Home Health Software

Buyers guide

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:

• Admitting and monitoring new patients
• Point of care documentation
• Scheduling
• Billing
• Revenue cycle management
• Claims processing 

• Payroll processing
• Administrative tasks

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:

What Is Home Health Software?
Common Features of Home Health Software
What Type of Buyer Are You?
Market Trends To Understand
Deployment Strategies

What Is Home Health Software?

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.)

Common Features of Home Health Software

Aide plan of care in Alora Home Health 

What Type of Buyer Are You?

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.

Market Trends To Understand

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.

Electronic visit verification requirements. The 21st Century Cures Act includes a new requirement for home health services and personal care services, which mandates the implementation of an electronic visit verification (EVV) application to track and report all in-home services completed by providers. If your practice relies on Medicaid reimbursements, finding software with this functionality is imperative.

Deployment Strategies

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.