One of the industry experts I learn from every time we speak is Ginny Kenyon, principal at Kenyon Home Care Consulting. Ginny helps open home care agencies and has given Ankota great inputs on our software. We at Ankota strongly believe that keeping elderly people healthy and comfortable in their homes (and out of the hospital) is an important step in the evolution of healthcare. Ginny is one of the pioneers driving moves in home health delivery. Enjoy her post (below).
Running a homecare organization is no easy task! The process of keeping your agency running smoothly can quickly become overwhelming. In the throes of your day-to-day responsibilities, you may even consider it insanity. Fortunately, there’s a light at the end of tunnel—at least when it comes to customized homecare manuals.
Cost of Creating Your Own Customized Manuals
Time is money don’t go waisting time, isolated clock with money time icon
Customized manuals are crucial to the success of your homecare agency. In these manuals, you find all the information necessary to maintain your organization’s integrity, remain in legal compliance, keep employees on track and so much more.
Writing your own manuals is an overwhelming task, one that is best left to manual experts. Otherwise, you simply add to the insanity of your daily routine.
The Time Aspect
Research has found that it takes approximately 300 hours (otherwise known as six 40-hour work weeks) to create a typical homecare manual from scratch. As crazy as that amount of time sounds, it doesn’t even include other important factors, such as:
- Researching what to include;
- Designing the template and content structure;
- Incorporating accreditation standards;
- Adding state-specific standards.
In all that time, you or whichever management-level employee you hand the task to, should be performing numerous other tasks that will help grow your business. Here are some ideas of better ways to allocate your time:
- Investigating and developing ways to branch into additional services
- Focusing on approaches to increase referrals
- Finding new marketing avenues
- Researching what competitors are doing better than you
- Educating employees to create an elite staff
- Attending home visits with staff
- Evaluating goals and creating new ones
- Brainstorming ways to improve your daily operations
The Money Aspect
Time is money, right? So, just to give you an idea of the kind of resources you’d be spending by creating your own manuals from scratch, we did the math.
At $25 an hour, a respectable wage for a leadership role in your agency, you would pay someone roughly $7500 to write a compliant manual. And, as we mentioned above, this doesn’t even include the preliminary research time, or regular updating once the manual is complete. That’s a pretty nice chunk of change. Think of all the ways you could spend that money to further improve your organization!
Peace-of-Mind Benefits of Purchasing Customized Manuals
Instead of driving yourself more insane by creating your own homecare manuals, consider purchasing customized manuals from an industry expert. Doing so helps you maintain peace of mind, allowing you to focus on what’s most important. Here’s how.
- Purchasing customized manuals helps you stay organized and up to date.
- Know your staff’s time is being spent in the most productive ways possible.
- Customized manuals are effective and accurate, allowing you to rest assured that nothing important is missing.
- Custom designed by knowledgeable experts to include necessary requirements for your state and specific agency type.
In addition to the benefits mentioned above, be sure your customized manuals are electronic making them easy to access, maintain and update. This alleviates the stress of overhauling and reprinting your manual every time a regulation changes.
Kenyon HomeCare Consulting’s Customized Manuals
Whatever your needs, Kenyon HomeCare Consulting has a manual for you! Our manuals follow best practices, are easily customizable, are accreditation ready and simple to update. So, we offer something for everyone! Simply click on a title below to learn more about how we can meet your specific needs.
- Aide Competency Testing Kit
- Employee Handbook
- Medicare Home Health Agency Administrative Policies and Procedures Manual
- California/Medicare Home Health Agency Administrative Policies and Procedures Manual
- Medicare-Certified Hospice Administrative Policies and Procedures Manual
- Licensed/Non-Medicare Home Health Agency Administrative Policies and Procedures Manual
- Non-Skilled Home Care Agency Administrative Policies and Procedures Manual
- Non-Skilled Home Care Agency Administrative Policies and Procedures Manual (California)
- Private Duty Home Health & Non-Skilled/Skilled Home Care Forms
In addition to these manuals, we offer many other services—ICD-10 Coding Plus, Aide University, Interim Management, numerous consulting services— to help your agency thrive. Reach out to us today to get started!
This article entitled, "Save Time and Money Creating Customized Homecare Manuals and Updates" first appeared in Kenyon HomeCare Consulting blog.
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One of Ankota's whitepapers, entitled "Seven Habits of Highly Effective Private Duty Home Care Agencies" available for download and we think you'll find it useful. Please click the link or the picture below to download. If you're interested in scheduling an online demo of our home care or care transitions software solutions, just click this button:
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital, focusing on efficiency and care coordination. Ankota's primary focus is on Care Transitions for Readmission avoidance and on management of Private Duty non-medical home care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact us.
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