Hospice software is a highly specialized subset of convenient home health charting and invoicing solutions. As a result, hospices must hit a balance between running a market smoothly and effectively and delivering quality care compassion.
Here, gaining efficiencies is crucial: The more limited time spent squabbling clinical, financial, and organizational data, the longer time hospice staff will apply to looking after cases.
Hospice software can play a significant role in achieving these goals by capturing and combining all that administrative data and making it available to managers and administrators. With your reports and analytics centrally stored and available via a few clicks of a mouse, more power and time can be assigned to patients.
Hospice agencies need to finance software that enables users to access end-of-life documentation easily, like Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) and Advance directives. Several patients have prepared this type of documentation, embracing the idea that this may help them carry out their final days on their terms and free from unwanted or invasive life-sustaining medical measures.
The most significant respondents feel the software is a much more effective storage method than paper records for end-of-life decision documents.
Examples of Hospice Software
MatrixCare Home Health & Hospice: MatrixCare is a comprehensive EHR solution that renders the ideal aggregate of a cloud-based back-office operation and an iPad point-of-care app. It is created for clinicians by clinicians; it is straightforward, intuitive, and efficient yet complete with compelling features that maximize documentation accuracy and compliance. MatrixCare is assigned to innovation and patient-centric interoperability in post-acute management.
myUnity Home Care & Hospice: Netsmart is myUnity Home Health and Hospice (previously DeVero) is a clinical point-of-care forms-based system that is intuitive and submissive. It leverages the most strategic elements of subsisting Netsmart solutions into a single, consolidated enterprise platform. The easy-to-use and easy-to-train solution allow a single patient EHR, a personal care plan, and a unique patient bill, simultaneously with data analytics, e-prescribing, electronic referral management, e-faxing, interoperability, etc.
Alora Home Health: Alora’s hospice software is devised to improve and fulfill your agency’s purpose of reaching the physical, sensitive, spiritual, and psychosocial demands of your patients and their relationships. Alora’s arrangement is a cloud-based, mobile-ready solution masterminded with input from hospice business professionals and unmatched comfort of use as its core functionality system. Whether your company is a dedicated Hospice care bureau or a blend that allows homecare, Alora surrenders unmatched workflow uprightness.
Hospice Software Users
Hospice software can be fixed on-premise or cloud-based. Cloud-based products hold the benefits of simplicity:
- Updates run automatically.
- There is no software to install.
- IT staff are not needed to maintain certain specifics.
In addition, cloud products are flexible. Critical data is accessible on all Internet-enabled devices, such as laptops, iPads, and Android tablets. It enables hospice workers to bring the system with them as they visit patients in their rooms or admittance to vital information after hours in a state of emergency.
By distinction, on-premise versions can provide administrators more check over the system, but they also demand more maintenance and typically do not allow the convenience of mobility.
The Functionality of Hospice Software
- Clinical: Originally a hospice EMR, clinical functionality supports and simplifies clinical processes with tools for maintaining the documentation of patient care, delivering medication, automating alarms, and calculating risk assessments, with other capabilities.
- Billing: Implements tools for handling all aspects of payment, including payroll reporting, Medicare billing compliance, tracking, and revenue cycle management.
- Scheduling: Grants access to medics and patient data to update scheduling tasks, personnel, clinicians, and other means. It also appears with reminders and an overall sense of schedule.
- Reporting and Analytics: Gives users quick insights into the complexities of marketing revenue and expenses—like billing, inventory, businesses, the value of care, and significant business metrics. Central dashboards give insight and support with decision-making.
- Staff Management: Empowers managers to hold tabs on staff through time- and absence-tracking accessories.
- Volunteer Tracking: Enables administrators to distribute volunteer hours and organize schedules for them.
- Custom Forms: Creates customizable forms for different documentation requirements, including consent forms, evaluations, Medicad waivers, dietary plans, social service paperwork, etc.
Advantages of Hospice Software
- Significant Reduction of Waste and Inefficiency: Software allows hospices to drastically degrade paper usage while profiting from the effectiveness of automation and streamlined path to critical information. Sustaining up-to-date records is simplified, as is ensuring the organization adheres to compliance standards. Meanwhile, the staff is analyzed to devote more time to patient care and less time to administrative systems, thus increasing morale.
- Advanced Reporting: The recording and analytics tools included in the software collect information from patient forms and display key performance metrics in accessible dashboards. As a result, it provides managers quick insight into models of care in their business and questions associated with business performance. Meanwhile, records that once took a long time to fix manually can now be created swiftly and efficiently—with a diminished likelihood of individual error.
- Greater Security: Hospice software is usually more secure than paper records for storing sensitive patient information. Paper-based documentation may get stolen or misplaced. On the other hand, the software provides layers of security that prevent breaches of patient data, such as encryption and role-based access control.
Hospice Software Trends
- Customer Association Automation: Some hospice agencies are investigating a solution to assist them to scale their operations in enhancement to managing their day-to-day clinical and commercial workflows. Businesspeople introduce customer relationship management (CRM) tools as a stand-alone, add-on, or integrated utilization. These help agencies manage contacts and identify the top referring health care providers in a client’s market so valuable referral sources can be targeted for outreach.
- Mobile Integration: Caretakers need to make patients feel as comfortable as possible, but it can be challenging to do so when they’re transcribing health information on a desktop workstation. For this reason, vendors are allowing their software to integrate with mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones. In addition, these plans are less intrusive, supporting staff to have more face time with cases while still accomplishing documentation requirements.