This article is sponsored by HealthCare Quality Consulting. In this Voices Interview, Home Health Care News sits down with Dr. Monika Virk, MD, Founder of HOP into Homecare! to learn about using structured orientation and continued education to drive improvement in quality, reduce turnover and reduce cost in the home health industry. She explains how this need led to the creation of the HOP Into Homecare! app, and she discusses its value to facilities, from care outcomes to the bottom line.
Home Health Care News: What career experiences do you most draw from in your role today?
Dr. Monika Virk: My current role heavily relies on my experiences as the Director of Quality Education and Program Development for a Hospital System Based VNA in Northern Virginia. In that role, I gained a wealth of knowledge in qualitative data analysis, clinical education, and program development, which I find incredibly valuable in my current position.
The challenge I faced as the director of education was that we were dependent on paper and binders for our orientation and education. There was no standardized process or content in place that we could use while onboarding different disciplines, experience levels or employment statuses. As a result, educators and clinical managers were reinventing the wheel every time a clinician was onboarded. Content was always lagging behind new regulations and evidence-based practices due to competing priorities.
We also had a significant blind spot when tracking preceptor visits and competencies. It was impossible to tell how many or what type of visits the clinician had shadowed their preceptors on and what was taught during those shadow visits. Moreover, the communication gap between different departments prevented us from assessing if the clinician was field ready. Due to this communication gap, either the clinicians were released too soon in the field, or it allowed room for “stragglers” who were in orientation for longer than the agency goals.
When it came to continued education and training of our field staff, we brought close to 200 clinicians into the office twice a month to cover new regulations or updates, which was an operational nightmare and disrupted patient care. During these team meetings clinicians were distracted, and we had little retention of the content covered.
In 2015, I got an opportunity to use Lean and decided to use the onboarding function as my focus area for improvement. Using Value Stream Mapping, we meticulously mapped out each step of the process, including the time required for each step and the people involved, and recreated the process by removing as many redundancies as possible. This deep dive into the orientation process sparked my passion for home care orientation, which continues to drive me to this day.
What inspired you to create the HOP Into Homecare app specifically?
The inspiration for developing the HOP Into Homecare app came from my consulting work after leaving my role with VNA. While working with various clients, I noticed a common struggle with onboarding, regardless of the organization’s size or type. This challenge motivated me to find a solution to standardize orientation content for home care agencies.
Initially, I created an online course for a client agency and observed a significant 8% improvement in the assessment of Oasis outcomes for new hires trained under my structured approach. This study made me realize that there is a significant opportunity to develop a comprehensive and streamlined onboarding and training process for homecare clinicians.
Then the pandemic hit, and I lost most of my clients, which gave me an opportunity to reevaluate the content and make it more structured and evidence-based. While doing so, I realized that merely providing content was not enough to move the needle and improve onboarding and training outcomes for new hires. This realization led to the idea of creating an app that could provide a platform for the onboarding and training process. I presented this idea to a client agency, and they generously paid for the first year’s subscription fee in advance to enable me to develop the MVP of the HOP app.
How does the app function, and what are some of the features that help eliminate repetitive work?
HOP into Homecare is an app designed to streamline orientation and training for nurses, therapists and other clinicians who provide care in home settings. The app is available for both iOS and Android devices, and has a web-based Learning Management System (LMS).
The app’s orientation process has three components: content, field visits, and competencies. The CEU Certified content is discipline-specific and helps trainees become field-ready. Field visits allow agencies to structure visits and tasks that trainees must master before being released in the field. Competencies are agency and discipline-specific and ensure that trainees are competent in their roles before they are released into the field independently, and that agencies are compliant.
One of the app’s standout features is the Clinical Huddles, which provide structured learning opportunities for clinicians while minimizing disruptions to agency operations. The app uses a drip-drip methodology to deliver complex CEU Certified education in bite-sized pieces over weeks or months, enhancing retention and engagement with the content being taught and ensuring that clinicians are continuously improving their skills.
With HOP’s calendar functionality, agencies can easily track multiple calendars for various disciplines and assign modules, one-on-ones, and in-house sessions required before a clinician is field-ready. The app caters to different personas, including trainees, field clinicians or preceptors, educators, and executives, enabling effective communication between them through the integrated platform.
These feature takes some of the work away from the frontline educator/management team, freeing them to focus on newly hired clinicians’ needs and agency-specific onboarding requirements.
What value does HOP Into Homecare bring to Homecare agencies?
It is evident that there is a shortage of home health clinicians. Unfortunately, national-level training of clinicians is still primarily focused on inpatient facilities, which doesn’t address the need for more trained clinicians in the home health sector. Therefore, home health agencies require a solution that allows them to train their own clinicians and expand the pool of highly skilled health care professionals.
HOP Into Homecare offers a comprehensive solution for home health agencies looking to address the challenges of high turnover rates and the costly process of onboarding new nurses. Pre-pandemic, the turnover rate for home health agencies was already over 25%, and this figure has only increased during the pandemic. Onboarding programs have been shown to be effective in anchoring clinicians to the agency and reducing turnover rates.
HOP into homecare is an app designed specifically to streamline the onboarding process and provide continued training for clinicians, helping to standardize orientation programs and ensure new employees receive the necessary training to perform their roles effectively. By offering ongoing education and training opportunities, HOP keeps frontline clinicians and management up to date with best practices, resulting in improved quality outcomes, patient engagement, and financial success.
With HOP, home health agencies can reduce back-office work and rework, increase employee retention rates, and improve overall operational efficiency, making it the perfect solution for agencies looking to improve their performance and achieve financial success.
What is the future of the app, and how are you planning to enhance its functionality and usability in the near future?
As the app expands, our plan is to leverage machine learning to analyze clinician behaviors and provide management with valuable insights. This data will allow executives to better manage capacity by understanding the orientation pipeline and how many clinicians are field-ready. By utilizing predictive analysis and machine learning, we aim to help agencies find the balance between releasing new hires too soon or not soon enough, bringing more awareness to the decision-making process. This will ensure that new clinicians are not overwhelmed or bored and are able to provide quality care to patients. Overall, our goal is to continue enhancing the app’s functionality and usability to better support homecare agencies in their hiring and onboarding processes.
What differentiates HOP Into Homecare! from other more traditional education solutions in the marketplace?
As a former user of the currently available traditional education solutions in the home health care market, I have designed HOP Into Homecare! with the intention of enabling frontline management and educators with several unique features that differentiate it from other solutions. Firstly, the app has a tailored Learning Management System specifically designed for skilled home health agencies, making it more user-friendly for frontline management. Secondly, the content is home health care-specific and includes both orientation and continued education, making it a comprehensive solution for agencies.
Thirdly, the app includes features such as tracking shadow visits with preceptors and monitoring the competencies and skills of clinicians being onboarded, which traditional platforms do not provide. Additionally, HOP Into Homecare! offers data and dashboards that help agencies assess their orientation KPIs and make informed operational and capacity management decisions.
The current traditional education platforms targeting skilled home health agencies only provide content without the added functionality and support that HOP Into Homecare offers. By streamlining and simplifying the onboarding and training process, HOP Into Homecare provides a comprehensive solution that sets it apart from traditional education solutions in the marketplace.
Finish this sentence: “In the home-based care industry, 2023 will be the year of…”
…technology adaptation.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
HOP into Homecare! Is an iOS/Android app-based platform that supports structured orientation and continued education to drive improvement in quality, reduce turnover and reduce cost in the home health industry. Reach out to [email protected] to learn more, or visit www.hqcpro.com to set up a demo and receive a free one-month trial.
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].
