheduling becomes frustrating, stressful, and disorganized.
In this article, we will discuss the challenges that agencies can face with their home healthcare scheduling software and how better software can help solve those challenges.
Home Healthcare Scheduling Software Challenges
There are many obstacles that agencies face on a daily basis. One of these challenges is scheduling.
Below are some challenges that can happen while scheduling:
- Finding the right clinician for the right patient
- Prevention of double booking
- Ensuring clinicians are aware of schedule changes
- Inputting clinician schedules manually every week
- Ensuring scheduled care follows payor authorizations or Plan of Care
- Managing agency overtime goals
- And more….
The challenges of scheduling can go on and will vary by agency and lines of business served.. However, the main point is an agency needs software that helps with scheduling, keeps up with alerts, and can help the User schedule the right clinician for the right patient within payor rules.
Scheduling Software within KanTime
In the previous section, we listed some of the challenges that many agencies can face with scheduling. Inside KanTime’s scheduling software, agencies are able to tackle those obstacles and more. Users don’t need to worry about open schedules, manually inputting schedules each week, finding the right clinician, etc.
KanTime does it right the first time.
Configurable Attribute Matching Tool
Scheduling the right clinician is vital in the post acute care setting. Patients deserve to have quality care at home. In fact, KanTime has a remarkable tool inside their scheduling system that helps select the right clinician for the right patient.
While searching for a clinician, the system validates against service time frames, vacation, required qualifications, double bookings, overtime impacts, and more. This feature helps prevent errors that could potentially occur if this was done manually, or on a software that doesn’t have a configurable attribute matching tool and significantly enhances efficiency.
Below is how the configurable attribute matching tool works:
- The user goes into the scheduling tab to see which shift still needs to be filled for the week.
- Once the day is selected, a search criteria box pops up, and the user can pick which attributes the patient needs/wants in a clinician.
- Some of the attribute categories include:
- Required skills
- Patient and clinician preferences
- Assigned Region or Team
- Control of Clinician OverTime
- Many of the actual attributes are configurable at the agency level
- Once the search criteria is filled out, a list of clinicians populates that meets the required criteria and can be further sorted by things like distance from the patient’s home and turn by turn directions to the patient’s home. This empowers the user to rapidly choose which clinician is best suited for the specific patient.
An agency with a configurable attribute matching tool knows with confidence that they are delivering qualified quality patient care everytime.
Configurable Dashboard Alerts
In KanTime, the User’s dashboard can inform them of schedules and items that need to be addressed immediately.
Some items that the dashboard will send an alert about are:
-
Open schedules
- How many patient schedules don’t have a clinician assigned to them.
-
Unconfirmed schedules
- Schedules that clinicians haven’t acknowledged or confirmed on their dashboard yet.
-
Pending Check in
- The clinician has not yet checked in to their visit.
-
Double booking
- A clinician has two visits scheduled at the same time. (when properly configured, this can be prevented from the start)
KanTime’s scheduling module works for agencies because it alerts the User in near real time of any items that need attention right away.
Drag and Drop Modifications and Repeat Schedule Generation
Two important scheduling features that KanTime has are the ability to perform repeat schedule generation and drag and drop modifications.
With repeat scheduling, KanTime software is able to schedule out the period of care, episode, or however long the authorization allows:
- Every week, every other week, every three weeks, etc. while meeting the patient’s and clinician’s availability.
KanTime’s drag and drop date modification function alerts the User if there is a conflict with moving the visit to a different date.
For example:
- If the schedule change causes a double booking event for a clinician, KanTime would alert the User that there needs to be a staffing change.
- If there is a change that moves the visit outside the Medicare week, or other payor rule, KanTime would return the visit back to the original date and alert the User about the problem.
- If the change would cause the generation of overtime and this is configured to be blocked, KanTime would alert the user.
With KanTime’s home healthcare scheduling software, agencies are provided the tools necessary to assign the right clinician efficiently and deliver quality patient care every time.
KanTime manages by exception and does it right the first time.
To find out more about how better happens, visit our website or request a demo today!
