Hospice agencies are stretching themselves thin to minimize the impact of today’s most pressing challenges. And while there’s no denying the value technology can provide, implementing a new solution requires time, resources and planning that agencies are hard pressed to deploy in today’s operating environment.
Tech transitions are an intensive process, but the right approach has the potential to change the trajectory of a business for years to come while producing measurable returns. When an agency is ready to explore a hospice tech transition, owners and operators should ask three key questions to ensure the greatest impact and success:
- Does the technology minimize operational disruption?
- How is success defined?
- What is the bottom-line impact?
Does the Tech Minimize Operational Disruption?
Resistance to change is a natural hurdle to new technology adoption, and the people-centric nature of hospice care makes it difficult to alter longstanding systems and processes, especially without a lapse in efficiency.
“Change is hard, and I cannot stress enough the importance of knowing your hospice tech solution’s functionality inside and out,” says Laura Parziale, RN, VP of Hospice and Palliative Care for Liberty HomeCare and Hospice Services, a North Carolina-based provider that offers a broad range of healthcare services across North Carolina and the Danville, Virginia, area. “Everything will run smoothly if your staff is managing and monitoring the KPI reports on a weekly basis, because it keeps the organization compliant,” she says. “If you’re compliant, you can rest assured that your staff’s out there doing the visits and providing quality care — and you can focus on managing the business to keep your revenue flowing.”
How Is Tech Success Defined?
Hospice agencies have different strengths, pain points and goals, all of which can influence a tech transition. By partnering with a hospice-focused software provider with industry-specific elements and fields, owners and operators can access the key performance indicators (KPIs) and information they need to achieve predetermined goals.
A hospice-specific tech provider understands industry nuances and can facilitate a collaborative working relationship to place care objectives in line with the technology platform. Then, they can help agencies determine the KPIs they need to monitor to complete those objectives and make adjustments as needed.
What Is the Bottom-Line Impact?
When providers can leverage specific KPIs to prove outcomes, it opens the door to operational and financial, referral and new business, staffing and retention or compliance-based opportunities.
Adopting a hospice-specific tech solution leads to decreased documentation time and increased quality scores. IDG members can then spend more time with patients and families, which improves the care experience and outcomes for all stakeholders. And when leadership is in tune with their integration partner, they can benchmark progress and access the data at a glance using all-encompassing dashboards that impact every aspect of the business.
Hospice Tech and the Care Continuum
Technology providers are building offerings on the principle that when operators have multiple service lines, they can risk-stratify patients by integrating a variety of interoperable solutions that communicate and aggregate data. This ensures clinicians are getting the actionable information and insights to provide the right care to the right patient at the right time. With data in mind, these platforms recognize acuity, improvements, reduced hospitalizations and improved quality of life, among other metrics.
Determining ROI
Owners and operators have seen the greatest bottom-line impact in:
- Ops and financial: On top of digitizing and streamlining key business processes to make workflows more efficient, a hospice tech solution can auto-generate claims to make it easy for agencies to collect hard-earned revenue. Hospices tend to struggle when changing to higher levels of care, and technology can help by calculating accurate time stamps to avoid issues with audits and billing.
- Referrals and new business: Through more efficient referral management, agencies can maximize admissions for hospice-eligible patients. It can also help clinical operations leaders understand how and why patients are eligible for hospice admission, as well as how that eligibility could change throughout the patient’s journey.
- Staffing and retention: By eliminating redundant work and documentation time, staff can focus their efforts on patient-centered care, ultimately reducing burnout while improving outcomes. As such, hospice tech solutions are a powerful recruiting tool through both their appeal to prospective staff members and their ability to automate many aspects of the hiring process itself.
- Compliance: Notices of Election (NOEs) have to be submitted within five days of patient admission, and a hospice tech solution streamlines this process while preventing any deadlines from falling through the cracks.
Understanding the Benefits of Hospice Tech Transition
Partnering with the right technology leader takes the guesswork out of hospice tech transitions by catalyzing a collaborative, intuitive process that is tailored to each organization and its unique needs. Working with a hospice-focused technology partner like Axxess empowers agencies to more efficiently overcome the top industry challenges, driving ROI.
Throughout this process, it is imperative to determine the technology transition’s impact on operational disruption, success and the bottom-line. Choosing a technology provider that understands how each of those elements affects hospice organizations specifically is the key to a triumphant tech transition.
Axxess Hospice, a cloud-based hospice software, includes simple tools such as intuitive medication management and real-time plan of care updates to help keep organizations compliant.
Editorial Note: This article was originally published on Hospice News.
