Why the Healthcare Industry Needs Skedulo

Healthcare is an industry on the move. Increasingly, doctors, nurses and clinicians are on the go, treating patients in their own homes, in mobile care centers, or in nursing home facilities. As mobile devices have made it easier for providers and caregivers to do their work outside of a clinical setting, patients have responded enthusiastically to the return of the home visit.

“The demand for home care and hospice continues to grow as we see a graying of the U.S. population,” said Bill Dombi, president of the National Association for Home Care and Hospice, when speaking to CNBC recently. Per Dombi, both younger and older patients are increasingly drawn to in-home care. “In 2015, it was the first time nationally that more money was spent on home care than nursing home care. We’ve seen a culture and financing shift toward home and community-based care.”

Healthcare is also an industry facing an alarming gap in supply of talent. For example, the demand for home health and personal care aides is expected to grow by 41% to more than four million jobs in the U.S. by 2026 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the same time, home healthcare providers continue to face constant demands for lower costs and improved efficiencies, all while trying to grow and scale.

Skedulo Addresses Healthcare’s Biggest Challenges

As the industry faces continuous movement, healthcare organizations are rethinking how their in-home and on-site services can provide the highest quality care and efficiently meet demand at the same time. This is why the healthcare industry needs Skedulo.

Skedulo is a mobile workforce management solution, not just a scheduling or rostering tool. Our platform is ideal for organizations that have teams of employees with a variety of skills, certifications, locations, and availability who serve patients in different locations. Unlike scheduling or rostering tools, Skedulo optimizes the process of matching providers to patients based on each individuals’ skills, availability, locations, and needs, not just open time slots on a calendar. Skedulo then supports mobile caregivers as they move throughout their workday to deliver quality care.

Although Skedulo did not start as a healthcare solution, we discovered a natural fit in the home and coordinated care space thanks to the flexibility of our solution and our product philosophy that puts people first in every respect. The biggest challenges facing healthcare providers are addressed with our solution:

• Improving Efficiency
• Scalable Growth
• Employee Satisfaction and Retention
• Personalized Patient Experiences

As our experience with healthcare use-cases deepened, we invested in a purpose-built solution for healthcare. Skedulo now supports 35,000 workers in the healthcare industry globally with our mobile healthcare management capabilities.

Skedulo for Healthcare Solution

Our Skedulo for Healthcare solution is designed around the three key workflows of home healthcare: patient intake, long-term care planning, and the mobile caregiver experience.

Patient Intake

For patient intake, Skedulo captures all the key variables of your patients and their needs: profiles, availability, care goals, type of caregiver needed, insurance entitlements and more. Our scheduling and matching engine optimizes all the patient-related variables against the profiles of your employees to determine when a particular caregiver can meet a patient at a certain place. Additionally, Skedulo addresses critical business efficiency needs, such as maximizing caregiver utilization, reducing travel time, and alleviating administrative burden.

Long-term and Recurring Care

Skedulo’s powerful scheduling and matching engine is at the core of the long-term care workflow. For many businesses, recurring care assignments are a headache of spreadsheets, calendars, and back-and-forth emails. With Skedulo, individual appointments, group events, and even complexly patterned care schedules, are managed with ease. Skedulo can map multiple patients and multiple caregivers to a specific location at a given time, and perform this matching repeatedly for recurring events.

Mobile Caregiver Experience

Lastly, Skedulo’s app is a tool for your mobile employees and contractors to make their jobs easier, not just to push and pull information your business needs. In the Skedulo app, caregivers have user-friendly access to their upcoming appointments and all the critical information needed for top quality care: patient records, appointment details, care plans, with notes from the previous appointment with the patient prioritized. Without adding administrative burden to your team, the Skedulo app syncs in real-time to your system of record and can track caregivers’ progress in real-time, optimize their travel, and capture mileage for easier reimbursements.

Your Business and Your People Benefit from Skedulo

With Skedulo in the hands of their care coordinators and mobile providers, our customers have seen a measurable impact to their business. Improved efficiency and faster growth are only half the story; your people–patients and employees–will see the difference when your mobile healthcare operations improve with Skedulo.  

Improving Efficiency

Skedulo improves a healthcare organization’s efficiency in several ways. Skedulo makes better use of your caregivers’ time, cutting out paperwork, optimizing their schedules to see more patients, and in greater proximity when possible. That way, caregivers spend more time in revenue generating activities, less time on the road, and less time doing administrative work. With Skedulo, care coordinators and schedulers save time that was lost managing spreadsheets, calendars, and emails, or correcting scheduling mistakes that were the result of manual error. The Royal Society for the Blind, a Skedulo customer, reduced scheduling overhead by 15% while doubling their weekly appointments per week, per mobile caregiver.

Scalable Growth

Many healthcare companies are overwhelmed by demand for their services; manual operations simply do not work at scale. Skedulo offers one system that manages all the data your team needs to make your mobile healthcare operations work. Because our solution is flexible and supported by the strength of Salesforce’s platform, Skedulo grows with your business. HealthStrong Australia’s four-person team is able to schedule more than 1,200 weekly appointments, an increase of 30%.

“We chose to work with Skedulo as we’re both growing and we could see the potential to grow together. That’s exactly what we’re doing as we continue to integrate more of our processes with Skedulo,” said Chris Kalavas, Salesforce Development Lead at HealthStrong.

New Jersey Respiratory Associates’ VP of Operations and Sales, Greg Pino, saw his business grow 20% for three years in a row after implementing Skedulo. He says, “We were shocked to see the effect Skedulo had in enabling us to do more with less. These benefits extended beyond just our mobile workforce. We saw greater efficiency in our back-office operations, invoicing, and sales.”

Employee Satisfaction and Retention

For your employees in the office and teams on the go, Skedulo makes their work lives easier. For care coordinators and schedulers, this means eliminating the cumbersome paperwork or broken systems that slow them down and complicate tasks. For Easterseals Bay Area, using Skedulo has made a tremendous impact, according to Jeff Hallett, vice president of product management.

“The impact from using the application has been a tremendous reduction in stress in terms of being able to manage the scheduling in a reliable way. We have 13 offices trying to manage hundreds of practitioners at a time,” Hallett points out. Using Skedulo has “given them the time to improve their overall processes and make their work life better, as well.”

Healthcare providers are passionate about caring for their patients. When they are heavily burdened with administrative tasks, it takes time and energy away from what they do best. Skedulo’s mobile app is a tool that allows caregivers to focus on patients, delivering the information they need when they need it, and making it genuinely easier to chart and capture appointment notes. Because the app also captures the information your business needs in real time, managers benefit from improved data and better insights, as well.

Personalized Patient Experiences

The consumerization of healthcare is a well-established trend, and one that challenges most healthcare organizations. No two patients’ needs are the same, but their expectation that you accommodate their particular situation is increasingly uniform. Skedulo’s logic and optimization engine makes patient needs part of the matching and scheduling decisions, so your patients are automatically prioritized in operational decisions.

Patients, like all consumers, value consistency and communication from providers, which is why Skedulo sends them updates about their appointments via SMS. And when life complicates things, as it always does, Skedulo makes it easy for care coordinators to manage exceptions and make updates without having to re-work an entire day’s schedules. This is especially valuable for companies that serve children or seniors and need to be sensitive to the availability of parents and caretakers, who are often trying to balance work and familial responsibilities.

“The clients are seeing a lot more predictability in the schedules. We are better able to work with the families very closely, establish availability, and make sure that availability is respected to the greatest extent that we can,” says Hallett of Easterseals Bay Area. “Just being able to know that a practitioner is going to be there in a reliable and predictable way just takes a lot of stress away from the clients and the clients’ families.”

A Better Way to Deliver Home Healthcare

Healthcare is a turbulent industry, and there’s no reason to think that is going to change. The pressure to grow efficiently, do more with less, and keep patients happy—not to mention healthy—will only grow. And it will be compounded with a shortage of available talent amid increased demand.

Skedulo is the only software solution that is purpose built for home and mobile healthcare that puts people first. We understand that people are what will improve patient and business outcomes. It’s a person who shows up at a patient’s door, or greets them at a mobile care center. So we made technology that makes employees’ jobs easier and patients’ experiences better.

Learn more about what we have to offer. We think you’ll like what you see.