Posted by Ken Accardi on Tue, Aug 31, 2010 @ 07:01 AM
The Home Care Software Geek posts in this blog don't talk about Home Care Nursing Software, Private Duty Telephony, DME Delivery Software, Home Infusion Care Management or the other topics we focus on regularly at Ankota. Instead, these posts are intended to keep our readers up to date with technology trends that might be useful to your agencies, such as social media technologies, mobile devices, and what's happening from the big-boys like Microsoft, Google and Apple.
Sometimes I'm comforted to know that there are bigger geeks than me, as evidenced by this post... Below I present a piece of artwork that was created to show how the most visited sites on the web (roughly the top 300,000) rate against each other in terms of traffic. The bigger your icon, the more traffic you get. You can click on the diagram to go to the interactive version, that will let you search for icons.
Some takeaways for home care agencies are as follows:
- The web is huge
- Your search rankings are somewhat dependent on how much overall traffic you get (e.g., if you have a web page optimized for the phrase "Home Care Bethesda MD", your ranking will be dependent on others who have also optimized for that phrase.
- You don't have to be in the top 300,000 sites to still have a very valuable site. Here are a few benchmarks:
- NAHC scored around 387,000 and didn't make it to the chart
- Stephen Tweed's Leading Home Care site ranks in the 3 millions. If you've visited, you know that this is an outstanding site with fantastic content
- I checked a very popular Private Duty Software company with 25 years of experience and a huge following of happy and loyal customers and they ranked in the 17 millions
- The top sites like Google, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo, Twitter and Bing are all places where our agencies can be found
If you want to know where your site ranks, shoot me a note and I can look you up.
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Mon, Jun 21, 2010 @ 07:09 AM
One of our most popular posts on this blog was "Five Tips for Providing Better Alzheimer's Care" inspired by the work of and the 
keynote speech delivered by Dr. Verna Carson-Benner at the NAHC 5th Annual Private Duty Conference and Exhibition (PDHCA). In this inspiring presentation, Dr. Carson Benner explained the stages of Alzheimer's in an easy to understand manner and shared tips on providing better care using analogies from caring for children. Her moving presentation made a great impact based on its content alone, and in addition Dr. Carson-Benner shares her own passion. In fact, she said that she was honored to be able to present at PDHCA, but that this is a topic she's so passionate about that she'd scream it from street corners.
For those of you who haven't been able to take advantage of one of Dr. Carson-Benner's classes on "How to Become an Alzheimer's Whisperer", the NIH has released a wonderful resource for providing care to a person with Alzheimer's. It's easy to read, beautifully photographed and free. In fact, you can download the PDF version by clicking here and you can order free print copies online at this link. If you have further questions, you can call the NIH toll free and they can answer your questions in English or Spanish on 800-438-4380.
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Mon, Apr 26, 2010 @ 07:15 AM
Having attended several recent home care trade-shows for Private Duty (NPDA and NAHC Private Duty), and for Home Health Care (e.g., NAHC in LA), I've tried to participate in the education sessions as much as possible so that I can learn what our industry is learning. Not surprisingly, a large number of the sessions are dedicated to marketing and sales, and teaching you ways to close more business for your agencies. So when my CEO passed along an article about Generating Referrals for Free to my sales team, I immediately wanted to share it with our readers. The article came from American Express Open Small Business site and is entitled "11 Free Ways to Generate Referrals". Here's a link.
First and foremost, the author, Julie Rains, encourages us to remember that the best kind of referrer wants to solve a problem for a friend. So our goal is not to get them to promote our business, but rather to make it clear that we can solve an important problem.
Here are a few pieces of advice from the article:
- Thank all customers who attempt to make referrals (not only the successful ones)
- Offer a unique product or service
- Truly understand and convey your market positioning
- Interact with customers consistently well
- Be easy to find and contact
Be sure to check out the full article for detail. If you are thinking about attending an industry tradeshow, here are links to some highlights from recent shows we've attended:
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Mon, Mar 01, 2010 @ 01:09 PM
A few weeks ago at the NAHC Private Duty Summit (see conference 
highlights here), I attended an outstanding presentation by the COO of Visiting Angels, Pat Drea, where she shared many of the best practices in her playbook. A few weeks ago, we posted a story inspired by Pat entitled Establishing a Customer Service Culture in Your Home Care Agency which you can view here. Today's post, also inspired by Pat, is about maximizing the value of your private duty software. Pat recounted a situation where she helped a struggling branch to generate almost immediate savings of over $80K and a big portion of the benefit came from better use of the software that they already had. Here's a summary of Pat's best practices to maximize the value of your Private Duty software:
- Use the Matching and Filtering Tools: If you're not using these, chances are that your scheduling people are keeping track of all of this in their heads which slows down the process. Your software should check for the following:
- Right skills and certifications
- Match customer preferences (e.g., Spanish Speaking)
- Proximity
- Preferred Caregiver for the client
- Available when the work is needed
- Worker not designated as "do not send" for this client
- Detect Sheduling Conflicts: Your software should inform you if there is ever a double booking or other availability problem
- Alert you when an assignment is missed: Does your software let you know when a worker has not reported their arrival? You don't want a dissatisfied customer or missed revenue
- Telephony: Cuts your data entry by four hours
- Family Member Communications: Does your software allow the family members of your clients to know how things are going with their loved one?
- Web-enabled: Can your office managers and caregivers securely access their schedules from their home internet?
These are some of the features that can help your organization increase its productivity. Thanks Pat!
If your Private Duty software doesn't perform the features listed above, Ankota would be happy to help. You can learn more about Ankota's comprehensive solution for Private Duty care here. As a private duty business owner, you are in the enviable position to have a growing client base, but if adding clients forces you to add back office staff and increase your costs, it might not be worth it. To see how Ankota can help your organization, please contact us or come see us at NPDA in Philadelphia in booth 32.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Thu, Feb 04, 2010 @ 07:17 AM
The NAHC 5th Annual Private Duty Home Care Leadership Summit and Exposition was a great success. We at Ankota met so many great people, learned so much from the presentations and got great feedback on our new comprehensive Private Duty Agency Software. We also released some video highlights from PDHCA on our blog last week, which got great reviews. In fact, one of our friends at NAHC shared their photos from the event and asked us to expand the video, so today we present "The Director's Cut".
PDHCA - Highlights of the NAHC 5th Annual Private Duty Summit from Ken Accardi on Vimeo.
We thank all of the presenters for granting us permission to include them in this video and to share some of their best practices on our blog. We've already shared Five Tips for Providing Better Alzheimer's Care based on the keynote presentation by Dr. Verna Carson Benner, and Establishing a Customer Service Culture in Your Home Care Agency from the great presentation by Pat Drea of Visiting Angels. You can visit www.ankota.com/blog to get the latest content - there's also an option to subscribe to the blog (which will email you when there's a new post).
Thanks again to all of you for an excellent meeting and for sharing your expertise and passion for improved care with your co-workers, your friends, and the vendor/exhibitors who support you.
Ankota is the pioneering company in the field of healthcare delivery management, focused on improving the quality and efficiency of health care outside of the hospital. Ankota provides Private Duty Non-Medical Home Care Software, and solutions for advanced scheduling and care management used in other disciplines including certified nursing, DME delivery, Respiratory Therapy, and Infusion Therapy. For more information please visit www.ankota.com or contact us.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Wed, Jan 27, 2010 @ 02:22 PM
Ankota had the pleasure of joining close to 400 practicioners and supporters of the Private Duty Home Care Industry in Phoenix from January 24th - 26th, 2010 at the NAHC 5th Annual Private Duty Home Care Leadership Summit & Exposition. Care givers are the best people you'll ever meet and this meeting was no exception! We appreciate everyone who came to learn more about Ankota and our new comprehensive software offering for Private Duty Care.
As a thanks to all the participants and those who were unable to attend the summit, we compiled a video summary with highlights of the event.
Thanks to all of the speakers featured in the video, each of whom granted Ankota permission to use their materials on our blog. We intend to post more of the best practices in upcoming articles here on our blog.
For those of you who'd like to learn more about Ankota and our software for Private Duty Care as well as our Advanced Care Management solutions for Nursing, DME Delivery, Infusion Therapy and Respiratory Therapy, please visit the rest of our site here or contact us.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Fri, Dec 11, 2009 @ 01:01 PM
Lots of my friends are doctors, and of course they're interested in what I do, but talking to them about home care is a lot like talking to them about your kid's ballet recital. They're happy to hear about it, but it's not a topic that they spend a lot of time on...
I've been blessed to meet a couple of doctors who really get it. First is Dr. Steven Landers. I breifly met Dr. Landers at the NAHC Annual Meeting and Exhibition in LA. I don't have to prove that he gets it, because in fact, he won the physician of the year award from NAHC. He was on the cover of Caring Magazine in October (click here for the online version).
Second in our very own Dr. J Hunter Young, who works at Johns Hopkins but also helps us out as Chief Medical Officer for Ankota. Hunter has done extensive research in community care and has published peer reviewed articles on topics such as how addition and hypertension affect martality in urban communities. Hunter always makes sure that we put the patient in the center of all of the technology we build at Ankota.
A third doctor who really gets it, is my friend and neighbor Dr. Roseanna Means. She created the non-profit organization Women of Means to provide free medical service to woman in the shelters of Boston and has inspired similar programs in other cities.
Getting back to the question of whether, in general, Doctors understand the value of home care, here's a snipit of video from Dr. Landers' keynote speech at the NAHC Exhibition. My favorite part was the laughter from the audience of nurses when the home care nurse asked a remote doctor for some guidance about treating a sore on the patient's buttocks and he said that he could set up a consult with a plastic surgeon. Enjoy the video...
You've all heard the expression, "home is where the heart is." At Ankota, we believe that "home is where the health is" and that a key to healthcare reform will be to improve care at home as well as patient centered coordination of care. Thanks to doctors like Steven, Hunter and Roseanna for leading the way.