This healthcare market continues to grow as healthcare shifts from the hospital to the home. Like many healthcare professionals, these workers need to speed up patient encounters, while providing better care.
Providers also face the added challenge of being constantly on the move. Fortunately, home health agency software is designed to automate many of the day-to-day activities professionals encounter, including:
We've created this guide to help buyers better understand this software market and how to identify which systems will best meet their needs.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Reviewers' Choice
What Is Home Health Software?
Common Features of Home Health Software
What Type of Buyer Are You?
Market Trends To Understand
Deployment Strategies
Recent Events You Should Know About
Reviewers' Choice Products
| Alora Home Health | AxisCare |
| AXXESS | Brightree Home Health |
| Perfect | FasterNotes |
Our Reviewers’ Choice list shows the five highest user-rated software solutions for Home Health when adjusted for total number of reviews and recency of reviews.
If a software solution has more reviews, and more recent reviews, we value those ratings more highly than a product with fewer, older reviews. This is because is it much harder to get 100 five-star reviews than it is to get 10.
We also know that software vendors continually tweak and update their product, so we believe that more recent reviews tend to be more accurate.
To determine which products made the final cut, we looked at how users rated each solution's:
A solution can make the Reviewers' Choice top five in all three categories, or just one or two. All software solutions in the Reviewers' Choice have at least 10 reviews from real software users. The final products are listed in alphabetical order from left to right.
For more details on how we selected our Reviewers' Choice, read the full methodology.
It generally includes features typical of most electronic health records (EHRs) to streamline the day-to-day clinical operations of providers. More specifically, these systems have been designed to automate nearly every process needed in home care—ranging from clinicals, or point-of-care records, to billing, scheduling and accounting.
Most systems are designed to take you through the Home Health Care Outcome & Assessment Information Set (OASIS) while keeping patient data secure and HIPAA-compliant.
Some systems offer unique features designed to meet the needs of specialty areas, such as physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech-language therapy or others. (For more information about software designed for other post-acute care settings, check out our long-term care and nursing home software guide and our assisted living software guide.)
| Point of care | Assists in conducting and capturing information from OASIS assessments and in determining a Plan of Care. Helps with completing HCFA-485 forms, OBQI reports and HHRG scoring. Stores notes from home aides, hospice, therapists and information on patients’ vitals. Functions include internal messaging, medication interaction checks, mobile device and telephony support and infusion therapy support. Also features signature capture, physician portal, ICD-9 database and HL-7 interface. |
| Billing | Home health billing software manages eligibility verification, claim scrubbing and CMS-1500s. Includes case mix calculator and non-LUPA case adjustment. Functions include ERN posting and electronic remittances, secondary payer support, request for anticipated payment (RAP) support, collections management, billing services and UB-04 support. |
| Scheduling | Home health scheduling software manages the process of scheduling patients to ensure accuracy of daily calendars. Features include conflict alerts and wait lists. |
| Accounting | Automates accounting procedures for agencies. Functions include payroll, general ledger, purchase orders, accounts payable and inventory control. Also handles bank reconciliation, accounts receivable, fixed asset management and budgeting/forecasting. |
| Human resources (HR) | Assists in routine activities including healthcare provider background and security checks, tracking time and attendance and payroll. Handles I-9 forms, certification tracking and review management. |
| Customer relationship management (CRM) | Helps coordinate care of patients across specialties, departments and locations, improving the impact of your referral program. Aids with correspondence related to wait lists for hospices with limited space and to donor management for organizations receiving charitable contributions. |
Aide plan of care in Alora Home Health
Before evaluating software and lining up a formal comparison of systems, you’ll want to make sure you know what type of buyer you are, and which home health software vendors meet your needs. We’ve found almost all buyers fall into one of the four categories listed below:
Home care. These agencies provide care by licensed health workers—including registered nurses, licensed practical nurses and licensed therapists—to treat patients for illness or injury. The most important features of home care management software for these agencies will likely be the clinicals (also called point-of-care records) and scheduling features to help you monitor your patient census. Most agencies will also require applications such as human resources, accounting, billing and customer relationship management. Therefore, integrated suites are ideal for these buyers.
Hospice care. These organizations will often look for human resources and customer relationship management systems. These features help support communications with volunteers and philanthropic donors that help the organization either financially or with in-kind contributions. Human resources features are important for conducting tasks, such as background checks of workers, payroll and performance reviews. Some organizations may prefer software tailor-made for hospices; see our hospice software buyer's guide for those options.
Private duty. These buyers typically provide non-medical care and require software that can support billing to organizations other than Medicare. They oftentimes also require human resources, scheduling and accounting solutions.
Therapy/rehabilitation. Therapeutic care providers, such as speech therapists and physical therapists, often look to systems to help manage patient data and track therapy progress. Other common needs include ensuring compliance, scheduling, therapist productivity and managing accounts receivable.
Buyers should keep the following trends in mind when researching software. How a vendor fits within these trends can affect its viability.
Software as a Service (SaaS). The growth of cloud, or Web-based, computing practices has touched many industries and healthcare is definitely among them. Within healthcare, home care-centered agencies can appreciate the lower upfront costs of home healthcare software, monthly pricing model, lack of IT infrastructure and remote accessibility that Web-based applications can deliver.
Accessibility from mobile devices. Web-based home care solutions provide convenient access to patient data from mobile devices, such as an iPad, iPhone or Android. This improves your efficiency and reduces paperwork by helping you complete assessments directly at the point of care.
Quality assurance features. Given the prevalence of mobile devices, it can be increasingly important that a point-of-care system automatically generate a Health Care Financing Administration (HCFA) form following completion of an OASIS so that payment from Medicare is assured.
When selecting a solution, buyers can choose to implement applications for specific tasks—known as standalone, best-of-breed home healthcare solutions. Or, they can go with an integrated system that has a full suite of tools to address all of their needs—such as accounting, billing, human resources and more.
Agencies also need to determine how they would like to access the system. For example, some systems are offered completely over the Internet as Web-based home health software systems. This is also referred to as a software-as-a-service (SaaS).
These SaaS systems are typically offered in a pay-as-you-go monthly or annual subscription and are hosted and maintained by the vendor. Other vendors offer on-premise solutions where users install and run the system from a server at your agency. It’s important to note that many vendors today offer both SaaS and on-site systems.
Home health market predicted to grow to $11 billion. A 2016 study by Stratistics MRC predicts the global home healthcare software and services market will be worth $11.2 billion by 2022. Factors contributing to this growth include the rising geriatric population and the number of products and services being developed to address their needs.
Homecare Homebase and Samsung team up. In December 2016, home health software vendor Homecare Homebase (HCHB) announced a collaboration with Samsung. HCHB’s platform will be available on more than 140,000 Samsung Galaxy Tab E tablets to help mobile users manage workflows, revenue and resources.
Home health market gets its own voice assistant tool. In December 2016, vendor Orbita released its Voice Experience Designer tool. Similar to the Amazon Echo voice platform, this tool leverages artificial intelligence and relies on voice commands to perform tasks. It is specifically designed to help home health patients by offering applications to monitor medication/treatment adherence, caregiver coordination, pain management and more.
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