There’s a story Donnette Threats likes to tell when she thinks about hospice care and the meaning of time.
It’s a story about helping clinicians spend more time bedside.
As the Director of Product Management – Hospice at Homecare Homebase, Threats thinks often about what drives clinician satisfaction in hospice, and what innovations hospice providers can undergo to deliver that satisfaction. The two areas of hospice work that she views as most critical to that satisfaction are adequate resources and adequate time.
“I refer to whether a clinician feels they have the time to provide the care that is most important to achieve quality end-of-life care,” Threats says. “Do they have the time to provide comfort and meaningful conversation? To teach? To provide effective care planning to the patient and family? Those are the things that come into that time piece.”
Those actions take place bedside. And while hospices can’t necessarily give clinicians more time, what they can do is give them more efficient use of their time. HCHB offers a med kit function, which Threats references as her go-to example. On admission, a nurse might be going to a patient’s home, and she needs to review all of the patient’s medications and enter them accurately in the electronic health records (EHR).
“With our med kits, instead of searching for individual cardiac meds, a nurse can open up a list of all the cardiac meds and just choose the ones that this patient’s taking, or if there are things that are typically ordered at the time of admission, those can be grouped,” Threats says.
For the clinician, that innovation saves significant time, rather than having to hunt through the patient’s record.
“That might not seem like a huge thing, but when you think about patients being on 25 or 30 meds, it’s time-consuming, and accuracy is paramount,” she says. “To be able to provide that tool was innovative. It’s great to see the really positive impact some of the features and updates we deliver have on clinicians’ approach to care. Many of these changes actually start as suggestions from clinicians and organizations.”
That level of technological innovation is one of three steps that hospice providers can take to increase clinician satisfaction and help them remain bedside longer.
- Help clinicians work smarter, not harder
Whether it is burdensome medication review or inefficient documentation processes, there remain many ways that hospice nursing staff can lose valuable bedside time. Today’s technology tools, such as those from HCHB, and the data that they can deliver, can help clinicians make more efficient use of the time they have with the patient.
“We’re getting some amazing results, with folks saying they’d had significant reduction in their documentation time,” she says. “Clinicians understand that documentation is important, but I think clinicians also want it to make sense with what they are doing.”
- Continually update clinical technology tools
Hospice providers that want to boost clinician satisfaction and give them more time at the bedside can do so with technology tools — Threat’s aforementioned “adequate resources.” Hospice operators must stay up to date on available technology to make sure they are giving clinicians the technology tools that make the best use of their time. She looks at the EHR as a perfect example.
“When I started in the field, the EHR had simply replaced paper,” she says. “That has evolved a lot. Now, we’re using EHRs to prompt best practices and provide information.”
Threats views this as part of the industry’s evolution from gathering data by volume to gathering data that is actionable. That’s what makes documentation more efficient.
“Think about your software: are there ways that you can tweak the way that it’s working today?” she says. “Are there new features or updates that have been released since you implemented your EHR? Which new features should you consider adopting?”
The answer to those questions will drive clinician bedside time.
- View hospice innovation through the lens of bedside time
Hospice providers can at times get overwhelmed thinking about the term “innovation” and what exactly it means. To Threats, simplifying that concept is essential. It’s all about making innovative choices that drive increased clinician time at the patient’s bedside. That’s why clinicians want to work in hospice: to deliver that hands-on, quality end-of-life care. That’s what creates clinician satisfaction, and so many vital, wonderful outcomes spring from that newfound availability.
“These can be simple changes that have a huge impact in the way that clinicians can approach care,” she says. “They’re no longer approaching care as something that they just ‘have to get done.’ They’re seeing it as part of how they plan and document. The patient and caregiver are participating, in that care process, hopefully resulting at the end in the patient dying in comfort and the caregiver feeling that they’ve given the highest quality care.”
This article is sponsored by Homecare Homebase. Homecare Homebase is a software leader offering hosted, cloud-based solutions to streamline operations, simplify compliance and boost clinical and financial outcomes for home-based care agencies. Our customized mobile solutions enable real-time, wireless data exchange and communication between field clinicians, physicians and office staff for better care, more accurate reporting and improved revenue cycle management. To learn more, visit hchb.com.
