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The coronavirus health crisis is challenging for everyone, but it can be especially hard on home visitors trying to juggle at-home responsibilities while also working to aid families who need their support more than ever.
But we’re hearing about home visitors who are going above and beyond in their efforts to offer continued support including home-made craft kits delivered to families and virtual bedtime stories. The question is, how can these front-line heroes continue to meet the needs of children, families and expectant parents under adverse conditions that may not abate for a long time? And how can we lift some of their current work-flow burdens?
Home Visiting Workflow is Challenging
Home Visitors face busy days full of conflicting demands: coordinate diaper drop offs in the morning; prep for a parent information group; jump on a team meeting on Zoom; check in on a new mom by phone after lunch; and, meanwhile, try to gather and record the information needed to make referrals and monitor kids’ progress.
Caseloads are heavy and each family is at a different stage. It’s difficult to remember and track which family needs which assessment. And paper tracking systems and bulky binders don’t help! But of course information gathering and tracking are essential to understanding communities, identifying how to expand services and making the case for funding.
How can the right software ease the burden?
A Home Visiting Solution that Improves Workflow
There’s an emerging realization that technology can improve workflows and make information gathering easier. It can also make information accessible when and where’s its needed. And the key is to lift administrative burdens and speed up workflows so home visitors can focus their energy on relationships and human connections. We see this as a new hybrid home visiting model that uses technology to improve interpersonal connections.
This idea is catching on. When asked about continuing to use technology after the pandemic, one supervisor said, “It could expand our services in different ways that we never anticipated them to expand. It might open up different opportunities for the parents. It could also open up different opportunities for staff to connect to families.”
At Advanced Metrics, we see a home visiting solution emerging that uses technology to improve workflow, not impede it. This model of home visiting uses secure, web-based software technology to facilitate personal connections. It offers data collection solutions that can be used anywhere from the office, the home, or the field.
For example, Advanced Home Visiting software from Advanced Metrics offers an innovative home visiting tracker which provides guided data entry for evidence-based home visiting models. There are also caregiver management tools and scheduling support features to help manage workflow on busy days full of appointments. Advanced Home Visiting software eliminates the need to use multiple data sets for accreditation support even when working with multiple funders or oversight agencies. And reporting is easy and flexible with customization of individual reports to meet a variety of reporting needs.
The coronavirus health crisis has highlighted the need for telehealth practices like these because traditional, in-person workflows have been interrupted. And home visitors have been forced to use technology in new ways to stay connected with families and with each other. Now that adoption has started, can technology continue to empower home visitors to be even more effective? We think so.
Software solutions like Advanced Home Visiting from Advanced Metrics can connect teams, improve workflow and enable home visitors to focus on what’s most important- supporting families and strengthening communities. We look forward to putting Advanced Home Visiting into the hands of even more home visitors.
Contact Advanced Metrics today for a demonstration of Advanced Home Visiting software.