As homecare demand continues to rise, there’s an enormous opportunity for homecare businesses to scale. However, for team retention and long-term business success, finding a balance between prioritising growth and addressing the rising pressures facing carers is critical.

Mike Williams, managing director of software development business Tagtronics, discusses the various benefits a paperless system can bring to homecare businesses, unpicking how the transition can be even easier than you might expect. 

It’s no secret that the future of homecare is digital, as the CQC now embraces the need for paperless operating systems for ‘outstanding’ homecare ratings. However, making the shift doesn’t need to be complicated, and it has many more benefits than simply ‘box ticking’ to meet CQC standards.

Person-centred care

Offering person-centred care is the primary aim for many homecare businesses, but time, capacity and budget constraints can make this challenging.

Ultimately, a digital approach to care frees up valuable time to enable your carers to deliver a better service to patients. Paperless systems minimise admin time by allowing carers to get up to speed on service users’ care quickly, complete pre-set forms digitally and upload documents to the business reporting system in real-time. In turn, this boosts the overall patient experience, which will show on your business’ bottom line.

Digital care systems can also help you to ensure consistency of care, by learning from service user preferences and integrating the data with carer rotas to ensure each patient has a regular team of carers.

Minimise mistakes

Paper-based systems can be susceptible to mistakes, such as missed visits or medication errors, as there’s often a heavy dependence on carers interpreting one another’s handwriting or notes. When errors occur, it can take time to identify them, due to paper logs often only being collected and recorded in the central system on a weekly – or potentially monthly – basis. This update lag can postpone when care managers receive critical information, delaying essential care plan updates.

Instead, digital systems centralise patient data – pooling it in one place for complete visibility. Ultimately, this takes pressure off carers, gives the responsible individuals the insight they need to identify and rectify any missed, late, short or long visits, or missed medication, quickly. If an incident arises, digital systems also give carers the ability to record it immediately, ensuring it’s escalated to the right person quickly.

Real-time insights and reporting

Paperless systems give complete data transparency and real time quality assurance. This allows you to easily identify any areas for improvement, ahead of care quality inspections. It can also enable you to see critical performance metrics and care information, as well as notify you with updates, such as when carer qualifications need renewing or when resources are maxed out.

Save time and improve efficiency

With paper-based systems, almost every daily care activity – from typing up care notes to revising care plans – has an impact on capacity (carer time) and budgets (eg fuel or transport expenses). This impact is reduced significantly with a digital system:

• Updating care plans – these can be updated remotely by care managers, enabling more frequent and timely updates.
• Collecting/replacing MAR charts or daily care notes – instead of storing these in individual patients’ homes, these are kept centrally and backed-up using a cloud-based system, so up-to-date documents are available instantly, from anywhere.
• Creating, updating and distributing staff rotas – rotas are recommended based on care continuity, team capacity, carer location and service user preferences. Rotas can be revised at any point by care managers, with carers immediately seeing the latest versions.
• Updated timesheets for billing or payroll – allowing you to keep track of timesheets in real time, integrating with your payroll and billing processes.
• Generating care reports – all of your performance data is kept in one place, demonstrated by an easy-to-understand dashboard, so you can access and present to management teams or care regulators at any time.

Identify potential pockets of capacity

Centralising your homecare data can highlight ‘pockets of capacity’, such as where you could preserve carer time by allocating carers to service users based on geographical proximity, minimising travel time and maximising your existing resources. This enables you to cover your care packages more efficiently, which is critical as you scale.

Team satisfaction

There’s no denying that homecare workers are overstretched, and the difficulty of recruitment makes team retention all the more important.

Digital systems can give you a real insight into your team’s capacity, allow them to submit feedback and demonstrate how you’re listening to their preferences. They can also support you in implementing new initiatives to support your team, demonstrating their impact on capacity and productivity, such as the new four-day care week currently being trialled by a handful of homecare businesses in the UK.

Going paperless – where to begin?

1. Understand the data you’ve got:

• How do you currently record care data?
• How often do you update this?
• Where do you keep the records?
• Which documents do you need immediate access to?

2. Centralise the data – collate everything you have in one place, including reports, schedules and care plans, with a system that suits your business.
3. Select the right system for your business – it’s not about reinventing the wheel. You need a system that integrates seamlessly with your existing processes to support its adoption across the business. For example, this could include using eMAR charts that follow the same steps as paper-based MAR charts.
4. Talk to your teams – support and train them in using the new system, opening conversations on how things could be improved. This is critical to strengthen your culture of care.

Smoothing your paperless journey

For many homecare businesses, it’s not unusual for care managers or registered managers to feel a resistance to change from carers who have been operating in the same way for many years. It’s completely understandable – it’s second nature to them.

That’s why it’s essential for your system to be tailored to your existing processes, so carers don’t need to spend time relearning how to do their jobs. Instead, it simply creates a different way of recording the same process, supporting you as you grow.

To find out more, visit Tagtronics, or call 01254 819 200.