Posted by Ken Accardi on Wed, Jun 02, 2010 @ 07:01 AM
Last month on this blog, we reviewed the book "The Checklist 
Manifesto" by Atul Gawande. It's a fascinating and riveting read that people both in and out of healthcare will connect with. Our initial post is available here. The "angle" in our original post was that Doctors can learn from Home Health Aides and it focused on the fact that we use care plans in the form of checklists (often supported by Telephony) for Home Health Aides to report their work completion and to ensure that we're delivering the proper care to our home care patients.
Dr. Gawande talks about how nurses and paraprofessionals in health care have embraced checklists for a much longer time than doctors. In fact, he talks specifically about how nurses instituted
the practice of measuring temperature, pulse, blood pressure and respiration as a standard part of charting long ago and how that has improved the quality of care. Then he talks about a checklist process put in place by Dr. Peter Provonost at Johns Hopkins in Intensive Care and claims that "If a new drug were as effective at saving lives as Peter Pronovost's checklist, there would be a nationwide marketing campaign urging doctors to use it". There's a New Yorker Article on this topic here. Additionally, in 2008 Time named Pronovost one of the 100 most influential people in the world; that same year, Pronovost was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, otherwise known as a "genius grant".
Today's case study focuses on checklists at the agency level and 
comes from our friends Karen Murphy (owner) and Kevin Jordan of Adept Home Health Care. They shared with us that they have a 23 step process to ensure that staffing is correct for their agency (and the other agencies that they consult with). Some of the steps in their process are unique and proprietary to the specific way that they do business, but they were kind enough to share this 12 step version of their process for our blog.
Staffing Procedure
1. Define which agency job titles are authorized to take referrals
2. Enter all referrals into Log
3. Demonstrate Nursing Authorization to admit
4. Develop a staffing list of all service hours uncovered in the next 10 days
5. Perform Scheduling of staff
6. Update aide availability weekly
7. Schedule uncovered shifts, orient staff to care plan
8. Report staff, document orientation and reporting
9. Check service satisfaction
10. Add care providers to list of oriented staff as appropriate
11. Record job offers refused by employee
12. Setup available staff for overnights and weekends and report to on call staff
If you're using checklists to improve the quality of care in your organization and would like to share your best practice, please let us know. Also, if you can use help to improve the quality of care delivery in your private duty care organization, perhaps Karen Murphy can help. Contact information for Adept Health Care Services is available via the banner below.
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 Thu, Oct 29, 2009 @ 11:00 PM
Ankota wants to thank the New york State Health Care Providers for the warm welcome we received at the 2009 HCP Annual Management Conference and Exhibition. Yours is a terrific organization made up of outstanding individuals. We're proud to be a part of your organization and look forward to growing relationships with many of you. Thank you to all of you who came to learn about the Healthcare Deliver Management solutions delivered by Ankota and the ways we can help the fine licenced agencies of New York State.
Please enjoy this video review of the meeting.