Tap to Read ➤

Important Aspects for Running a Home Health Care Agency Successful

Andrew Russell
You may be allured by the promises and the rise in demand for home healthcare among the aging population and think of setting up an agency of your own. You will need a proper setup and a carefully designed plan to execute and make sure that you can provide the best home health care service irrespective of the type of patient.
You will need to have proper resources and backup support for that matter. There are a few specific things that you should be concerned of making sure that you have it in your agency to excel among a large number of home care agencies near me.

Customer Recruitment and Home Visits

The first thing to ensure that your home care agency runs properly and sustains the high level of competition is to focus on customer recruitment. More than your advertisement, it is the way you provide your services that will matter in this regard.
Better services provided means more word of mouth advertising, which even today, in this world of digital and online advertising, plays a significant role. There are a few specific ways in which you can ensure that you provide the best health care services to people.
  • First, offer a pharmacist home visit upon admission to your agency especially to those clients who take nine or more medications that may include both OTC and herbal products.
  • Next, in addition to that, you can offer nurses, physical and occupational therapist to make client referrals on a case to case basis.
  • Also, appoint a scheduler to contacts each of your clients to offer such a service.
Interestingly, all of your clients will not accept such visits. The study says that the ratio of acceptance to the refusal of such pharmacist visits is 60 to 40%. The reason for refusal can be many and varied including:
  • Perceived lack of benefits
  • Fear of offending the primary care physicians and even strangely
  • Wanting to limit the number of people entering their homes.
The pharmacist typically visits as many as five clients a day with each home visit lasting anywhere between half and one hour. There may be client revisits required in some cases as well.

Preparing for the Home Visits

Before the home visits are made, make sure that the pharmacist is well prepared for it. This will not only help the pharmacist before, during and after the home visit but this will also raise the trust of your clients in your care services once again. For example:
  • The pharmacist must review the condition of the clients as well as the list of ordered medications.
  • It is also required to go through the chart notes that may be available from other home care agencies and clinicians such as nurses, occupational and physical therapists.
During the home visit, the pharmacist must discuss with the clients every medication that they take including the herbal supplements and the over-the-counter drugs. They must do the same with the home caregivers as well. This will help them and all in assessing different aspects of the care process such as the:
  • Indications
  • Effectiveness
  • Safety
  • Compliance and even
  • Affordability.
Such knowledge will help you to make a proper plan or health care or make amendments accordingly in the existing one to ensure better results. Make sure that the pharmacist and your caregivers keep the primary physician in the loop and do everything according to his or her suggestions.

The Final Results

All these efforts will take some time and commitment from your part, but you will surely see the results as soon as a year. However, you will be better off and position if you allow a pharmacist to continue as your staff permanently.
The primary objective is to have client home visits regularly and a better identification, resolve, and prevention of medication-related problems. All this will allow the clients to stay safely in their homes and you reach your goals of providing the best home care, enabling your home health care business to grow.