The Real Challenges of Providing Care at Home—and How to Address Them

TEC Journeys: Explore the Tech-Enabled Care Experience

As care at home becomes the preferred option for many aging and ill patients, its advantages—comfort, familiarity, and personalized care—are clear. But delivering this kind of care for patients isn’t as simple as sending a nurse to their house and calling it a day. It comes with compounding challenges for home-based care agencies and clinicians alike.  

From debilitating staffing shortages to fragmented documentation and shifting payer requirements, providers are under pressure to do more with less—while still delivering high-quality, compliant care.

Here’s a closer look at the most pressing challenges in providing care at home, and how agencies can navigate them with Maxwell TEC’s consulting expertise and tech-enabled solutions.  

Financial Complexity and Reimbursement Barriers 

Getting paid accurately and on time remains a top concern for care-at-home agencies. Home health and hospice providers continue to juggle a growing number of payers, evolving billing requirements, and increased scrutiny around compliance while facing a complicated revenue environment that’s difficult to manage alone.  

Amid these shifting payer requirements and electronic submission protocols, having the right foundation is essential. That means: 

• Proper payor source setup from the start 

• Efficient financial evaluations and payment review structures 

• Accurate, timely documentation that supports claim integrity 

• Continuous monitoring to uncover new revenue opportunities 

Too often, agencies operate using siloed systems and outdated practices that lead to billing errors, delayed reimbursements, or even denied claims. And with more commercial insurers entering the space, navigating different payment structures only adds to the burden.  

Maxwell TEC helps agencies overhaul their entire revenue cycle. Whether it’s optimizing claim submission workflows, identifying cash flow gaps, or aligning your processes with the best-in-class industry standards, our experts bring years of hands-on experience across RCM systems and payor landscapes. Through analytical insights, interim leadership, and proven best practices, we help agencies get ahead of payment disruptions—while identifying areas for long-term growth.  

Persistent Staffing Gaps 

Staffing remains one of the most urgent and complex challenges in providing care at home. As demand surges for home-based services—driven by the increasing aging population— agencies are struggling to recruit, retain, and empower the caregivers they need.

But today’s workforce challenges require more than quick fixes. Agencies need tools that support them in the long term, from onboarding to burnout prevention.  

That’s where Maxwell TEC’s Caregiver Accelerator comes in. Our platform equips caregivers and schedulers with real-time productivity insights, streamlined scheduling, and improved care team communication. This tool helps agencies identify support needs, reduce burnout, and ensure coordinated care that boosts caregiver efficiency.  

Through our partnership with Levo, agencies can even go a step further, bringing real-time, predictive workforce management into the mix. Levo helps organizations proactively monitor burnout risk, reduce churn, and improve scheduling through behavioral data insights. The result? A more resilient, engaged workforce that sticks around—and shows up ready to deliver quality care.  

Maxwell TEC is committed to helping home-based care agencies engage and retain their caregivers through high-quality tech solutions like Caregiver Accelerator and Levo. We know these challenges can make providing care at home feel overwhelming—but with the right technology and support, agencies can do more than just keep up. They can build a stronger, more sustainable care model for the future.  

Documentation Burdens 

Documentation remains one of the most time-consuming, risk-prone aspects of home-based care. Between evolving regulatory requirements to inefficient EMR usage, many teams are stuck in workflows that add friction instead of clarity.  

Even with the best intentions, overburdened care teams can fall into inconsistent or incomplete documentation habits. Outdated templates, underutilized features, or missing validations within the EMR can all contribute to errors, denials, and compliance risk. 

Maxwell TEC helps agencies optimize their EMR for clarity, compliance, and clinical efficiency. Our team conducts thorough reviews of current documentation processes and EMR configurations to identify gaps, reduce redundancy, and eliminate bottlenecks. We deliver: 

• Streamlined documentation pathways that reduce charting time and clinical decision making 

• EMR assessments to identify agency-specific needs and optimizations that meet current CMS and payer-specific documentation requirements 

• Hands-on coaching and workflow training to ensure teams know how to operate new systems or utilize what they already have more efficiently 

Our optimization services aren’t one-size-fits-all fixes—they’re built to align with your agency’s goals, existing systems, and clinical workflows to ensure documentation supports care delivery, rather than slow it down.  

Siloed Technology and Care Coordination Gaps 

Technology should simplify care, but for many providers, it adds friction instead. Disconnected systems, limited data visibility, and lack of interoperability make it difficult to deliver coordinated care, especially across multi-disciplinary teams. 

We at Maxwell TEC believe technology should work for your team—not against it. Our solutions are designed to integrate seamlessly into existing workflows, reduce coordination gaps, and enable real-time visibility across your organization. Through our tech-enabled products, we offer: 

• NOTIFY: keep patients in the loop with real-time text updates about their upcoming clinician visits—ensuring better communication. 

• ENGAGE: offers daily text-based check-ins to patients, while providers receive real-time updates on patients’ wellbeing—allowing for more proactive care.  

• REACH: maintain connection with discharged patients, promoting ongoing engagement and monitoring to identify potential signs of readmission 

• BEREAVE: replace traditional paper-based bereavement communications with tailored, supportive text messages—personalized utilizing AI risk-scoring, so the right message is sent at the right time 

• Caregiver Accelerator: productivity tool that helps agencies optimize scheduling and track clinician performance in real time—resulting in fewer missed visits and more efficient use of staff 

Our tech stack was created to fit seamlessly into your agency’s current operations and support your team in delivering high-quality, connected care—from first check-in to final comfort. We believe technology is built to work together, fit easily into your workflows, and enable real-time visibility across your organization.  

This blog was originally published as "Major Challenges in Hospice and Homecare" by Vivek Mathew on 4/20/20, for Maxwell Healthcare Associates. The Maxwell TEC editorial team has since updated this article to ensure accuracy and relevance.