Posted by Will Hicklen on Tue, Sep 07, 2010 @ 12:00 PM
Home Health and Private Duty agencies might share this with their clients or repost on their own web sites.
Caring for an elderly parent consumes tremendous time and effort and is often an emotional and financial drain. No matter how devoted they are, family members have limited time and proximity is often a challenge.
Here are some helpful ideas from CNN Money magazine, “4 Tips for Caring for Mom and Dad,” and ways to manage family communications from Ankota. Additional resources are listed below.
It is estimated that 7 million Americans care for an elderly relative from a distance. 48% of them have to use sick or vacation days, and 38% report that they have to stop or reduce their savings during this time, according to the National Alliance for Caregiving (NAC). The same study reports that long-distance caregivers spend an average of $8700 per year providing support, roughly twice as much as nearby relatives.
CNN Money Tips:
1) Know Mom’s Needs. Things to look out for: “You’re looking for significant changes from normal patterns,” says Donna Wagner, a gerontology professor at Towson University.
2) Create a DIY Plan. Identify local friends or family who can help, and put together a checklist . Local grocery delivery might be useful, for example.
3) Get Low-Cost Help.
4) Bring on a Professional.
More on getting help or hiring a professional: Personal Care or “Private Duty” Aids range from $15-30/hour and are ideal for helping with things like cooking, housekeeping, baths, and so on. Nurses can be hired through Private Duty and Home Health care companies in your area for those who need medical care.
For more comprehensive help, a geriatric care manager can be hired. You might check out Caring For Your Parents by Elinor Ginzler of AARP. Ginzler’s article The Cost of Caregiving on AARP’s website is also an excellent resource.
Ankota Tip About Caregiver-to-Family Communications:
In focus groups sponsored by Ankota, a recurring frustration among family members is the inconsistency of communications from caregivers to family members. This should not be left only to phone calls and the bill should not be a primary means of communication. Family members should insist on regular electronic updates. Technology like Ankota’s FamilyConnect ensures secure and consistent, proactive communications that leverage text messaging and email, and provide a family portal.
By staying informed and on top of things, family members can alleviate some of the stress that comes along with caring for an aging parent.
Resources:
FamilyConnect from Ankota automates repetitive communications between caregivers and family members. All home health and private duty agencies should use some form of communicating like this.
Informal Caregiving by and for Older Adults by Donna Wagner, Professor of Gerentology and Health Sciences, Towson University, Towson, Maryland.
Lotsa Helping Hands is a free, private, web-based community that can also help organize family and friends.
The Cost of Caregiving an article by Elinor Ginzler on AARP’s web site
Caring for Your Parents a book written by Elinor Ginzler
Learn more about using checklists in these two recent Ankota articles: The Checklist Manifesto and Checklists Improve Quality of Care
BeClose Simple, unobtrusive home monitoring provides real-time, remote activity monitoring in the home.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Thu, Sep 02, 2010 @ 04:35 PM
We love planning, and scheduling! We love to be organized and efficient! We pride ourselves on being in control! But we don't always get to dictate how things are going to run in our home care operations - sometimes mother nature has the last word. With Hurricane Earl running its course, it's good to prepare for home care in a hurricane...
(phote courtesy of National Geographic web site)
Here are some ways you can plan and respond for the hurricane:
- Be Proactive in Your Agency: Are there weekly visits in your plan that can be pulled ahead to avoid the heavy weather days? Are there other routine tasks like creating next month's schedule or preparing your payroll that can be done now? Do them!
- Help Your Clients be Proactive: Can you get the groceries earlier than normal? Can you make sure that your client has water, blankets, prescriptions filled, easy to eat food, a movie rented? Help them be prepared and avoid strife when the storm hits.
- Can you provide additional Services?: Do the patients or clients you care for need help with their storm shutters or making sure that their sump pump is plugged in and ready to go? Given that they need your services for medical care or help with other ADLs, there's a good chance that
- Don't start what you can't finish: If your patient is due for a 48 hour chemo infusion to go from Thursday through Saturday and the storm is supposed to be heaviest in your area on Saturday, you might want to rethink. Once you start that treatment, you're commiting that you'll be there within a 4 hour window on Saturday to turn it off. So think twice!
- Set Priorities and Back-up Plans: If you can't get to everyone in the height of the storm, know which patients are urgent and which can wait. Know who has a backup plan for ther care and who doesn't.
Hopefully you the storm will be mild when it gets to you, but if you follow the above steps, you'll be prepared for the worst. The projected path of the storm is below. Will you be ready?
As you go through this process and "weather this storm" I'd also challenge you to see if your software is helping you during the storm or just getting in your way. Can you reschedule visits easily? Can you update your worker's shifts? Can you visualize which caregivers live near which patients? If not and you're ready for an upgrade, be sure to let us know!
Related articles you might be interested in:
- Managing Home Care in a Blizzard here
- Maximizing the Value of your agency software here
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 Will Hicklen on Wed, Sep 01, 2010 @ 12:55 PM
I usually leave this type of information to the Home Care Software Geek to report on, but some news is just too good not to pass along right away.
You can now get Blackberry Enterprise Server Express for free.
So what? Well, let me first say that we are not taking a position on one mobile device vs another. We at Ankota like to profess that we are device agnostic, choosing instead to make even our most advanced technology available via web browsers and common mobile devices that our customers have readily available. Frankly, we don’t want to force new infrastructure or hardware requirements on our customers. That just wouldn’t be efficient...and those of you who know Ankota know that we are efficiency zealots.
A more pragmatic description of our position is that we are in favor of anything that helps mobilize technology for our customers and does so securely, productively, and affordably. Blackberries have proven to be excellent mobile devices for many of our customers. Our customers include Home Health, DME, Private Duty, Infusion, Respiratory Therapy and other companies that we say make up the “Homecare Ecosystem.” In the past, the cost of purchasing mobile devices like this (& their service plans) has been a deterrent to many. As devices and plans continue to get cheaper, more and more of our customers will buy them. This announcement helps make it cheaper and easier for our customers to manage their mobile staff and their Blackberries.
Blackberry Enterprise Server Express synchronizes wirelessly with Microsoft Exchange, calendars, contacts, and provides remote file access & access to your intranet. It will run on your existing mail server whether you run that yourself or have that managed for you by another company.
Of course, schedules, calendars, POC forms, and even optimized route plans created in Ankota HDM can be pushed to Blackberry devices in real time. You can still utilize Ankota's telephony interface as you would with any other mobile phone.
Click on this image to view key features:
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside of 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 Will Hicklen on Tue, Aug 24, 2010 @ 02:09 PM
I saw a thought provoking piece about elder mediation and home care, posted on LinkedIn this morning by Rob McClenehan of Right At Home. If you are a member of LinkedIn, you can read his post here, and perhaps also join the Home Health & Hospice Group.
The topic of elder mediation is probably most relevant to our Home Health Care and Private Duty customers, but our Infusion, Respiratory Therapy and Rehab customers might also find it useful. If you are one of these companies, take a look and consider what role elder mediation might play in the future of your clients.
Rob referenced an article called Elder Mediation by Angel Carl, which you can read here on Right At Home’s blog. Right At Home credits an article by Georgia Daniels of Mediate.com. Ms. Daniels is a family mediator and author in Pasadena, CA. From Right At Home’s blog, the article begins:
Eldercare mediation is a growing field that will increase in prominence as the number of elders increases. As parents age, conflicts can erupt between parents and their children over living situations, driving, or the need for more help with daily activities. In addition, conflicts may spring up between siblings about their parents’ aging, such as when it is time for more in-home care, assisted living, or which sibling is responsible for what aspects of a parent’s care. Mediation can also address more complex issues such as estate planning and inheritance or health care choices, and may be used to develop alternatives to conservatorship. Mediation offers an opportunity to explore options and develop the best plan possible for the elder and family. More…
The Role of Home Health and Private Duty Providers
After you have a good plan that the parties support--and a good mediator will help guide you through the planning--the follow through makes it successful. In addition to providing quality care, home care providers can help with this by providing clear and consistent communications on a regular basis. When families feel engaged and informed, tension is mitigated and caregivers can focus their efforts on their client. It's a better result for everyone. Family communications are simple & inexpensive to manage using existing technology. Ankota's FamilyConnect is an example of one simple way to do this. http://www.ankota.com/ankota-family-connect/
As a provider, you might also consider establishing relationships with elder mediators in your area. If the need arises with one of your clients, you will be in a better position to refer to someone confidently. Who knows, some mediators could even develop into referral sources for your business.
The topic of elder mediation continues to gain attention. Click on these images to learn more:
Posted by Ken Accardi on Tue, Aug 24, 2010 @ 07:28 AM
Non-Medical Home Monitoring Technology is starting to get media attention as distant Family Members search for better and more affordable ways ways to track how mom and/or dad are doing.
We've been following great stories about these trends in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Laurie Orlov's Aging in Place Technology Watch and Time Rowan's Home Care Technology Report. If you want to get quickly up to speed, review these two posts:
This week more coverage is available, this time as a four part series on NPR. The first article spoke about the emergence of "Villages" like Beacon Hill Village and a rapidly growing list of others that are essentially support groups to help with aging in place. The next two, talk about non-medical remote monitoring technologies. Here's a link to today's article (which has links to the first two in the series). You can also access it by clicking on the picture below.
So now that we've established that this technology is out there, the question we need to answer is whether it poses a threat to our home care private duty agency or an opportunity? The pessimist would say it's a threat - that families are working around us. But the smart entrepreneurial agency sees this as an opportunity, and a way to provide differentiating service to win more business. Here's a specific idea for you:
- Offer a service to evaluate for a home monitoring system. Your evaluation can evaluate how the client is doing, check for safety issues in the home, and determine what monitors would make sense for this client and their family. (To learn more about the monitors available, check out the demo videos at www.beclose.com). Note that you generally provide this service for free to a prospective client - in this case you can charge.
- Install the System and Train the Family: It is guaranteed that someone in your caregiver community has a spouse or friend who can do a great job providing this installation service. You can charge a nice margin here.
- Couple it with a short weekly visit and an assessment using Ankota FamilyConnect: This technology makes it easy for you to let the remote family members know how their loved one is doing. learn more here.
- Grow with the Client: The above three items will be a great service to the client and their family, and will make you some money. But looking at the bigger picture, you've also gained a client and family who will turn to you when they need more help.
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 Will Hicklen on Wed, Aug 18, 2010 @ 12:01 PM
Let's think about PRODUCTIVITY – arguably the single greatest opportunity for your business today.
Ankota is first and foremost a process management company. We develop technology that helps organizations run their Home Health Care and related businesses more efficiently. More profitably. More productively.
What we do is revolutionary because we're the only company that has organized health care into a delivery model and optimized it for performance. That takes some high-powered technology, but all you really need to know at the moment is that it helps you run your business better and achieve immediate results.
Our customers include home health care agencies, HME and DME companies, Private Duty care agencies, and "the therapies" - infusion therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, respiratory therapy, and more. If you need to mobilize staff, equipment, medications, and supplies for health care, we’re the experts you trust to help optimize your business.
I would argue that the single greatest business opportunity before these companies--companies like yours--lies with improving productivity. The greatest opportunity to improve profitability lies with better utilizing staff and resources. Relative to other markets, this business has traditionally lacked a performance culture. The market has not demanded it until now, with new pressures on revenues, limited staff, and the ever increasing costs of doing business. The most immediate option is to improve productivity. That is, generate more output with the same or fewer resources. The good news is that there are many opportunities for immediate improvement, spanning from reduction in miles driven to increased utilization of staff and equipment. Downstream benefits abound, such as reduced paperwork, improved record keeping and accountability, happier staff, and so on.
We’ll discuss several of those in subsequent articles here. However, for now, your homework is simple. I’d like to encourage you to think of your Home Health Care, DME, Private Duty or rehab business in terms of productivity. Take a look at the following definition of PRODUCTIVITY and begin to consider it in the context of your business. When you examine your operations or consider new initiatives, consider also how it will impact productivity.
Note that I am not suggesting that quality of care be compromised at all! In fact, quality of care should improve or remain constant to make productivity improvements measurable and valuable. A business with a performance minded culture is one focused on constant improvement. So, while you think about PRODUCTIVITY and your business, think of it in the context of questions like
“How can we improve the consistency of care?”
“Will clients/patients and their families be better off?”
Wikipedia has a clear definition of the word PRODUCTIVITY and includes some great supporting data. Take a look and start to think about productivity in your business.
Productivity is a measure of output from a production process, per unit of input. For example, labor productivity is typically measured as a ratio of output per labor-hour, an input. Productivity may be conceived of as a metric of the technical or engineering efficiency of production. As such, the emphasis is on quantitative metrics of input, and sometimes output. Productivity is distinct from metrics of allocative efficiency, which take into account both the monetary value (price) of what is produced and the cost of inputs used, and also distinct from metrics of profitability, which address the difference between the revenues obtained from output and the expense associated with consumption of inputs.[1] click here for full article in Wikipedia
Another way to look at it... Borrowed from Accel, experts in team productivity, The Productivity Conceptual Modelbelow, takes the form of a 'productivity tree'. The roots denote the inputs to the system, the trunk the conversion process and the foliage and fruits the systems outputs. click on graphic to go to Accel's web site
Posted by Ken Accardi on Sun, Aug 15, 2010 @ 10:53 PM
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.
Many home care business leaders started their companies because they had skills as a caregiver and a heart for providing care. Along the way, they've needed to learn a lot about running a business. This post is a primer in how to buy software for your agency taught from the perspective of a software vendor. Here's what you need to know:
- You should look for a partnership with your software vendor and shouldn't select a vendor who doesn't want to engage in partnership with you.
- Let the vendor know about any gaps that are holding you back from purchasing or getting the maximum value from the software.
- If you go through an evaluation process to choose between several vendors, share the results with the top few and see how they respond. For example, the vendor with three deficiencies might be willing and able to solve all three faster and better than the candidate vendor with only one.
- Sometimes the issue holding you back from moving forward is not directly related to the software. For example, you don't know how to organize your information to load into the software, or you want to do the project but you first need to focus on a higher priority like an audit. Explain this to the vendor because they might be able to help or plan for the delay.
- If you see some software that you like but it needs to work with some other software you already have, explain this to the prospective vendor and set up a call between your existing vendor and the new vendor to see if they can work out the interface.
- If a vendor reaches out to you, and there's no way you'd consider working with them, it's better to tell them "no" than to "string them along"
- When you set up a meeting with a prospective vendor, and something changes requiring you to move or cancel, let them know.
- When negotiating with the software company, focus on the items that are critical to you and also think about items you might be able to offer to the vendor. For example, if they are able to give you a lower monthly price, can you give them more up-front or might you be willing to help as a reference or by providing a case study.
- There are advantages to using the software without customizing it. You'll get better support and easier upgrades, so if something doesn't work as you expect, first ask the vendor how the software is intended to work before customizing.
- Once you engage in a relationship, continue in the spirit of partnership by letting the vendor know how they can continuously improve their product. Chances are that if you're a good partner to them, that you'll get preferential treatment, and that the improvements you suggest will be helpful for the vendor to sell to other customers.
Bottom line is that it's all about developing and maintaining a strong partnership.
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 Wed, Aug 04, 2010 @ 07:19 AM
As we grow Ankota's business, I try to read a lot about successful 
growing businesses and apply their lessons. Today I read a compelling article about Brightstar, a Chicago-based home care franchise, and some lessons learned by their CEO Shelly Sun. As always I encourage you to read the original article, but here are some of the highlights:
- A survey taught them things that the numbers didn't reveal: In this case they learned that franchisees were unhappy
- Listening to Customers yielded Great Results: In this case the customers were franchisees, but we can all learn through customer feedback (good and bad)
- Less is More: By sponsoring less initiatives but doing them very well, the company improved satisfaction.
- Growth is not Good Enough: Home care is a rapidly growing market, so doing better than last year might mean that you're still losing pace and losing share. In Brightstar's case they're on pace to grown from $51M in 2009 to $115M in 2010 - over 100% growth.
- Improving the Technology yields strong Returns: One area where Brightree gained success and satisfaction from their franchises was in the technology improvement initiatives.
Whether you run a large or small home care business, there are things to learn from Brightstar's course corrections and the positive results they've yielded.
Note that if you enjoyed this post, you might also enjoy this story, inspired by Pat Drea, COO of Visiting angels.
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 Marc Ottinger on Sun, Jul 11, 2010 @ 10:29 PM
Question -
Do you have the structure to execute on the “Dominant Vector” of your Home Care Agency?
Preface
The focus of the first posting was identifying your Home Care Agency’s “dominant vector.” What do you need to do now the dominant vector has been identified in order to be that high performance business, and create the competitive advantage that generates cash? No one needs to tell you Home Care is a highly competitive environment. Operational excellence offers the opportunity to increase quality, reliability, flexibility, speed, and customer value. This is the second of six blog posts hiliting the five characteristics that facilitate operational excellence.
Creating Operational Excellence
To achieve operational excellence owners need to take a step back and look at how is the business set up to achieve the established goals, and how is work organized and executed. This, the second characteristic, brings organization and execution to a more concrete level -
2. Establish the correct structure that creates an advantage. This requires a clearly defined operating model, which in turn needs to describe how the company is organized to execute the “dominant vector.”
The focus of this series is that high performance businesses put a premium on operational excellence. The first installment was on creating operational excellence. The link for this is http://bit.ly/cyShNI. The third installment will ask the question, do you have the understanding, drive, and alignment to out-execute Home Care Competitors?
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 Marc Ottinger on Fri, Jul 09, 2010 @ 03:33 PM
Having worked in logistics for approximately fifteen years one of the industry rags I pick up on a regular basis is Logistics Management. Recently there was an article titled “The Five Hallmarks of Operational Excellence.” It was written by Mark Pearson, who is in Accenture’s Supply Chain Management. This article applies equally as well in home healthcare including DME, Infusion Therapy, and Respiratory Therapy.
Preface
The focus of the article is that high performance businesses put a premium on operational excellence. Why? It creates a source of competitive advantage and generates cash benefits. In today’s difficult economic times operational excellence offers the opportunity to increase quality, reliability, flexibility, speed, and customer value. Home healthcare operates in a very competitive environment. How do you create operational excellence?
Creating Operational Excellence
In order to achieve operational excellence owners need to step back and look at the big picture. First, how is the business set up to achieve the established goals. Second, how is work organized and executed. There are five main characteristics. This is the first characteristic that facilitates this -
- Identify your companies “dominant vector,” defined as that internal capability that creates customer value more effectively than your competitors. To put this another way, what mechanism distinctively creates economic value for you and your customer. This characteristic should change only when the company’s underlying value proposition changes.
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.