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The Benefits of Electronic Point of Care Documentation in Home Care
Due to growing pains of the industry and the subsequent nursing shortage, home care providers are placing more emphasis on ensuring appropriate visit documentation is completed rather than ensuring the information is documented thoroughly and accurately.
Specifically, agencies operating on paper processes see more physically damaged or lost documentation, increased caregiver error at the point of care, and illegibility, yielding less efficient workflows and a potentially negative impact on the quality of care.
Providers are expected to care for more clients with fewer resources, which is why an increasing number of agencies are turning to mobile devices to help alleviate time-consuming processes, and increase efficiencies.
Electronic point of care documentation solutions have the ability to streamline tasks such as poc documentation and reporting, allowing home care nursing staff and clinicians to free up time to focus on their patient needs.
Here are some additional benefits associated with implementing an electronic point of care documentation software in your home care agency:
Empower Care Workers in Their Point of Care Documentation
Point of care clinical document software empowers care workers by enabling remote access to the most up-to-date electronic health records and critical resident data at the appropriate time at the patient’s bedside. With immediate visibility into client history and real-time data collected, field staff and nursing administration can make more timely and informed decisions, in turn, leading to improved clinical outcomes.
Increase Efficiency
The productivity and economic impact of inefficient processes and communication in health care has been well-documented. Evidence from a recent study on The Impact of Home Care Electronic Health Record on Timeliness of Clinical Documentation, Reimbursement, and Patient Outcomes found that productivity in the number of critical clinical notes documented post-implementation of an electronic solution increased almost 10-fold compared to pre-implementation.
EMR POC documentation reduces inefficiencies and will reduce errors dramatically compared to information transfer that requires paper documentation and dual entry, often at night, when the nurse’s attention may be elsewhere.
Increase Accuracy
Electronic point of care software solutions are often equipped with analytics that have the ability to scope out inconsistencies and errors in reports that you wouldn’t generally capture using manual processes.
This can increase the accuracy of your documentation and significantly reduce human error. More advanced solutions that leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence can effectively monitor and analyze agency and clinical data, enabling providers to be predictive and proactive in their care delivery on an individual basis.
Increase Compliance
With an electronic point of care documentation solution, information is entered in real-time enabling up-to-the-minute tracking of care worker activities and an automatic, detailed audit trail for every home care visit.
Management can use reports to identify clients who have not received necessary services prior to the close of each shift, thereby ensuring providers are where they say they are, and that clients are receiving the highest quality of care they need/deserve.
Electronic documentation also has the ability to increase overall agency compliance in terms of financial claims and regulations due to increased accuracy, resulting in faster reimbursement.
Improve Safety and Security
With a mobile care worker mobile app, care providers have access to critical information at the point of care to ensure the safety of themselves and their client. All of the risks entered in the client profile are visible, along with easy access to emergency contact information. End-to-end solutions come equipped with electronic visit verification (EVV) and corresponding GPS data, giving providers the power to validate who, where and when services are delivered.
Alerts are triggered if an employee doesn’t arrive or leave the client’s home as scheduled, so the appropriate actions can be made to further validate the safety of the client and provider.
Home care agencies taking advantage of electronic point-of-care solutions are more likely to keep up with growing demands, while continuing to deliver the highest quality of care to their clients. If you’re concerned about the impact of limited staff and resources, reach out to the AlayaCare team to learn more about how our end-to-end software solution can help.
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Sources:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4081747/
