Has your caretaking agency recently implemented some new home care agency software recently? That’s a great thing, most software of this variety is very useful and can help you out a lot in your daily operations over the course of the entire year.
The trouble here is knowing exactly how to get the most out of this kind of software. This is something that the vast majority of people struggle with within the caretaking industry and it only makes too much sense that this would be a hurdle for most people.
Learning how to use new programs as effectively as possible is often a huge struggle. Even getting started with certain pieces of software can make things that much more complicated and could potentially take months, and mastering said pieces of software so they can be optimized is even harder.
That’s why we’ve written today’s article. Knowing the right ways to make your software work better for you can mean a lot of good both for you and your company in the long run, which can oftentimes mean incredible things for your career in the caretaking industry in general.
Whether you’re brand new to using caretaking software or you’ve been using it for months or even years, knowing how to get the most out of it is incredibly useful. It doesn’t matter what your role is, what your experience level is, or even if the software is brand new.
Learn the Software’s Core Functionality
Every piece of software is a tool, and depending on how you use it you could see different results. Knowing the core functionality of certain pieces of software can make using said pieces of software a lot easier for you while you’re trying to work.
In the caretaking industry, there are a lot of different kinds of software. Some software is mandated by state or federal law, and some software is used voluntarily to make life easier for everyone involved. There are a lot of different kinds of software that are used in this industry, for example:
- EVV
- EVV is short for electronic visit verification, and it’s used by certain types of caretakers to log hours that they were at a specific location. This helps to keep the caretaking industry transparent.
- Billing software.
- It’s an unfortunate truth that everything costs money. Certainly, many homecare businesses would love to operate for free but they have overhead. Billing software can make collecting payments a breeze.
- Caregiver Management Software.
- There are many pieces of software on the market that help to make sure that all of your caretakers are being fully utilized, and those are called caregiver management software. These have a lot to do with scheduling.
- Messaging software.
- Whether or not you work in the care industry, you probably use some sort of messaging software. This one is pretty straightforward.
- All-Inclusive caretaker software.
- You can get a bunch of different pieces of software, or you can just get an all-in-one piece of software for everything.
Understanding the basic function of a piece of software makes using it a lot easier. If you don’t even understand that much, using the software is going to be an uphill battle and you’ll very quickly realize that you have no idea what’s going on.
This is probably the simplest of the things that you can do, but the fundamentals are important. Without even a basic understanding of how you’re supposed to use the software, you’ll have no hope of being able to use it effectively to help with other things that you’re doing.
Understand the Interface
Different pieces of software have different interfaces, and the way that you interact with each interface will drastically change the ways that you’ll go about optimizing the way that you use it during your daily responsibilities on the job. It’s very important to understand how the interface works.
This is true of any kind of software. Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel are both Microsoft programs, but their interfaces are wildly different. You can’t use Excel like you use Word, just like you definitely can’t use Word like you use Excel. It might work a little, but not as well as you want it to.
So, when you sit down with the software, familiarize yourself with the interface. Understand the paths that you need to take to get from one place to another so you can do so more quickly. The more quickly you’re able to navigate, the better.
We have a few steps that we recommend to make this process go more quickly:
- Open the program.
- First, find out how to get to the primary function page.
- This should be pretty easy to accomplish.
- Locate any auxiliary function pages.
- This is a little trickier than the last step but take a moment to do so.
- Click on every other link.
- You might end up in some weird places this way, but you’ll become very familiar with the program.
- Do test searches through any registries.
- You can just use your name for this most of the time and it will show you all results related to you.
- Remember what the other tabs did.
- You may never click on one of the tabs again, but knowing what it does could save you a lot of hassle someday.
- Challenge yourself to get from one page to another.
- This will help you remember even more effectively.
The better you understand how to navigate your software, the more likely you’ll be to be able to optimize how you use it. This is incredibly important if you’re trying to get the most out of your home caretaking software every single day.
Not familiarizing yourself with the software can lead to major issues with the way that your company is able to operate, and that’s not ideal for anyone involved. You can make some pretty big mistakes if you don’t fully understand how the software works, so make sure to take this step seriously.
Use as Few Programs as Possible
As we mentioned, there are a lot of different pieces of software out there that do a lot of different things. That’s a good thing because it allows companies to have their choice of software in place. Some pieces of software are just better than others.
That being said, being able to simplify the number of pieces of software that are in use within your company can streamline a lot of your processes in a lot of ways. The most obvious is that you don’t have to go from portal to portal to gather information.
Let’s say, for example, you have a piece of EVV software. This software already tracks where the caregivers are on any particular day at any particular hour. That information is good for the patient because it provides a high level of transparency for the level of care they’re getting.
In case you didn’t know, patients are able to access EVV records through a secure website online or through a secure app they can download on their phone. It makes it really easy for them to check on the hours that a caretaker was actually at their home.
That being said, your business can use a piece of software that combines EVV with payroll. This combination makes doing payroll an incredibly simple task and can save your company a whole lot of time, month after month. As they say, time is money, and that means that you can save a lot of money, as well.
We aren’t just being cheeky with that last one, time really is money. If your payroll person makes $20 an hour and it takes them an hour to get the payroll information in one place every week, that’s $80 a month every month.
$80 a month doesn’t seem like much, that’s only 4 hours. The issue is that there are 12 months in a year, meaning that $80 quickly turns into $960 a year. That comes out to a total of 48 hours a year, that’s enough for over a week of full-time work.
That’s a big part of the reason why all-in-one caretaking software is so good. Everything that you need from payroll to scheduling is all in one place so you don’t have to rush from portal to portal to make sure that everything is working the way that it should.
Getting the Most out of Your Software
Trying to get the most of your software can be a complicated affair if you don’t know what you’re doing. There are so many different pieces of software out there, and not all of them work very well together, which only makes this harder.
Knowing how to get the most out of your software consistently can mean saving your company thousands of dollars a year, and that’s more money than you can shake a stick at. Not only can it save you that money, but it can also save you a great deal of time at the same time.
