In life, you have a lot of choices to make. Will you have cereal for breakfast or a breakfast burrito? Will you take the highway to work or the surface streets? Is blue a better color on your, or does red do better things for your complexion?
The list goes on and on. It can feel overwhelming to make all of these choices. There is actually a phenomenon called decision fatigue. It can be a devastating thing to have to deal with and can make making choices a lot more difficult if you get to this point.
One choice that you might have to make is if you start using home care agency software, and this choice can feel overwhelming. One way to make this choice a lot easier is to do the research so you can better understand exactly what you’re getting yourself into.
That’s precisely why today we’re going to be covering the benefits of using this kind of software to help you with your home care provider job. We’re going to look at the ways that it can make your life easier and why you should definitely make sure that you’re using it.
Even if we can make this one choice easier for you, we hope that it can help. With all of the choices that we’re expected to make on a daily basis, even just a little bit of ease in making big choices like this can make a world of difference.
Hopefully, by the time we’re done with this article, you’ll be able to fully understand and articulate the reasons why this kind of software should be used in your daily work life, and why it actually makes your job a lot easier for you to do on a daily basis.
Convenient Logging Abilities
With any job, you’re almost always expected to keep detailed records. The records that need to be kept can vary a lot from profession to profession, and they can grow nearly infinitely more detailed depending on the level of responsibility that a job gives you.
A commercial truck driver, for example, has to keep records of the hours that they drive, the miles that they drive, the amount of gas that they use, the money that they spend on food and entertainment, and the list goes on. Truckers have a lot of responsibility because they’re a cornerstone of logistics.
A gas station attendant has to keep records of the hours that they work, the amount of money that they get throughout their shift, inventory, and when they take their breaks. A lot of the records that they keep are automated, making things a lot easier for them.
As a home care provider, you’re typically expected to keep track of things like:
- When you arrive at the client’s house.
- When you leave the client’s house.
- The amount of medication given to the client.
- The times that medication was given to the client.
- Services provided, such as:
- Laundry.
- Cleaning.
- Cooking.
- Helping with hygiene.
- Setting up appointments.
- The miles that the client was driven.
- Any major health issues that the client had while you were present.
- Other general services that are provided throughout your stay with the client.
- The number of miles driven from one client’s house to another’s.
Keeping all of this information using a pen and paper can get a little overwhelming unless you’re really the type that enjoys keeping written records. In order to do this with a pen and paper, you have to make sure that you always have a pen and paper on you.
On top of that, you have to make sure that you’re keeping meticulous records even when your work day is hectic. A lot of employers will not accept anything less than detailed records of every single task performed throughout the day, which makes things much trickier for this method.
When you use a piece of software, you can instead have a general checklist of tasks that need to be performed within the software that allows you to check things off and go through menus for tasks that don’t appear on the list, which makes things a lot easier.
On top of that, your employer can more easily check your records without you having to turn in a piece of paper every day. That makes it a lot easier for your employer to make sure that the client is getting the care that they need while also making it easier to store records.
This level of ease on its own makes using a piece of home care software worth it. Being able to quickly and accurately communicate with your home office that the client is being taken care of means that you don’t have to worry as much about there being any miscommunications.
Software Required by Your Employer
Now, just like a lot of careers require a high level of record-keeping, a lot of employers require some sort of software to make record-keeping easier. This is called digital record-keeping and it’s been used in all sorts of industries for decades at this point.
As we mentioned, the use of software makes it so you can instantly communicate the tasks that are being done with your employer and they can more easily store these records so they can be accessed at a later time. This makes things a lot easier for your employer.
Because of the level of ease that this kind of software can provide to home care companies, a lot of them require their employees to use some kind of record-keeping software. Different companies usually use different pieces of software, but most companies require at least a single piece of software to be used.
A company should run like a well-oiled machine, and in the present day, that means taking advantage of all of the tools that are available. Whether that’s software, hardware, or something else entirely. A company that doesn’t modernize risks having to be a lot less efficient than its competition.
On top of that, most companies that provide home care services want to make sure that they can keep an eye on their caretakers as well as make sure that all of their clients are getting the care that they signed up for. That makes customer service issues go a lot more smoothly.
If your company requires the use of a piece of home care software, then you don’t really have a choice in the matter if you want to continue working for them. If you refuse, they can fire you for not doing a key part of the job.
Legally Mandated Software
As we talked about in the last section, it’s not uncommon for employers to require the use of certain pieces of home care software in order to make things within the company run a lot more smoothly for everyone ranging from the clients to HR.
Well, on top of that, there are certain pieces of software that are mandated by law to be used by home care providers. Not using the software that is legally required can get both the caretakers and the companies involved in a lot of legal trouble, and nobody wants that.
Electronic visit verification or EVV for short is the most popular instance of this. It digitally verifies that the caretaker is actually where they say that they are when they say that they are, and it is legally required on a federal level for all caretakers in the United States.
Each state has its own versions of this law, but regardless of which state you live in some form of EVV software is required to be used by every single home care provider unless they want to face the consequences that will be handed out by the appropriate governing body.
This piece of software is legally required to ensure that clients are being protected from people that would want to defraud them. Without it, any disputes would essentially boil down to the caretaker’s world versus the client’s word, and those kinds of cases are really difficult for everyone involved.
This software also helps protect caretakers for the same reasons that it helps protect clients. If disputes aren’t just one person’s word against another, it’s a lot easier to figure out who’s being honest about what happened and who’s lying, and that’s excellent for everyone involved in any given situation.
Understanding the Importance of Software
Knowing why a piece of software should be used for a particular profession is important. Sometimes it can be pretty hard to decide if it’s actually worth it or not, so doing the research can make your choice a lot easier than it might have been otherwise.
Fortunately, this particular one isn’t actually much of a choice in most cases. Either your company or the government will require the use of certain pieces of software, which makes deciding whether you should use it or not a lot easier. Spoiler alert: You definitely should be using home care software.
