Empowering Patients: How Custom Software Can Enhance the Home Care Experience

Do you know who requests or benefits most from home health care services?

On an average there are as many as 15 million patients actively seeking home care services out of which almost 70% of them belong to the aging population, or are about the age of above 60. This is the reason why many home care patients and their families are concerned about their loved ones while receiving care.

And they are not to be blamed, the traditional home care setting provided very little flexibility and real-time updates on the services provided to the patients. However, if your home care practice could harness the power of a custom home healthcare software, then providing holistic care with a patient-centric approach and keeping them in control of their health, wouldn’t it transform your practice and provide your patients with a pleasant experience?

But how can a custom home health care software change the face of a practice and contribute to its experience?

Well, let’s find out how home care technology solutions empower your patients and practices to provide a delightful and holistic home healthcare experience.

Real-time Communication and Updates

Typically in a traditional home care practice follows the standard practice of communicating with the caregivers and patients. In these settings the information is usually shared with paper-back reports and communication happens through various unregulated channels.

Now, imagine one place where you can share all the information and communicate with the required personnel instantly with a recorded history. But why imagine this when it can be a reality?

Yes, that’s where specially curated custom home care caregiver tools comes into the picture. For instance, with real-time communication features like secure messaging, video conferencing, custom alerts, and progress reporting, everything that requires manual work and paper is done directly from your caregiver’s smartphone.

This way the patients, their family members, caregivers and healthcare providers can be updated about their care journey at all times and ensure that the care is being provided as decided per the care plan.

Furthermore, with real-time communication and updates, you empower all the stakeholders to participate actively in their care journey and contribute to improving the quality of care with assurance.

Remote Monitoring of Vital Signs

As a healthcare provider, you know the importance of a patient’s vitals and the role continuous monitoring plays in improving their health outcomes. Though it is a manual process in the traditional setting, with custom home healthcare software development you can ensure its automation with authenticity.

For instance, if you can integrate your custom home healthcare software while remote patient monitoring development and wearable devices then they could collect the patient’s health vitals in real-time and transmit them to the case manager’s or provider’s system. This way care planning before the actual caregiver visit can be planned accordingly and it also gives the patient idea about what their care plan should involve.

With wearable devices important health vital signs such as heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation and other health indicators can be tracked and monitored remotely. And this acts as the cornerstone in deciding an appropriate care plan and the future planning for the entire care episode.

Medication Adherence Tracking

An interesting statistic has shown that non-adherence to the treatment leads to 50% of treatment failure and causes 125,000 deaths yearly. On top of that, with 25%, non-adherence to medication is one of the leading causes of hospitalization in the United States alone.

And this being one of the persistent problems in healthcare, a special attention to this has to be given if you’re providing home care services. Though keeping a track of patient medication adherence in typical healthcare settings is difficult, the implementation of custom home healthcare software can provide a solution for that too. Let’s see how!

For instance, with a special portal dedicated to medication management and administration, a section of adherence would help you in keeping track of whether the patient is following the suggested medication or not. To enable this, features like electronic medication administration records or simply known as eMARs can be used. On top of that, with customized alerts for individual patients, you can remind them of their medication dose.

This is one of the most effective ways to improve patient adherence with their medication and its benefits are directly reflected in the patient’s health with improved health outcomes.

Activity Tracking & Fall Prevention

Since 70% of healthcare patients are from an aging population, it becomes difficult for them to take care of their own health and body. With deteriorating body organs and posture, they are at a high risk for falls. In such cases, in an already degrading health condition, a fall can lead to severe damage and even death.

Though avoiding this needs constant physical monitoring which is near to impossible in any of our busy lives and especially in home healthcare services. However, with the use of cloud-based software development of home care software with RPM integration, these factors can be met and smartly tackled.

The way this custom software is able to give you a solution to this is by constantly tracking the patient’s activity levels and identifying potential fall risks, where the patient can lose control or consciousness. However, the role of wearable sensors, activity reports and setting customized fall detection alerts plays an important role.

Geolocation Tracking & Safety Alerts

Home care services work completely differently than the usual functioning of other healthcare services. In a traditional healthcare setting, the patients are provided services under the supervision of a provider, however, in a home care setting neither the provider nor the case manager are present. Which not only ensures the delivery of holistic care services but also to ensure the safety and security of the patients.

This is where the feature of geolocation tracking and safety alerts feature from your custom home healthcare software comes to your rescue. For instance, with the feature of geolocation tracking, the location of both caregivers and patients can be tracked in real-time. While one aspect of this is to ensure that the patient is being provided the right services by the caregiver, the other side is to monitor patients’ whereabouts and send alerts in case of emergencies.

Some of the most essential features for geolocation tracking and safety are geofencing, wandering detection, and emergency alerts.

Integration with Telehealth Services

People receiving home care services are usually not in a condition to go to a clinic to receive care and receiving care without the supervision of their provider can be dangerous and can even put the life of the patient at risk. Telehealth integration is required to avoid such cases and empower the patients to stay in touch with the provider throughout the care episode.

For example, after the patient has received home care services from the caregiver and is still doubtful about their care journey and experiences some health issues, then he could directly connect with their provider from the home care app with patient engagement features. These features will enable them to do virtual consultations and remote monitoring. On this basis, the provider can make the necessary changes in the care plan, which would lead to improved health outcomes and also contribute to their satisfaction levels.

Frequently Asked Questions