Top 5 Digital Health Tools for Easing Staff Burnout in Home Health
Staff burnout and attrition are continuing to rise throughout the home health industry, contributing to an ongoing staffing shortage and creating a pattern that can quickly spiral. As staff burnout rises, so do attrition rates, increasing the burden on the remaining employees—and fueling their burnout in turn.
Luckily, there’s something your agency can do right now to help reduce staff burden before it becomes a much bigger problem: turn to digital healthcare technology. Digital health tools such as telehealth, mobile apps, and online home exercise programs (HEPs), can help streamline workflows, reduce manual tasks, and improve patient rapport and outcomes, all contributing to an improved staff experience.
Here are five essential digital health tools that can help you reduce staff burden.
Home Exercise Programs (HEP)
Home exercise programs are a key component of high-quality therapy, providing important care continuity for patients while reducing the cost and time commitment of supervised therapy sessions for providers. Digital HEP is a simple yet powerful tool that allows clinicians to quickly and easily assign online exercise programs to patients.
Effective HEP helps engage patients and has the added benefit of ensuring the patient’s progress doesn’t stagnate between home visits. This helps patients be more prepared for their next visit with their clinician, streamlining their care plan and saving time over the course of treatment.
HEP tip:
MedBridge’s Home Exercise Program Builder allows you to upload custom HEP or even request exercises you’d like to see in the future, helping you take patient program customization to the next level.
Telehealth
Telehealth exploded in use during the pandemic and has continued to stay in demand, offering flexibility and cost savings that keep it a popular option for clinicians and their patients. Checking in with patients between home visits via virtual care sessions can save clinicians time and help improve patient rapport, engagement, and outcomes by helping to address issues as they come up and before they get worse.
Telehealth tip:
Finding a telehealth platform that can integrate with your organization’s electronic medical record (EMR) will save time at the point of care and increase ease of use, reducing the time burden for busy clinicians.
Patient Education
Helping patients understand their condition and treatment plan improves their engagement and self-efficacy, and effective online patient education can help a larger population of patients achieve this understanding more quickly, reducing the time burden on staff.
With a comprehensive online patient education library, clinicians can assign standardized resources to patients so they can learn more about their condition at their own convenience. When patients understand their condition, home visits can be spent more effectively on treatment, discussing care plans, or answering patient questions.
Patient education tip:
Pairing patient education with a home exercise program helps to reinforce and expand on what patients learn as they perform their exercises at home.
Patient Adherence Tracking
Patient adherence tracking helps identify behavioral patterns and barriers to adherence to help boost patient satisfaction and improve clinical outcomes. Patient adherence tracking can be used to flag concerns, pain, and difficulty with prescribed HEP before a larger problem arises. This helps address these problems between visits, allowing the time with the clinician to be spent more efficiently.
Patient adherence tracking tip:
Digital health tools can be integrated with an EMR to help track long-term trends in patient satisfaction and pain and difficulty reporting.
Patient Mobile Apps
Patient mobile apps provide a platform for patient engagement, gather powerful patient activity insights, and encourage better communication between patients and clinicians. Built-in messaging is effective for non-emergency interactions like patient questions and check-ins, and gamification, reminders, and push notifications engage patients as active, daily participants. Together, these elements provide a convenient way to strengthen the therapeutic alliance.
Patient mobile app tip:
Push notifications are a powerful tool to cultivate continued engagement—in fact, they have been shown to increase patient interaction with a health app by up to 11.8 percent within the subsequent 24 hours.1
How MedBridge Can Help
While each of these digital health tools is powerful in their own right, the real key to reducing staff burden is leveraging all of these strategies together to create a comprehensive solution. The MedBridge Home Health Care Solution combines best-in-class provider education with innovative digital patient care technology on a comprehensive engagement platform to help agencies significantly improve clinical expertise, quality of care, and staff retention.
References
- Bidargaddi N, Almirall D, Murphy S, Nahum-Shani I, Kovalcik M, Pituch T, Maaieh H, Strecher V. To Prompt or Not to Prompt? A Microrandomized Trial of Time-Varying Push Notifications to Increase Proximal Engagement With a Mobile Health App. JMIR Mhealth Uhealth. 2018 Nov 29;6(11):e10123. doi: 10.2196/10123. PMID: 30497999; PMCID: PMC6293241.
