In season one of Home Care Now, we explored becoming a lean agency. Over the last five episodes, we discussed how to increase efficiency and productivity across the organization. In this episode, hear the highlights and advice from each guest on how to become a lean agency from the perspective of their expertise. Get the expert’s advice on:Preventing litigation from Angelo Spinola from Littler Mendelson Combining a large field force post acquisition or merger from Jennifer Maxwell from Maxwell Healthcare AssociatesImproving retention and recruiting Sydney Axelrod from the Home Care Aide CouncilKeeping caregivers safe through emergency preparedness by Kim Skehan from Simione Healthcare Consulting Connecting systems across the ecosystem through interoperability with AJ Peterson from Netsmart Go more in-depth on each topic by listening to the full episode on www.celltrak.com.Full Episodes:How to Prevent Litigation and Wage Disputes. Angelo Spinola, Attorney at Littler Mendelson. Ensure that you comply with wage and hour requirements. Listen to Episode 1After the M&A Transaction: Combining Large Field Forces. Jennifer Maxwell, President at Maxwell Healthcare Associates. Learn about the hard work of achieving scale.Listen to Episode 2New Perspectives on Caregiver Recruiting & Retention. Sydney Axelrod, Foundation Manager at Home Care Aide Council. Engage caregivers in creative ways.Listen to Episode 3Caregiver Safety: Preparing for the Unexpected. Kimberly Skehan, Director of Regulatory and Quality Consulting, Simione Healthcare Consultants. Stay connected with caregivers so you are there when they need you.Listen to Episode 4Going Beyond Interoperability Standards. AJ Peterson, VP/GM of Interoperability and Consumer Engagement, Netsmart. Understand the practical side of interoperability and integration.Listen to Episode 5

Home Care Now from CellTrak

Expert Advice on Becoming a Lean Agency: Season 1 Round-up

Your IT systems help your agency operate at scale, but for all practical purposes your data is held hostage in their data silos. To compete and operate efficiently, data needs to flow freely to support decision-making and streamline workflows. While interoperability standards progress, agencies need to take action now.  In this episode, AJ Peterson, vice president and general manager of interoperability and consumer engagement at Netsmart, and host Kristi Harris, vice president of customer success at CellTrak, discuss what interoperability means on a theoretical and practical level, its impact on agency productivity, and what agencies can do today to free their data to run lean.If you find this podcast interesting or helpful, please “like” it and leave a review on iTunes or Google Play. Be sure to subscribe to this Home Care Now so you can stay up-to-date on upcoming episodes or listen to earlier ones.  For more valuable resources on the home health care market, visit CellTrak.com. Resources Mentioned in this Episode and Supporting Information:You Can Get the Data You Need With Just a Few Words:  Learn three steps you can take today to gain access to your data and help drive industry progress. Read the Blog Post  Interoperability: Expanding the Definition of Integrated Care:  Explore how organizations are leveraging technology platforms to improve key processes. Look at why putting shared information into context is the key to creating a model for true, collaborative care.Read the White Paper Interoperability Tools - Resources:  Get links to standards organizations for a deeper investigation into interoperability.Get the Resource List  Infographic:  As healthcare shifts to an integrated care model, Netsmart offers a secure network.See the Netsmart network

Going Beyond Interoperability Standards

Caregivers can face unexpected challenges to their safety on any given day. Whether from the environment, around the neighborhood, or in the home, agencies must be prepared to communicate and act quickly. Federal and local regulations can help ensure a robust and complete plan. In this episode, Kimberly Skehan, director of regulatory and quality consulting at Simione Healthcare Consultants and host Kristi Harris, vice president of customer success at CellTrak discuss the challenges to keeping caregivers safe, emergency preparedness regulations, and how technology can help ensure staff and patient safety.If you find this podcast interesting or helpful, please “like” it and leave a review on iTunes or Google Play. Be sure to subscribe to the Home Care Now podcast so you can stay up-to-date on upcoming episodes or listen to earlier ones.For more valuable resources on the home health care market, visit CellTrak.com. Resources Mentioned in this Episode and Supporting Information:Emergency Preparedness: Is Your Agency Disaster-Ready?Learn the elements to consider in an emergency plan and the questions to ask. Read the Blog Post Climb the Ladder of Success with CoPs:From Simione Healthcare Consultants’ series on home health CoP training, learn the key factors for emergency preparedness.Read the Article Home Health Conditions of Participation, 2018 Implementation. Checklist 484.102Review each checklist item to insure compliance with the following requirements with the Medicare Home Health Conditions of Participation effective November 15, 2017.Get the Checklist Government’s Emergency Preparedness Resources: Access CMS and U.S. Federal Government websites for detailed information.Get the Links Trillium Health Partners:Trillium Health Partners, a hospital in Ontario, Canada, providing specialized care to people in their own communities, uses CellTrak to improve safety and visibility of home dialysis staff.Read the Customer Success Story

Caregiver Safety - Preparing for the Unexpected

The demand for home caregivers continues to grow, as do the challenges of recruiting and retaining staff. In this episode, Sydney Axelrod, foundation manager at the Home Care Aide Council, shares key findings from the Council’s recent Home Care Industry Assessment. Along with host Kristi Harris, vice president of customer success at CellTrak, Sydney explores the challenges caregivers face, the impact on agencies, and actions agencies can take to recruit new workers and reduce turnover.Resources Mentioned in this Episode and Supporting Information:Home Care Aide Industry Assessment: The Home Care Aide Foundation conducted an assessment of the Massachusetts home care aide workforce throughout 2016 and 2017. This project included both a survey of home care agencies and a survey of home care aides employed by these agencies.  Download the Data Findings Fact SheetDownload Recommendations for Change Three Ways Home Care Agencies Can Improve Staff Satisfaction and Retention: Get an in-depth look at how home care companies can leverage tech-based solutions to improve worker safety, manage time efficiently and better communicate with employees.Download the white paper Improving Home Care Aide Satisfaction and Retention Using Technology: Addus HomeCare shares what has worked to retain direct care workers in their organization.Watch the webinar replay How to Decrease Caregiver Churn Rates: Here are three proven ways for boosting staff satisfaction, improving retention, and reducing your caregiver churn rates.Read the blog post Graceworks at Home: Graceworks at Home, a non-profit offering residential and personal services to older adults in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, uses CellTrak to improve efficiency and productivity, increasing employee retention by 20%.Read the Graceworks at Home Success Story

New Perspectives in Caregiver Recruiting and Retention

2018 has seen a surge in home care agency mergers and acquisitions. But after the transaction closes, leadership must combine large field forces of caregivers efficiently to maximize ROI. In this episode, Jennifer Maxwell, president and co-founder of Maxwell Healthcare Associates, shares insight into the challenges facing the new organization’s ability to run lean. Along with host Kristi Harris, vice president of customer success at CellTrak, Jennifer explores how technology can help drive productivity within large remote field forces to get to the ROI investors expect. If you find this podcast interesting or helpful, please “like” it and leave a review on iTunes or Google Play. Be sure to subscribe to this Home Care Now so you can stay up-to-date on upcoming episodes or listen to earlier ones.  For more valuable resources on the home health care market, visit CellTrak.com.Resources Mentioned in this Episode and Supporting Information:5 Ways Home Care Agencies Can Increase Productivity and Improve Financial Outcomes: Home care agencies are faced with growing demands to provide high-quality care and increase productivity while keeping up with industry and regulatory changes. Many factors impact productivity, yet streamlining workflows and increasing efficiencies lead to improvement. Agencies need a way to increase productivity and reduce costs while delivering compliant and quality care.  Read the White Paper. You Can Get the Data You Need With Just a Few Words: Digging into how agencies operates, can uncover data availability issues: Data being keyed into multiple systems, data from some systems needing to be manually keyed into other systems, or the inability to combine data in the ways needed to do analyses to optimize the business. Learn what you can do today to free your data from silos. Read the Blog Post. Hospice at Home: Hospice at Home, a Lakeland Health affiliate based in Michigan nationally recognized for delivering exemplary patient experiences and clinical outcomes, reduces administrative burden for caregivers by 76%, reduces mileage expenses by 26%, and increases job satisfaction with CellTrak’s point-of-care documentation. Read the Hospice at Home Success Story.

After the Merger and Acquisition Transaction - Combining Large Field Forces

For the last three years, the Home Care industry has been the most targeted industry for wage class actions and single plaintiff lawsuits. Why? Because regulations are relatively new, which means they are low-hanging fruit for attorneys as home care agencies learn how to comply. These lawsuits are also popular because the industry is profitable – aging at home is the trend and money is being invested here.So how can your agency protect itself and prevent these lawsuits? Angelo Spinola, attorney and shareholder at Littler Mendelson, joins Kristi Harris, CellTrak’s vice president of customer success, to provide tips on how to reduce risk of litigation by avoiding common mistakes. Listen in to learn which kinds of agencies are most at risk, which states have the highest rate of litigation, and typical pitfalls agencies are making – and how to avoid them.  Be sure to “like” this episode and subscribe to Home Care Now, and visit CellTrak.com for more valuable resources.

How to Prevent Litigation and Wage Disputes - with Angelo Spinola - Ep. 1

Home Care Now is a bi-monthly podcast for home care agency leaders brought to you by CellTrak. Home Care Now will bring you insightful conversations with an outstanding line up of experts and influencers within the home care industry. Our goal is to share ideas that can help you achieve the Quadruple Aim – better care, better outcomes, lower costs, and caring management.This season’s theme is “becoming a lean agency.” By lean, we mean running efficiently and productively. Over the next 5 episodes, we will explore becoming lean through different functional lenses, including human capital, legal, operations, and other areas. By the end of the season, you’ll have a well-rounded view of how to operate efficiently and productively across your organization.In our first episode, we’ll explore how to prevent litigation and wage disputes with Angelo Spinola, who specializes in employment and labor law at Littler Mendelson. We’ll discuss the legal pitfalls of managing a remote workforce, and how technology can foster better labor relations, benefit employees, and help prevent litigation.We’ll also tackle how to become lean after the merger or acquisition transaction completes. Combing large field forces brings a unique set of challenges. As investors look to quickly get ROI, we’ll discuss how innovation can help drive productivity with Jennifer Maxwell, President of Maxwell Healthcare Associates, who are change management specialists.In another episode, we’ll look at IT interoperability and integration, discussing the challenges of working with multiple systems and what you can do to ensure you can easily access all your data.With today’s tight labor force, recruiting and retention is top of mind. Sydney Axelrod from the Home Care Aide Council joins us in an episode to discuss their recent caregiver research and we explore creative ways to engage workers to reduce turnover and improve productivity. We also have an entire episode devoted to keeping caregivers safe. We’ll discuss regulations, and ways to ensure staff and patient safety in homes and neighborhoods. You won’t want to miss an episode! Go www.celltrak.com/podcasts now and subscribe to the Home Care Now podcast, so you get new episodes automatically. You can listen via Apple iTunes, Google Play or Spotify – or directly from the CellTrak web site.Drop us a line at podcasts@celltrak.com with what you think about the episodes or if you have other topics you’d like us to explore.

Home Care Now - Season 1 Preview

Home Care Now from CellTrak is an audio program for home care agency leaders striving to achieve the Quadruple Aim – better care, better outcomes, lower costs, and supportive management. I’m Kristi Harris, CellTrak’s VP of customer success. I’ll be speaking with industry thought leaders and experts in this biweekly discussion about timely issues and trends that affect your agency. Be sure to subscribe now to stay up-to-date on the latest episodes via iTunes, Google Play Music, or www.celltrak.com/podcasts.

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Home Care Now from CellTrak

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