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 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 Thu, Aug 26, 2010 @ 06:33 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.
If your home care agency sometimes has conference calls, you might enjoy this funny video about conference calls. It's especially funny because it's so realistic... Enjoy!
Note that if you'd like to be able to hold conference calls, I've been happy with the service we get from www.FreeConferenceCall.com. The service has good quality, 24 hour support, and nice reporting (they send you an email after each call saying who dialed in, at what time and from what number). Also, the service is absolutely free (unless you want a toll-free number or another of their paid services).
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 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 Thu, Jul 22, 2010 @ 09:28 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.
Let's start at the beginning and talk for a moment about what cloud computing is... The general idea is that you don't need all of your software to run on computers that you own or have in your office. Instead, the software can be hosted outside of your company and you can access it via the Internet. Another related term is SaaS which stands for "Software as a Service". Again, the concept is that you don't have to buy software and the computers, instead you can use them online, and generally pay a monthly fee. Having said this, there are different ways for your software provider to set up the system and these might impact data security and HIPAA compliance. I'll get more into that below, but first I want to share the article that inspired today's post, entitled "Healthcare Solutions Cloud Up". Click here or on the image below to read it.
The article author is Jeff Kaplan, who has dedicated himself to SaaS and Cloud Computing. Jeff is an analyst, blogger, consultant, and excellent speaker, and he also runs a site called SaaS Showplace where you can go to find a searchable catalog of SaaS solutions that might be useful for your business.
Some of the key points of Jeff's article, are as follows:
- There is an ongoing debate about whether On-Demand computing is OK for health care. Concerns are primarily related to patient information security and availability
- On the other hand, improved communication and shared information are key factors in improving the quality and cost of care
- There are now several big examples of healthcare applications on the web. Jeff talks about Microsoft Health Vault, Google Health, Dossia and the IBM/U. of Missouri Life Sceinces Research Project, plus others
- The bottom line is that there are still questions to overcome, but more and more services are becoming available and adoption is fast
For the especially geeky ones among you, there are multiple ways for your software vendor to host your application. One is via dedicated hardware, and the other is through virtual shared hardware (where software Vendor A's software runs on the same hardware as Vendors B, C, D and more) where the potential advantages are that you have more computers to help when there are spikes in traffic and less computers sitting around idol wasting electricity. Some people call the former SaaS and the latter Cloud Computing. At Ankota, we use the dedicated hardware approach because not all of the security risks of shared computing have been retired to our satisfaction yet.
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, Jun 23, 2010 @ 07:31 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.
The home care software geek generally attempts to inform you about technology topics that you've heard of but might not understand. The cell phone doesn't fall into that category, but that's because most of us are still thinking of it as a phone and not yet as a health care device, but that's changing. My friend and colleague Dr. Eliot Heller MD was speaking to a group of health care entrepreneurs from France last week and made a point of mentioning that the one constant across his patient base in the Bronx was that they all have a cell phone. Many of these low-income patients from Bronx-Lebanon hospital don't have home phones, but they all have cell phones. In fact, Dr. Heller indicated that the cell phone number is more important and consistent for the hospital to track patients than their address.
Health care delivery efforts have taken notice and are starting to take advantage. Here are some examples:
- In the article Cellphone + EHR = Diabetis Management, two programs are designed which help inner city residents of Washington DC manage diabetis. The applications allow people to record their weight, blood glucose and blood pressure and they are given alerts on their phone screen if the values are out-of-range. This initiative is expected to easily pay for itself by reducing hospitalization, and participants are given the cell phone.
- My friend Jacqueline Thong started a company called UBIQIHEALTH to help migraine sufferers. UBIQIHEALTH chose to implement their technology on a cell phone, because everybody has one and because the nature of migraines is that you can get them under control better if you track when they happen and what triggered them. Below is the content from their "How We Can Help" section of their website
So why is this relevant for home care? Perhaps the cell phone becomes an entry level TeleHealth unit that you can use to monitor your patients or clients at a very affordable price. Remember Ankota's book of the year for 2009 was The Innovator's Prescription, by Clayton Christensen, and that one of his key messages is that that simple applications on devices available to more people often displace the more expensive devices. You can see this explained by Clayton Christensen in a video, here.
Also, here at Ankota we've recognized the potential of the cell phone for home health aides to report their arrivals and departures. As more and more cell phones are replaced with smart phones that can support simple applications and track GPS location, we expect that this will become a preferred option over telephony. But, of course, we offer both and offer them interchangably (you can have some workers use telephoiny and others use their cell phone, and in fact you can even have a worker report their arrival on their phone and their departure on telephony (and vice versa). Read more about Ankota's paperless work tracking solutions 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 Ken Accardi on Thu, Jun 17, 2010 @ 06:30 AM
Sometimes I seek inspiration for blog postings from my twitter lists. As a refresher, twitter is a web site where people can share little bits of information with 140 character messages. The home 
care software geek talks about twitter here. Home Care veteran and marketing guru Merrily Orsini describes twitter as the social media's version of cocktail party conversation - it's not so deep, but it keeps you up to date on what's on people's minds. The traditional way of using twitter is to "follow" the people whose information interests you, but some of us don't have time for that. To help out, I've been building twitter lists for home health and private duty care. By going to one of these lists, you can tune in on the conversation of a whole bunch of related people. The lists are accessable at http://twitter.com/#/list/AnkotaCTO/private-duty-care and http://twitter.com/#/list/AnkotaCTO/home-care. But I digress... one of the conversations topics I see frequently is about preventing falls and the impact of falls on seniors. Let me share a few observations...
- According to this post, one out of three seniors in the US experience a fall each year, and every 18 seconds an elder is treated in an emergency room for a fall-related injury.
- The afformentioned post also shares that the impact of the fall often results in a fear of falling, which leads sadly to more falls.
- Finally, they share that falls is the leading cause of injury-based fatalities among those aged 65 and older
- The National Center for Injury Prevention and Control shares that you can decrease your risk of falling via exercise, home safety improvements, medication review and vision checks. The information is available here
One of my favorite private duty agency leaders, Hazel Kuchinsky from Ivory House told me that her agency has only had one fall in 
the past year among their hundreds of clients. This makes it clear that there's something you can do about it... So if you want to find a way to differentiate your agency, maybe this is an area that you can focus on. I know that if I were shopping for care and I interviewed Hazel's company and she told me that one in three seniors falls every year and that falls are the leading cause of injury related deaths amoung seniors, and that her agency has had one fall in the past year, I'd take it very seriously.
What differentiates your agency? Is it fall prevention? Is it family communications using Ankota's FamilyConnect? Or are you still struggling to find your focus?
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 14, 2010 @ 05:14 AM
As Ankota has grown, many of our customers, prospects and blog readers have come to know the story of our origin. Our CEO, Will Hicklen, was inspired by the tragic loss of his wife Sandy to cancer. This drove him to want to improve the delivery of home care. Will brings his experience with supply chain management and Software-as-a-Service to home care. You've also come to know the inspiration of Hunter Young, MD and Ken Accardi to our product vision, or perhaps you've enjoyed Ken's "Home Care Software Geek" posts.
Our other co-founder, COO/CFO Marc Ottinger, might not get as much visibility outside of the company, but I've learned some 
great lessons from Marc, which are both worthy of admiration and worth sharing. Marc brings his level-headed demeanor into every discussion we have. He relies on simple principles like the reasonable man theory (modernized at the "reasonable person" in this Wikipedia Entry). He also has prevents us from pontificating about what someone else may or may not agree to, by giving counsel like "We're entitled to ask. They're entitled to say yes or no. Let's ask them."
What especially impresses me about Marc is the way the people he knows are always willing to meet him, help him, counsel him and often do business with him. When Marc asks for a meeting, nobody feels like they're threatened or exposing themselves to a sales pitch. Marc wants to share what we've learned and to learn from others.
So make sure that as you get to know us better, that you get to know Marc. You'll be glad that you did.
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 Thu, Jun 03, 2010 @ 05:42 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.
We're all familiar with Apple, and its CEO Steve Jobs. I personally remember when the first Macintosh computers were installed in the
"MacLab" at college and we were all blown away. Although Apple and its founder have had their ups and downs, they've definitely hit their stride now with the iPhone, the iPod, iTunes and the app store, the iMac, and most recently the iPad. But this post isn't so much about the technology, but rather the philosophy of Steve Jobs. He shares 10 life lessons in a blog article on http://www.educopark.com/. The article there is entitled: 10 Golden Lessons from Steve Jobs. I'd encourage you to check out their blog to get the full commentary, but for those of you who want the "Readers Digest Version," here are the 10 lessons:
- "Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower."
- "Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren't used to an environment where excellence is expected."
- "The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it."
- "You know, we don't grow most of the food we eat. We wear clothes other people make. We speak a language that other people developed. We use a mathematics that other people evolved... I mean, we're constantly taking things. It's a wonderful, ecstatic feeling to create something that puts it back in the pool of human experience and knowledge."
- "There's a phrase in Buddhism, ‘Beginner's mind.' It's wonderful to have a beginner's mind."
- "We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on."
- "I'm the only person I know that's lost a quarter of a billion dollars in one year.... It's very character-building."
- "I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates."
- "We're here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise why else even be here?"
- "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
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, May 05, 2010 @ 07:46 AM
There's really only one reason to write a blog, which is to share useful information (generally referred to by web people as content) with people interested in your agency. Having said this, there are plenty of other good reasons to blog, including the following:
- It let's you share "who you are" as opposed to "what you sell". For example, although you sell Private Duty care services, you may have a passion and expertise for preventing falls, understanding Alzheimers disease, or empowering eldery Americans to lead rich and full lives (or maybe all of the above). The blog lets you share this expertise and passion.
- When you blog on your own website, the search engines recognize that your site is alive and this helps how they rate you
- Each blog entry allows you to include more "keywords" (the terms that people might use to find an agency like yours)
- It gets you "into the conversation" and increases your visibility (more people can find you)
This post was inspired by the fact that Ankota was mentioned in another blog yesterday, from Fast Company magazine. This particular article talks about the importance of differentiating your business, and uses Ankota as an example. This is a lesson that applies to all of us in home care. You can click the banner below to see the article.
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.