Clinicians in the Field, Part-Time Doctors, & Your Hospice

How Did They Do It?

One major benefit that allowed hospice agencies to keep moving forward was their experience with remote teams.

Companies in most industries struggled to learn an entirely new way of operating.

If, for example, you called your bank during the pandemic, odds are you couldn’t reach anyone in a timely manner. How do you take a call center of customer service people and adjust to everyone working from home. Managing, staff became a high-wire act of who is where and when. Providing equipment, routing calls and services to and from the right departments and people, collaborating – every piece of companies’ structure, from top to bottom, bottom to top, and side to side, had to be radically re-written and rewritten quickly.

Most companies had no significant remote structure in place. No future plans to go remote when Covid had hit. They had no time to hire consultants to design plans and flew by the seat of their pants in a herculean effort to keep their company going.

However, hospice agencies have worked remotely, practically from their inception

Hospices deliver care where the patient is.

Wherever the patient is, that’s home.

Whether it’s a log cabin in the woods or a SNF in the heart of downtown, the level of care is still Routine Home Care.

The rates may change from rural or not, but when the level of care routine home care, home is wherever the patient lays their head down to sleep.

So while huge corporations with towers that reach the sky became ghost towns and those companies had to relearn how to operate, hospice agencies were already managing remote teams. Hospice clinicians come into the office for IDG, to pick up supplies, for a PIP meeting and things like that. All important issues, but easily transferrable to remote. Their day to day responsibilities of delivering care, of providing comfort to people sufferings, care for the terminal patient, support for their loved ones, those core hospice responsibilities were designed to be remotely done.

Unfortunately, while hospice clinicians excel at delivering care remotely, most of the legacy tools for hospice were built to support hospice clinicians in the field. Most of them weren’t even actually built for hospice but were reworked from home health. A common clue is if your system calls hospice CNAs – home health aides.

A web browser pretending to be an app that only works on a specific operating system or one kind of tablet isn’t a tool built for hospice clinicians in the field.

If you have to wait until your marketer or clinician gets back to the office to scan in paper docs, your tool wasn’t built for remote.

When Friday afternoon hits and you get an emergency discharge call from the hospital  and all you have is a first name, a last name, the name and phone number to the POA and will get the face sheet next week, if you can’t create a medical record from your mobile device and start charting , your tool wasn’t built for remote.

If you have to call your medical director who works at a hospital or clinic and beg them to come in or get to a computer to sign docs and they can’t do it from an app with a click, your tool wasn’t built for hospice in the field – which is where and how hospice happens; especially for the local independent hospice agency.

Check out how Hospice Tools helps clinicians in the field, part-time doctors, & hospice teams like yours!