In this interview, we sat down with Keri Shockley, Senior Consultant at MTEC. Keri discusses the common trends she’s seen at the agency level, upcoming concerns and solutions, and the best practices to overhaul operations and achieve caregiver success.
The most common trend that agencies need to focus on is working on communication within their operations. Between the administrative side, and the field staff side of things we find that most problems come from either a communication breakdown or not following set policies and practices. By focusing deeply on that communication, following organization policies, operations can make sure everything is streamlined and helps to correct any of those issues that might arise.
Essentially the biggest complaint that I've seen in my experience, especially in relation to patient care is the scheduling of visits. To address these concerns, Maxwell TEC has two products coming out soon, NOTIFYnana and nanaCONNECT. So, what these solutions do is basically streamline communication. It’s going to send an automatic text when a caregiver arrives, and then every visit that they have from there on out is going to send a notification saying, “Hey, you have a visit with this clinician coming up. Is that general time and date OK?”. The family or patient themselves will be able to confirm or decline that scheduled visit and that's going to help reduce the number of missed visits that your agency sees. It's going to help with many common patient complaints, especially when they don't know when the therapist is going to arrive. So, any solution that can streamline communication, specifically those two products from MTEC, will be a huge game changer for agency and patient satisfaction.
Staffing has been a really big issue for the retention of both field staff and back-office staff. We've seen countless organizations come to us for help streamlining their processes. We start by looking at their staffing model to see if they have the right people in the right places. From there, we help them in streamlining their processes so they're able to have fewer people in the back office, they're able to have field staff support that they need for those clinicians that are out there seeing the patients and providing care. Staffing is a very prominent issue right now and throughout my time as a consultant I’ve seen this overlap between countless agencies.
I really do feel that agencies and organizations are moving away from being all-encompassing as far as staff responsibilities are concerned. We see operations somewhat simplifying, looking to see where they can be more efficient as far as their worker productivity for both people in the office, and in the field, making sure that their training is a nice solid foundation by utilizing optimization practices. Once we have those streamlined processes presented to them, they're able to define and carry their own success forward.
This blog was originally published as "THRIVE: Best Practices for Post-Acute Success" by Maxwell Healthcare Associates on November 14, 2023, for Maxwell Healthcare Associates. The Maxwell TEC editorial team has since updated this article to ensure accuracy and relevance.