5 Ways for your Home Care Agency to Deal with Margin Squeeze

The increasing demand for home-based care services amidst the aging population brings both challenges as well as opportunities for providers. Despite the growth in spending, declining reimbursement rates and rising labor costs are putting pressure on agency margins. 

Here are 5 strategies to overcome these challenges: 

1. Engage and retain your caregivers 

Employee turnover can be very expensive for a home-based care provider, from searching for new candidates all the way through training. 

HomeCarePulse identified that it could cost upwards of 60% of an employee’s annual earnings to replace them, which can add up to over $10,000 to replace just one employee. Now if you have multiple employees leave, this can become overwhelming and have a negative impact on your bottom line.  

It may sound counter-intuitive, but caregivers rank schedule accommodation as the number 1 reason for choosing to work for one agency vs another. The more you can retain your staff and attract great caregivers, the less cost you’ll incur recruiting and training new staff members. 

The key here is to utilize technology that incorporates maps and optimized visit routes to ensure schedules are convenient and efficient for both employees and clients. 

With AlayaCare, you can distribute schedules and shift offers directly to care providers via the AlayaCare Mobile App, and benchmark/measure productivity and financial progress through aggregate reports and analytics.    

2. Improve efficiencies with interoperability 

With new home care systems and software solutions being introduced into the market almost daily, care workers have the ability to be more informed and prepared for client visits than ever before.  

But the more tech systems agencies implement to help their employees be more productive, it can do the opposite and lead to inefficiencies when technology systems do not integrate.  

Overhead costs can increase if care coordinators spend a lot of time entering information into multiple systems or working with paper. Make sure your IT systems are integrated and working efficiently to reduce costs. 

AlayaCare is a cloud-based platform equipped with APIs and the ability to support third-party integrations; it is the closest thing to a true platform in home care and provides a combination of functionality, flexibility and efficiency to help meet your agency’s unique needs. 

“AlayaCare allows us to deploy the technology in a rapid manner. Competitive platforms don’t provide the integration capabilities, in my opinion, that AlayaCare can provide. The integration of the platform allows for rapid adoption.”

Option Care Health

3. Don’t let payments get denied! 

Inaccurate home care billing documentation can generate hours of rework and, even worse, delay reimbursement. 

It’s the agency’s responsibility to review and make sure all documentation is on file and accurate before transmitting the claim for payment. This is especially important when you are billing Medicaid because you need to make sure you have all the required documentation on file before you submit your claim for processing. 

To protect against denied payments, it’s important to have digital records of patient visits and services delivered. Using a smartphone app, such as AlayaCare, can provide GPS-tagged punch data and reporting to prove services were delivered. 

4. Optimize Schedules and Routes 

Continuity of care is essential, but having caregivers crisscross the city day after day can be inefficient.  

Commuting from patient to patient can be tiring and time-consuming, especially for caregivers who must use public transportation. Late or missed appointments, due to long commutes, are a common issue among caregivers.  

Using technology that optimizes schedules and routes can improve caregiver satisfaction and patient experience.  

With AlayaCare’s Schedule and Route Optimization features, schedulers and coordinators have the tools to ensure they are efficiently utilizing current staff to their maximum potential. 

“AlayaCare has helped us to achieve better outcomes on our scheduling and caregiver management, thereby creating a better work environment for our caregivers, but more consistent and continuity of their scheduling.”

Caprock Home Health Services

5. Leverage automation to improve efficiencies 

It’s estimated that agencies spend as much as one-third of their gross profit coordinating and supervising the care being delivered.   

Automated processes mean using machine learning approaches to achieve new levels of efficiency and success in areas that take up more time than they should, such as patient scheduling, medical billing and claims processing. 

Along with maximizing the talents of back-office and front-line staff and not wasting their time with work that can be automated, home-based care providers have an opportunity to save big money by reducing labor costs in more mundane, repetitive areas.   

How are other organizations looking at growing their business?

Learn how home-based care organizations are approaching financial health and growth strategy in today’s environment via the results of our survey report.