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How a New Home Health Financial System Can Help Your Agency Grow

in: Home Health Care, Company News

A new home health financial system can help your agency grow to meet rising demand. Almost all seniors say they would like to continue living at home as they age. In order to do so, many will require home healthcare, whether it is an aide to assist with routine tasks or skilled nurses to assist them during illness or recovery from an illness.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, by 2030 all of the Baby Boomer generation will be age 65 and older. That’s about 73 million people in the United States who may, at some point from 2030 onward, require home healthcare.

If your agency hasn’t put in place the right technology to support growth, now is the time to prepare for the anticipated demand surge for your services.

Common Problems Faced by Businesses During Growth

As small businesses start to grow, they face several common challenges. These challenges include:

  1. Financial management
  2. Owner fatigue and its related counterpart, founder dependency
  3. Maintaining high quality during growth phases

Let’s unpack each of these and how they impact a home healthcare agency.

Financial Management

When you started your home healthcare agency, keeping track of expenses and income in a notebook or on a spreadsheet was probably sufficient for your needs. Then, as the agency grew and your revenues grew along with it, you needed more robust software to track income, expenses, client billing, insurance payments, payroll, and more.

Like many small businesses, you’ll probably reach a stage when you outgrow your current accounting and finance software. Many home healthcare agencies begin using typical small business accounting software and try to make do with it even though it’s not set up for a home healthcare agency. At some point, however, you’ll find that making do with what you have constrains rather than supports growth.

A home health financial system or a dedicated system will help you manage all the critical accounting and financial tasks related to a home healthcare agency. Such a system offers support for the complexities of billing and time tracking needed by a home healthcare agency. It also supports added software to manage payroll and time tracking, client and provider communications, and more.

“Making do” with your current software may be fine up to a point. But you may reach a critical growth stage where making do with what you have is actually stopping you from achieving your goals. The right software saves time, minimizes mistakes, facilitates communication, and enables you to do so much more than you thought possible.

Owner Fatigue and Founder Dependency

Owner fatigue and founder dependency are related challenges faced by home healthcare agencies.

If you’re the owner of a home healthcare agency, you know what owner fatigue means. It’s the exhaustion that comes from being on call 24/7 to an agency serving the most vulnerable populations. It’s worrying about finding qualified staff, meeting payroll, managing client and caregiver expectations, and so much more.

Owners bear quite a burden when running any kind of business, but the challenges that come with running a home healthcare agency are unique. Because it is a healthcare related business, much is riding on the shoulders of the people running, managing, and providing the services. Owners may take on the entire burden or share it with founders but, at the end of the day, it can be exhausting to run an agency without support.

Founder dependency may be related to owner fatigue. The term founder dependency means all decisions, all knowledge, resides so much with the founder (or owner) that the staff isn’t empowered to do their jobs. Instead, they must turn to the founder for answers. This ends up making the founder feel important but also overtaxed when everyone continues to turn to them for the solution.

To get out of the cycle of owner fatigue and founder dependency, it’s important to share information so not every question gets the answer of, “Ask the owner.” Instead, home healthcare agencies can implement systems to track, record, and share data and information so that it gets out of the owner or founder’s head and into a systematized record all can share. Software supports this and makes it easy to share notes, information, and more.

High Quality and Standards

It goes without saying that your home healthcare agency strives to meet and exceed all care and quality standards set forth by state accrediting agencies and other groups that oversee the industry. Add to that your own high standards and the need for compassionate, knowledgeable caregivers, and you’ve got a third challenge that few small businesses face.

Sure, every business strives to provide the highest quality service or products to its customers. It has to, or else it won’t remain in business for long, but home healthcare is different. It’s a people-based business that provides vital services to vulnerable people. High quality and standards must be the order of the day, not a goal to strive for, if an agency is to be successful.

Meeting the Challenges Using Technology

Here’s where the right technology can support and facilitate home healthcare agency growth. A good home health financial system provides the support for many aspects of critical business tasks including:

  1. Monitoring cash flow
  2. Managing billing and insurance
  3. Scheduling payroll
  4. Invoicing clients and insurance providers
  5. Tracking expenses

What benefits might your home healthcare agency receive from adding such technology to your business?

  • Better, faster record keeping: Caregivers can keep appointment notes in the system rather than writing everything out by hand and keying it in later. This improves accuracy and speed with which information can be shared.
  • Improved cash flow: The faster you can update your records, the quicker you can bill for services rendered. That shortens the time between invoicing and receipt of payment.
  • Time-saving accounting: You probably started your home healthcare agency with the goal of providing better care to patients. Accounting was low on your list of “fun jobs.” Technology can take the tedium out of accounting and make it faster and easier to keep accurate records.

Technology Can Help You Serve More Clients

Lastly, technology can be used to help your agency grow by making it easier to serve more clients.

Remember those 73 million Baby Boomers who want to remain at home for life? As they age, they may develop medical problems that in the past required constant in-person monitoring.

Now, through the introduction of technology such as smart watches, home heart monitors, and other technological advances, remote monitoring can track their condition while they remain comfortably at home. Your agency can implement remote monitoring devices that enable clients to remain independent while still complying with medical advice for health monitoring. If, in the event that the monitors show something that requires a visit from a clinician, home healthcare software can alert you so you can schedule an appointment.

Technology Facilitates and Supports Business Growth

The rapid pace with which technology continues to advance may make some people uncomfortable, but it’s a fact that the changes which it has introduced into the business world have enabled companies to grow beyond their wildest dreams. Your home healthcare agency can benefit from similar technology with the right home health financial system in place.

Mindover Software

Mindover Software provides solutions for the home healthcare industry. When you are ready for home health agency accounting software, please call Mindover Software. Contact us or call 512-990-3994.

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Mindover Software

15901 Central Commerce Drive, Suite 203
Austin, Texas 78660
Phone: 512-990-3994
Fax: 512-251-8992

About Us

Started in Austin, Texas in 2000, Mindover Software has been providing award-winning software and consulting solutions spanning the business lifecycle to small and medium sized business. Now, with consultants in Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, Boise, and San Diego, Mindover Software provides strong local support with the resources of a national company.

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