Jim Lezzer of Worldview recently hosted a webinar bringing together Dr.Karen Paules from Nest In Place and Laura McKee from Hucu.ai to discuss some of the challenges faced in home care and how communication helps in overcoming them.
With 22 years of experience in healthcare, Dr. Paules knows the value of strong communication and how it drives quality of care. Several solutions left them unsatisfied because they were either not organized or HIPAA compliant. They were inefficient and ineffective from group-texting to EHR Portals to voice systems and even good old notebooks in the home.
With Hucu.ai, everything fell into place for Karen and her entire team at Nest in Place.
Challenges: Home Care
Home care agencies face many key challenges. Employee satisfaction ranks high, which means creating a great culture and working to maintain that in your organization is critical. Having a culture where employees feel supported can prove difficult at times. Employees might leave if they feel under-appreciated for all their efforts. Supportive communication is closely tied to employee retention, a critical success factor for home care service quality and growth.
Effectively addressing these challenges will drive your home care agency forward.
Here are the 5 Key Takeaways:
Employee Satisfaction
For Dr.Paules, making sure that her employees feel supported throughout their caregiver journey takes precedence over anything else. Hucu.ai makes the caregiving process easier for providers at Nest in Place. Now, they are part of caregiver chats and have immediate access to a client’s history. Every caregiver who sees a particular client is included in that chat.
With a different caregiver on shift, they can just refer back to the chat in Hucu.ai, and see how that client has progressed over the past few weeks and take note of important information.
Hucu.ai makes new caregivers at Nest in Place feel supported and encouraged in all their care efforts. For instance, a family member might ask a caregiver who is on their first shift to clean their mother’s under nails. That caregiver now knows what they need to do, once done, they can even share pictures of that in Hucu.ai, and the other caregivers plus the families can see the efforts of the new caregiver. Positive feedback from colleagues and the families encourages them and makes them feel that their day-to-day efforts are making a difference in the lives of others.
Hucu.ai helps Dr.Paules create a strong culture within her agency, where their caregivers feel backed and supported from day one of their joining. Hucu.ai drives improved net promoter scores at care agencies, as staff members feel committed to their organization’s vision: Nest in Place is 75.
Saves Time
Above all else, 100% of employees at Nest in Place agree that Hucu.ai saves their time. With quick access to client information in Hucu.ai, caregivers save time and channel all that energy towards other urgent matters that require their expertise.
The entire organization at Nest in Place is in one place. Hucu.ai brings families, caregivers, managers together in a single setting, where they can securely communicate with each other and coordinate timely care. This saves them a lot of time, as now they can respond quicker to patient needs in a shorter span of time.
“Hucu.ai seeks to make communication ubiquitous across the care continuum.” said Laura Mckee (Co-Founder and COO at Hucu.ai).
There is a lot of value attached with caregivers saving time as opposed to faxing, phoning or waiting for a callback.
Lower Staff Turnover
With employees feeling supported, the positive culture at Nest in Place helps them retain their employees through challenging Covid times. The ability to coordinate effective care through Hucu.ai makes caregivers more efficient in their roles, with higher levels of job satisfaction.
Therefore, lowering turnover by 44% at Nest in Place, which is far lower than the industry average. Hucu.ai makes it easier for providers at Nest in Place to communicate as a team, and have the information they need while seeing a client. 75% of Nest employees say that they have grown more efficient in their roles ever since Hucu.ai: this helps them perform better and feel more comfortable in their jobs.
Better data visibility helps track their team’s engagement with Hucu.ai. This allows them to follow up in case an employee of theirs is facing some issue with a client or perhaps a personal problem.
Team Engagement
Culture development is a top priority at Dr.Paules’s home care agency and that starts from day one. Hucu.ai has made quite an impact in this regard. In Hucu.ai, they have a channel by the name of ‘all employees’, where every team member welcomes a new caregiver and so they are already made to feel part of the team. This is a rarity in home care, as caregivers barely see each other and are working individually in different client’s homes.
Nest in Place even has a channel, I love my pet, where employees love sharing pictures of their pets. This encourages the new employee to do the same and makes them feel part of the team.
Hucu.ai brings the team at Nest in Place together as 81% of the staff feels more connected to their team.
A Better Patient/Family Experience
Hucu.ai allows families at Nest in Place to feel supported with a 75% increase in family engagement. Separate patient/family chats allow caregivers to directly communicate with the family. Information is provided timely with immediate exchanges between caregivers and the family. Families are quickly updated over anything urgent in their loved ones’ care. This makes them more supported and engaged in the whole care process.
Dr.Paules’s team of managers are a part of every caregiver chat. This keeps them informed of what is happening with a patient, in case they are not walking well or having difficulty getting out of the chair. They can simply visit that patient and can communicate relevant information through Hucu.ai, to the patient’s nurse practitioner for instance. Perhaps, that patient needs to have their urine checked.
External collaborators can be added in Hucu.ai, and this way information over patients is timely coordinated between teams, their families and other care staff. This helps Nest in Place provide better care for patients and reduce unnecessary hospitalizations.
Dr.Paules sums up the creative energy behind Hucu.ai with the following words,
“I am always coming up with new and inventive ways of what we can do with the platform.”
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