‘Are We Tracking Outcomes?’: Home Care Providers Must Level Up to Reach Potential in 2022

Home care providers have been given the best gift they could ask in early 2022: attention. They’ll still need to do their part to capitalize on it, however.

In retrospect, 2021 was a banner year for home care. The public health emergency pushed the industry out of the shadows — and even the Biden administration strove to push home- and community-based services forward.

“I’ve been in this business [for a long time], and I never in my dreams thought I would be listening to one of our sitting presidents using the words ‘home care,’ and it happened,” Vicki Hoak, executive director of the Home Care Association of America (HCAOA), said at the Home Health Care News Home Care Conference.

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The Washington, D.C.-based HCAOA is an advocacy organization that represents nearly 3,000 companies.

Hoak believes the increased attention home care received in 2021 is a sign of things to come in the new year.

“This is home care’s opportunity to blossom and take advantage of all this new attention,” she said. “As a result, a shift we’re seeing across the country is this thinking that perhaps our caregivers can do a little bit more than we thought they could. We’re seeing that in Illinois. We’ve got some chapter leaders who did a great job taking a look at their [regulations] and saying, ‘We can do more.’ We’re also seeing that in California and Connecticut.”

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One emerging trend for 2022 is the role employers will play in the overall attractiveness of the caregiver position, according to Adrian Schauer, founder and CEO of AlayaCare. 

“I think the previous paradigm was very much about the need to just fill shifts,” he said during the event. “The thought was that the immovable point is the demand, and you have to get someone to the client’s home. Now, I think we have to adjust and say, ‘Ok. I need my caregivers to have consistent work that fits into their preferences.’”

Founded in 2014, the Montreal-based AlayaCare is a software platform and secure cloud-based system that includes clinical documentation, client-and-family portals, remote patient monitoring and a mobile caregiver functionality.

The company serves more than 500 home-based care agencies across the U.S., Canada and Australia.

Schauer also believes it will become increasingly important for home care providers to get on the same page as health systems and the broader health care continuum in 2022.

“This means things like change-of-condition reporting at the point of care, and how you bring that data to the rest of the continuum,” he said.

It won’t be just about tracking data, but instead, tracking the right kinds of data.

“As an industry, are we tracking outcomes?” Home Care Pulse President Todd Austin said. “Digesting that is Step 1. [In 2020], only 32% of home care agencies were actually tracking outcomes. I think there’s a foundation that needs to be built, and we can build it. This needs to be led by the individuals that are investing in the future.”  

Founded in 2008, Home Care Pulse is a research and education firm that reports on workforce developments, marketing strategies and financial trends.

Moving forward, Hoak also sees an opportunity for providers to engage and collaborate with families and informal caregivers.

In the U.S. alone, almost 44 million people step in as informal caregivers. These are spouses, partners, friends or family members who assist with activities of daily living (ADLs) and possibly even medical tasks, according to the San Francisco-based nonprofit Family Caregiver Alliance.

“I don’t think we have begun to tap the potential of having a good family caregiver,” Hoak said. “Not just to be your partner in delivering the care when the aid isn’t there, but also in advocacy.”

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