Home Care Solutions
If you're looking for a software solution that fits the needs of your home health care or private duty agency, ContinuLink is the answer. Developed in tandem with agencies of all sizes and business mixes across the country, ContinuLink grows with you - and can work for you right away, no matter how small your agency is now, or how large you want it to be.
Home Care software will help providers meet the growing industry's needs
Everyone entering their twilight years deserves the chance to age with dignity. To that end, the majority of Americans prefer to live out the rest of their years in their own home. But with the physical and mental tolls that aging exacts - such as declining mental functions and increasingly fragile bodies - how is it possible for seniors to live outside of an institution?
With the help of home care.
A 2010 report issued by the National Association for Home Care & Hospice (NAHC), an industry association, listed home care as the cheapest long-term care option at $135 per visit, compared to one day's stay at a hospital or skilled nursing facility, which can cost $6,200 and $622, respectively.
Amidst the rising costs of healthcare and the current economic crisis, home care appears to be the most practical, cost-effective solution. These trends, combined with the federal Administration on Aging's projection that nearly one-fifth of the U.S. will be aged 65 years or older by the year 2030, predict that the home care industry can only grow.
Government Push
In order to serve patients more effectively across all settings, including home care, the federal government is supporting several advances in healthcare technology. As part of the Affordable Care Act, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is incentivizing the adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) for providers who can demonstrate meaningful use, which entails e-prescribing, exchanging health information electronically and utilizing the technology to submit clinical quality and other measures.
When it comes to medically underserved regions of the U.S., the Department of Health and Human Services announced in 2010 that it would devote more than $3 million to build capacity and technical assistance for telehealth.
Health IT streamlining the industry
Like all medical settings, home care can only benefit from the increasing use of health IT. According to a study conducted by IT firm CompTIA, two-thirds of healthcare providers intend to improve their practice's use of mobile technologies, such as tablets and smartphones. Such devices can be used to access web-based home care management software, such as EHR.
However, when it came to cloud computing, only 57 percent of study participants were familiar with the technology, but CompTIA said it's worth noting that there is great potential for growth here. One reason for this is that cloud computing entails many of the characteristics that will help home care providers meet standards of meaningful use of EHR including flexibility, escalability, big data capacity, redundency and robustness. In other words, home health software that entails cloud characteristics will help make providers eligible to participate in the CMS EHR Incentive Programs.
CompTia's study also found that
38 percent of doctors use medical apps on mobile devices on a regular basis.
one-third of doctors already use mobile devices to access EHR, while 20 percent expect to do so within a year.
10 percent of study participants intend to use video conferencing with patients within the next year.
The problem with servers
Increasing automation in health IT can be problematic for providers whose home care software is still entirely server-dependent. Patient record systems, care management protocols, case documentation, physician order entry and other systems would require the help of high availability solutions, in which multiple computers or servers run simultaneously, according to a recent article published by Government Health IT. While one computer or server functions as the primary hardware, another system backs everything up in near real-time in order to avoid problems caused by routine maintenance or other occasions when the primary server goes offline.
By comparison, web-based home healthcare software not only saves money on the costs of hardware, but also allows providers to operate without the needed protection of high availability solutions.
Ultimately, all of these software advances can help aging Americans by simplifying care tasks for their providers and allowing for more provider-patient interaction.
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