The home health industry is an ever expanding one, as the number of elderly people grows, so does their need for support. To be able to provide an elderly person with the assistance they need to stay in their own homes is a great service to our community as a whole. For every person that is able to continue living in their own home, that is one less burden on an already overcrowded public health care system. For a home health care agency to operate succesfully and be of value, they need to have a streamlined way in which to track their clients, scheduling, staffing an financials. A decent network setup and a good home health software package is imperative, as is staff training to ensure that everyone knows how to use it correctly.

There are four main areas that should be addressed by any good home health care software; scheduling, in order to ensure that your clients are getting the care needed when they need it, financial, so that you are not spending a fortune on accountancy bills, patient contact details, so that you have a complete history of their care, and staffing, in order to ensure your clinicians and nursing staff are given the support they need to do their job.

The scheduling module should be the place that pulls in all other data. You should be able to record the date and time of the request, along with the name of the staff members that took the call. It should also give you the ability to record where the patient was referred from. Ideally referring doctors and hospitals should only ever need to be entered into the system once. If a previous patient has been referred by the same entity, then it should be available in a drop down list in order to minimise the need for data entry. When recording scheduling information, the home healthcare software should provide plenty of room for notes, and group those notes into categories for ease of searching in the future.


On top of everything else though, the biggest benefit of having a scheduling module available is the automation of assigning clinicians and nursing staff to patients. This should be done using multiple variables. For instance, just because a clinician is available at the time an appointment is requested, does not mean that that staff member is the best one for the job. The clinicians proximity to the patient, and their individual qualifications should be other deciding factors that the software takes into account. This will ensure a better experience for both the client and the staff member.

Any home health care agency software should also be able to handle the financial transactions that occur within the organisation, and this module should cater for items specific to the health industry. Ideally, it will be able to handle Medicaid, Medicare and Insurance reporting requirements, as well as being able to issue and track invoices. You will benefit greatly from being able to customise the payment terms of individual customers, easy automation of overdue invoice flagging, and payment processing. You will probably want the ability to send invoices via mail merge or bulk email as well, and each customer should be able to designate a billing preference.

The patient themselves will obviously need their contact details stored within the system, as well as their medical history. There should be a history of every prior visit to that client that is easily searchable, along with a list of emergency contacts, medication details, and next of kin. For ease of scheduling, many home health agency software packages now provide the ability to tie the patients address details into the staffs gps systems, making navigation a breeze.

Finally, each staff member within the organisation should have a history of the callouts that they have made, an employment history and a list of qualifications. A submodule that can store the staffs training history will prove useful as well, especially if it is able to notify you when a staff member is due for retraining. Each staff member should be able to log their availability and record things such as annual leave so that the scheduling system can run more smoohtly.