If you’re like many of your peers, your home care agency started out with just a client and a dream, and today you sometimes can't believe how much your business has grown.  You’ve realized that in order to scale further, you need software to manage your scheduling, care plans, billing, payroll, and time tracking.  Hopefully, your software came from Ankota, but whether it did or not, we’d like to help you make your roll-out a success.  

With that in mind, here are some Best Practices we'd like to share for your telephony roll-out.

1. Choose telephony that knows your care giver schedules and client care plans.  This way, your caregivers simply need to answer yes or no questions rather than memorizing complex codes.
2. Have your office staff show enthusiasm:  If your back-office team is excited about the telephony and understand how much simpler it will be for the caregivers and office staff alike, their positive energy will rub off.
3. Provide training – Bring caregivers in to get a quick introduction to the telephony and try it out.  This shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes or so.
4. Set up test clients and test IDs, then have each caregiver do a practice "clock in and clock" out before they're out in the field.
5. Consider starting with just time-keeping, and then add care plans later.  If your organization is embracing technology for the first time, it might be best to focus first on timekeeping, billing, and payroll and then add care plans a bit later (even just a couple of weeks).
6. Print business cards with the telephony instructions:  With Ankota’s system all they need to remember is a phone number, a user ID (usually 3 digits), and a PIN number (also usually 3 digits).  Note that I highly recommend EliteFlyers.com for business cards.  You get 1,000 high quality cards for $35.
7. Identify early adopters:  Roll out to a small number of enthusiastic caregivers first.  As explained above, a positive attitude within the company is important in all technology roll-outs.
8. Train your back office staff so they can be coaches for the Aides.
9. Think beyond telephony: Even if you’re just rolling out telephony for the first time, some vendors, like Ankota, offer a “smart phone version” of telephony and a fixed visit verification solution for clients who don’t have home phones.

For other home care best practices, please subscribe to the Ankota blog or download the free white paper, 7 Habits of Highly Effective Home Care Agencies

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 Reeadmisison avoidance and on management of Private Duty non-medical home care.

To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.