Whether your home care agency wants to spur growth, increase caregiver retention, reduce caregiver churn, or stabilize revenue, leveraging data is the key.
Leveraging Data to Improve General Processes
Agencies should be very aware of their data and how to track important information in their home care management software. If data is not being tracked, it’s hard to understand the movement of a business.
This collection of data should not only be tracked on a day-to-day basis. It should also be looked at in-depth on a week-over-week or month-over-month basis. Some of the most important metrics are about the change of data points over time.
What’s the best way to look at all that data your agency has collected? Through reports.
Using Reports
When it comes down to it, most agencies simply don’t take the time to run reports because they are so busy doing other things, like providing great care. We really can’t state enough times how important collecting and leveraging data is, and reports are the mechanism agencies use to do just that.
Margins Report
One example of a report that most agencies don’t utilize but definitely should is the Margins Report on Clients. This report allows agencies to determine what their profit margins per client are.
Are you actually billing enough on that Couples Care case, or just breaking even? The Margins Report is the easiest way to make sure an agency is actually billing enough and generating enough income to sustain its business.
Many agencies set up bill rates and pay rates independently, often on a case-by-case basis. This is not something we at Rosemark recommend. We suggest bill and pay rates never exist independently of one another. Using a Margins Report is one way to ensure agencies are billing enough to care for a client and properly pay a caregiver while making a profit.
Running Margin Reports in Rosemark is quick and easy but It requires one very important component that not every agency takes part in actively. That key component is making sure your agency has accurate pay and bill rates in the system for all clients and caregivers on all shifts.
Accurate rate management means the data you export into those reports is correct, accurate, and up to date.
Traditionally, businesses run on a 50% margin, so a 50% markup is considered good. However, if you don’t know what your margins are because your bill and pay rates aren’t accurate in the system and you can’t run the proper reports, your agency could be losing a lot of money.
Think of Margin Reports as a snapshot of how well your agency is doing. It’s a great way of making sure you’re meeting the minimum requirements to sustain your business.
Looking at Trends in Reports
Leveraging data by looking at trends is also extremely valuable. Agencies can use trend data to make sure there are no underlying problems lurking beneath the surface of their operations.
One trend to keep track of is shifts that aren’t worked. Those shifts could be by caregivers who call in with notice or at the last minute. They could also be caused by clients who cancel. Either way, it’s crucial that agencies use the tools in their software to keep track of missed shifts.
It’s important to look at unassigned shifts that are not being worked. It’s also really important to change the shift status to reflect what actually happened in those situations rather than simply unassigning or deleting them. Did the caregiver call out or no show? Was the client not home when the caregiver arrived?
This will allow the agency to later pull reports that show how many times a caregiver called off or how many times a client canceled with or without notice. Utilizing status changes to make sure your system accurately reflects what’s happening in the field is the only way you can leverage that information for key performance indicator (KPI) reporting.
That data can be useful for employee reviews as well. It can also help an agency determine whether a client who continues to cancel shifts at the last minute needs to be rescheduled for a better day or time.
Think of every missed shift as lost revenue. By finding the patterns, you can prevent more missed shifts and more lost revenue.
Payor Sources
Running a home care agency is like putting together a very intricate puzzle. There are a lot of pieces that fuse together to make the agency run smoothly and be profitable.
Looking at various payor sources is another piece of that puzzle. Those payors could include:
- Private pay
- Medicaid
- Veterans Administration (VA)
- Long-Term Care Insurance
- Workers Compensation
If an agency is expecting a certain number of hours per week and too many clients or caregivers cancel, those are not shifts that can be made up immediately. That equates to lost revenue.
Having a diverse number of clients with various payor sources is one way to potentially mitigate the problem of lower margin, lower hour clients if they can be offset with higher paying clients or payor sources that provide more hours.
That being said, we’ve seen a trend that even with private pay there is a consistent reduction in hours across the board. That means further diversification is even more important for an agency’s sustainability.
Diverse payor sources can also help with cash flow. Some payors can take several weeks to issue reimbursement, while others may pay weekly. Finding a sustainable balance of payor mix can help your agency maintain a healthy cash flow.
Leveraging Data to Close Leads and Hire More Caregivers
Being aware of why someone didn’t sign up on the client side or why a caregiver may have left your agency are vital pieces of information for your business.
Determining how to bring on more caregivers and make closed leads active again can be an incredibly powerful tool for spurring growth.
For example, if an agency is trying to grow but they’re struggling because they keep losing caregivers to other higher-paying jobs, that’s helpful to know.
Some agencies close out a client lead due to staffing shortages or because the lead was not in their service area. If the staffing issue gets resolved and the service area expands, a report can be pulled in Rosemark that shows all the leads who can then be re-engaged due to those changes.
Many home care agencies will simply mark a client as discontinued, close that lead, and never look at it again. They might also leave that client as an inquiry because they didn’t sign up and the salesperson moved on to a new lead.
Simply put, this means your inquiry list is useless because it’s not showing you the correct lead data.
By using Rosemark’s tools to track why caregivers left, why clients left, or why potential clients did not come on board, agencies can adjust their processes and thrive.
What’s the Most Important Data to Collect
There is so much data, and agencies can easily feel overwhelmed by the thought of putting every single note into their home care management system. So where should they start, especially if they are a new agency trying to get their business up and running?
The most important information to start with is the boilerplate data:
- Client name
- Address
- City
- Phone Number
Those pieces of data are the bare minimum; that’s non-negotiable. If an agency isn’t putting in at least that minimal amount of information, they’re not using their system efficiently.
Once you get past that initial phase, start adding in client profiles. For Rosemark users, this means starting with the Inquiry Tab. In this space, agencies can:
- List the person who inquired and what their relationship is with the client
- Set up when that client wanted to be contacted or how soon they want to be in service
- Mark when you tried to reach that person and when you actually made contact
- List referral sources, which is a helpful tool for tracking and fostering relationships
This is part of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality of Rosemark that often gets overlooked or underused and can be helpful in lead generation and target marketing.
Leveraging data is the best way to grow your home care agency. Creating reports using the data your staff has put into the system is by far the most effective way to see how operations are running and where improvements could be made.
In addition, let your home care management system do the heavy lifting for you by creating Margin Reports and other reports based on KPIs for home care.
For questions about generating reports, reach out to the Rosemark Customer Care team. To see if Rosemark would be a good fit for your home care agency, fill out the form below to schedule a consultation.