When a caregiver calls out at 6:05 a.m., your home care software may not be the first place your scheduler turns. She opens the spreadsheet she keeps on the side, remembers that two of the available caregivers are allergic to the client’s cat, texts three others, and waits. Once someone finally says yes, she goes back into the system to update the schedule.
Most of that morning’s headache could have been prevented with a system that tracked those details instead of relying on a person to remember every detail. That’s what we mean by smart home care software: it holds onto the information your team would otherwise keep in their heads and puts it to work when it’s time to fill a shift or send a reminder.
Let’s walk through six places your software should be carrying that load. 
Home Care Software Should Match Caregivers to Clients
Knowing who’s free at 9 a.m. is only a piece of the caregiver management puzzle. Your scheduler also has to account for service area, pet allergies, and any training a Client’s care plan calls for, and on a busy morning that’s a lot of details to keep straight.
Rosemark handles this with Skills Matching. An agency applies skills and requirements to caregiver profiles and to each client’s service, and when the scheduler goes to fill a shift, the system filters out caregivers who don’t meet that client’s needs. If task matching is also turned on, the system requires a caregiver to be set up for the specific tasks on the client’s care plan before it lists them as an option.
There will still be days when your scheduler needs to make an exception. Rosemark allows an override in those cases and lists which requirements the caregiver is missing, so the person making the call knows exactly what they’re approving.
Shift Reminders Improve On-Time Rates
A late arrival can be caused by something as small as a caregiver accidentally writing down the wrong start time. Calling or texting everyone the night before can help, but it’s also one of the first tasks to get skipped when the office is short-handed. It can also be a long, manual process if you have a lot of care staff.
Shift Reminders in Rosemark take that job off your staff’s to-do list. Once they’re turned on, reminders go out automatically, and your agency decides:
- What time of day they’re sent
- Whether they cover next-day shifts only or same-day shifts too
- Whether to send them out via text or email
Staff can still send one manually whenever they need to. As you compare home care software, look closely at which notifications happen automatically and which still depend on a staff member remembering to send them.
A Caregiver App That Still Works Offline
Caregivers use their phones to check schedules, clock in and out for electronic visit verification (EVV), complete tasks, document visits, and collect signatures. That works well until they pull up to a rural client’s house with no cell service or walk into a building where the signal drops.
Coverage maps won’t always warn you, either, since the FCC’s mobile coverage map reflects service outdoors or in a moving vehicle and doesn’t account for signal indoors, where caregivers do most of their work.
The Rosemark Caregiver App (RCA) has an Offline Mode for those visits. Caregivers can clock in, work through their tasks, and collect signatures the same way they would with a connection. When they’ve returned to a place with better service and log in, everything they recorded offline syncs to Rosemark.
Pull Reports From Your Home Care Software
Most agencies have plenty of data, but it can be frustrating if it takes a long time to create a usable report when someone needs a quick answer.
Whatever home care software you use, reporting should help your team:
- Pull payroll numbers for any date range, as a quick summary or broken down by shift
- Catch shifts that haven’t been verified before they end up in payroll
- Review the tasks and signatures caregivers recorded during a visit without chasing down paper timesheets
Rosemark’s Payroll Report is built with that second point in mind. By default, it leaves out shifts that haven’t been marked as “Verified Complete” and shows how many verified and unverified shifts fall in the set date range, so your team can see what still needs review before payroll goes out.
For anything the standard reports don’t cover, most fields in Rosemark can be exported, and our Customer Success team can help you put together the report you need.
Set Up the Software Around How You Operate
An agency billing mostly private pay needs different things from its software than one juggling Medicaid, Veterans Affairs (VA), and long-term care insurance. A small rural agency also schedules differently than a larger one in a metro area.
Rosemark supports agencies billing private pay, Medicaid, VA, long-term care insurance, and workers’ compensation. Skills Matching adapts, too. Some agencies build it around service areas and pet allergies, while others use it to confirm caregivers have the training or credentials a care plan requires.
Nearly 40 years in home care has shown us how many different ways there are to run a good agency, and your software should be able to follow your lead.
Make the Software Easy for the Whole Team
Everything above depends on your whole team using the software consistently, including your newest hires. Give new care staff a strong start with a clear training plan, and offer current staff refreshers to help everyone feel confident using the tools in their daily work.
Rosemark’s U.S.-based Customer Success team handles onboarding and staff training. For questions that come up later, our online help center includes Rosie, an AI chatbot that points people to answers and helpful articles, so new team members have resources to review before coming to your desk.
Where Your Agency Should Start
Spend a day jotting down the tasks your staff does from memory, like which caregivers can’t work with which clients, who needs a nudge before a shift, and which report you have to build every week. Those are things your software could be doing so you can focus more on providing great care, recruiting caregivers, or generating more leads.
If that list turns out to be long, it may be a good time to see how Rosemark handles that work.
Schedule a chat now to see how Rosemark works.