TECHNOLOGY & SOFTWARE Paperless Homecare


Mike Williams, Managing Director at Tagtronics, explores the benefits a paperless system brings to homecare businesses and discusses how the transition can be much easier than you might expect.


With homecare demand continuing to rise, there’s a huge opportunity for homecare businesses to scale. However, balancing growth plans with the rising pressures facing carers is critical for team retention, efficiency and long-term business success.


There’s no question that homecare has a digital future, with the CQC now embracing paperless systems for homecare businesses to secure an ‘outstanding’ rating. However, shiſting to a digital system doesn’t need to be complicated, and it has the potential to unlock benefits beyond CQC ‘box ticking’.


PERSON-CENTRED CARE


Offering person-centred care is becoming increasingly important, but time, budget and capacity constraints can make achieving this challenging.


Paperless systems centralise patient data – creating a complete pool of data in one place. This ultimately takes the pressure off carers and system users, giving those responsible the insight they need to identify any missed medication, or missed, late, short or long visits, quickly, so they can make real time changes to care plans. Should an incident arise, the carers are able to record this immediately to the system, ensuring it’s escalated and handled quickly by the responsible individual, care manager or registered manager.


REAL-TIME INSIGHTS AND REPORTING


Digital care systems offer complete data transparency – offering real time quality assurance. This gives you greater control ahead of care quality inspections, so you can easily identify areas for improvement. It also highlights critical information and performance metrics, as well as notifying you of any updates, such as when capacity is maxed out, or carer qualifications or certificates need to be renewed, for example.


“Paperless systems centralise patient data – creating a complete pool of data in one place.”


Taking a digital approach to care ultimately saves admin time, as carers can get quickly up to speed on previous visits and complete pre-set forms digitally, uploading them to the business reporting system in real-time. This enables your carers to focus on what they do best – caring for people – so they can deliver a more personal service to patients. In turn, this impacts their overall experience with your business, which will show on your bottom line.


By continually learning from service user preferences and integrating these with staff rotas, a digital system can also ensure each patient has a regular carer or team of carers, helping you to achieve consistency of care.


MINIMISE MISTAKES


Paper-based systems are prone to mistakes, such as medication errors or missed visits, as there is a heavy reliance on carers interpreting one another’s notes or handwriting. When mistakes occur, it can take time to identify these, as paper logs are oſten only collected and recorded in the central system on a weekly, or even monthly, basis. This lag in updates can delay critical information from reaching care managers, prolonging essential updates to the service user’s care plan.


- 22 - SAVE TIME AND IMPROVE EFFICIENCY


Typing up daily care notes, filling out care plans, alongside other admin activities associated with paper-based systems can take up a lot of valuable carer time. Additionally, with a paper-based solution, almost every daily care activity has associated impacts on capacity (carer time) and budgets (for example, fuel or transport costs):


Updating care plans – with a digital system, these can be updated by care managers remotely, allowing for more frequent and timely updates.


Collecting/replacing daily care notes or MAR charts – instead of holding these in individual service users’ homes, paperless systems store these centrally, meaning the most recent documents can be accessed immediately, from anywhere. This also backs-up the files safely, so they won’t be lost or damaged.


Updating MAR charts – with paperless systems, you can have greater control over MAR charts, enabling you to amend them quickly and easily with new or updated medications, for example.


Creating, updating and communicating staff rotas – digital systems can streamline this process, as it recommends care rotas based on team capacity, care continuity, location of surrounding visits for maximum efficiency and service user preferences. These rotas can be updated at any point by care managers – for example when needing to organise cover – with teams immediately seeing the updated versions.


Updating timesheets for payroll or billing – paperless systems keep track of timesheet information in real time, integrating with payroll and billing processes to save admin time from carers or care managers.


www.tomorrowscare.co.uk


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