By Kristin Easterling
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (August 4, 2020)—Home health providers are working to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, and with more patients choosing the home setting, home health agencies need the tools to manage their employees. HomeCare set down with Matt Fairhurst, CEO of Skedulo to talk about interoperability in the age of coronavirus.
HOMECARE: Tell me about Skedulo.
FAIRHURST: Skedulo is a deskless productivity solution that enables customers to simplify scheduling and dispatching for appointments, communicate directly with both the company and their employees, and improve tracking and reporting for any industry that has a mobile workforce. We offer desktop software and a mobile application, so regardless of location, the deskless workforce, their managers, and high leadership are able to seamlessly and easily access Skedulo.
HOMECARE: How does Skedulo help providers manage care?
FAIRHURST: Skedulo helps health care providers manage patient appointments, reducing the amount of time spent on administration and enabling caregivers to focus on what really matters: patient outcomes. The software intelligently matches patients with the appropriate caregiver, based on criteria decided by the provider. For example, one of our clients aims to keep children with the same caretaker throughout their patient journey so as to ensure optimum care. From the caregiver’s perspective, Skedulo can easily match up the patient and caregiver and accommodate their travel time from other appointments to optimize their utilization. Skedulo also supports triaging, so urgent appointments are given the appropriate priority.
Skedulo is HIPAA-compliant and interoperable with patient EHRs. This ensures providers have what they need to administer comprehensive care while on-the-go, and it also keeps patient information secure. Additionally, our mobile app supports caregivers’ charting and notes, ensuring patient progress and any observations are inputted on the spot, in real-time.
HOMECARE: Why do you call Skedulo deskless?
FAIRHURST: 80% of the global workforce is deskless, or works from outside a traditional office setting. Yet this segment has been underserved by tech vendors. By our estimate only 5% of software developed reaches them. Skedulo developed the Deskless Productivity Cloud to meet the needs of these mobile workers, many of whom are in health care.
Homecare professionals are expected to manage their daily schedule, travel from appointments, provide quality care, communicate with patients and managers, access electronic health records, and keep track of the care given throughout each appointment—all on different devices and via different means. The Deskless Productivity Cloud consolidates all of these tasks onto one mobile platform, reducing the burden placed on caregivers and empowering them to focus on patient outcomes.
Accelerated by the pandemic, health care is experiencing a concept known as “amazonization;” this is the shifting of services away from facilities and towards home- and community-based settings. With more providers than ever considering alternative settings and methods of delivering care, it reaffirms the need more than ever for mobile solutions like Skedulo and the Deskless Productivity Cloud.
HOMECARE: What are some of the ways Skedulo integrates with telehealth providers?
FAIRHURST: We have built integrations to video conferencing tools, like Zoom, directly within the app. This enables our customers to book telehealth appointments with patients without having to switch between our app and a tool like Zoom. Both the patient and health care worker can then join the appointment with just a tap within the app rather than having to work through several platforms. This helps reduce patients’ frustrations and improves the customer experience all while helping limit administrative work for providers, boosting their productivity.
HOMECARE: How do providers connect to Skedulo?
FAIRHURST: Skedulo has many powerful integrations and is thoughtfully designed to connect with a variety of other systems. One type of connection is with customer relationship management systems, where providers keep detailed customer data. Additionally, Skedulo captures data related to hours worked and service delivery, so many organizations find it valuable to connect Skedulo with their billing, payroll and expense software.
Interoperability is an essential consideration in health care in general, and in particular in-home health care. That’s why Skedulo has partnered with organizations like Bridge Connector, to connect the Skedulo platform with EHRs and a variety of other platforms used across the health care landscape. With these integrations, providers can work within a single environment to book patient appointments, develop care plans, access health demographics data and more, helping to automate labor intensive processes to enable more efficient care delivery and an improved patient experience.
