Making your business more efficient with care management software

Making your business more efficient with care management software

When it comes to planning care provision for a home care business, ensuring that visit schedules are in place for all clients with carers assigned, can be one of the most intensive activities in the daily life of a care coordinator. 

But once all of the hard work is done and a schedule is finalised, what happens when things don’t quite go to plan?

Whether it is carers calling in sick, clients’ needs changing rapidly when health takes a turn for the worse, a freak snowstorm that nobody saw coming, or any other unforeseen occurrence, care coordinators need to be agile enough to change plans at a moment’s notice.

And in ‘A plan for digital health and social care’, published in July 2022, the UK government asserted its aim for “a health and social care system that will be much faster and more effective, and deliver more personalised care.”

Find out more about IQ:caremanager

Want to know more about our Plan features? Request a copy of our digital care planning guide for more information about how IQ:caremanager is helping home care businesses like yours, to plan.

How software helps make home care planning easier

With paper planning systems, a last-minute scheduling change can be the source of a service meltdown. 

Coordinators rushing to contact clients, getting printed schedules replaced and figuring out which carers can rush in to save the day – is an all too familiar scenario for organisations that have yet to digitise.

But with IQ:caremanager – changes are easy to make at speed, ensuring that each client can get the care they are expecting.

Understanding what is happening at a moment’s notice in the Daily Overview

The Daily Overview – the hub of the planning process in IQ:caremanager, presents a quick ‘calendar style’ overview of planned care in your business at a specific date or time of your choosing. 

With lots of filters to choose from, with the Daily Overview open, a scheduler can customise and focus on what they want to schedule and make changes to existing visits in a few simple clicks. Filters include areas, time of day, time period and carer availability.

Quickly edit visits with simple shortcuts and intuitive controls

As technology has improved our expectations for how things should work have evolved. Technology should be quick and intuitive, and making changes should be possible in as few clicks or taps as possible. Our quick shortcut tools like Quick add carer and Quick swap carer allow users to edit existing visits at speed. Using the technology found in the Find Carer feature, these shortcut tools quickly indicate carer suitability when making swaps or adding additional carers to visits.

As well as editing the carers assigned to visits, the Daily Overview is a great place to utilise Visit Nudge, which allows you to shift planned visits forwards or backwards in increments of 5, 10, 15, 25 or 30 minutes. This is especially useful if you are aware of a visit being pushed back or brought forward from its intended time and want to ensure that your records reflect what is happening on the day.

For even more speedy changes, Drag and Drop functionality is available for editing visit times in the carer view of the Daily Overview. This makes it easy to click and drag visits to new times or move unallocated visits into a carer’s schedule.

Finding the right carer for the job

If a visit is unallocated or things change and a carer becomes unavailable, the Find Carer tool provides you with a filtered list of carers that are most suitable for a visit. Find carer (or best match) sorts carers according to 7 factors in order to identify the most suitable for a care visit. Factors taken into consideration are: client preference matching, carer availability, the carer has previously visited the client, distance, qualifications and whether or not they are an approved carer. 

It’s the ideal tool for quickly finding replacement cover when time is of the essence and ensures that the most suitable carer is chosen for the job.

Want to know more about how IQ:caremanager can help improve care planning? Head over to our Plan page.