Optimal Home Care and Hospice is having to make drastic technology changes due to its ambitious growth plans.
And its experience serves as a guide for industry peers with similar expansion goals.
Currently, Optimal serves about 350 patients and has annual admissions of around 2,500 in the Detroit metro area. With plans to grow its patient census even further over the next several years, the Michigan-based home health company is hoping its transition to a new emergency medical record platform will be a smooth one for both its employees and patients.
“We wanted to transition to something that reduces duplication and [tried to find] an EMR that allows us to focus on the patient as well as getting the documentation done at the point of care,” Erik Wilson, Optimal’s co-owner and vice president, told Home Health Care News.
Wilson started with the company as a field nurse in 2011 and worked his way up.
Specifically, Optimal — which is 100% nurse-owned and operated — is in the middle of an EMR transition from one major vendor to another. The biggest reason for making the EHR transition, Wilson said, was the ability to provide the clinical staff with something easier to use that’s more efficient in the field.
Simplicity and time management were two priorities for the new EMR system. The team tried to find the system that showed a high percentage of clinicians completing their documentation within 24 hours, Wilson explained.
“That is key for us because we want to keep a good work-life balance, and sometimes in home health care, that can be hard,” he said.
The other big reason for the change was financially driven.
“We have a pretty robust growth plan in place,” Wilson said. “We want to make sure that the analytics and the finances are just as strong as what we want them to be, and we don’t necessarily get that great of output on our current EMR that would be able to keep up with the growth that we specifically want to achieve.”
The current system Optimal is using worked well for the first several years of the company’s journey. However, over the last couple of years, Wilson said the “ball had been dropped” on several occasions.
“There’s been a lot of issues with understanding what’s in our accounts receivables or our finances, which has led to a lot more work processes that we have to go through on our side,” Wilson said. “Which is really costly.”
Optimal looked at EMRs that had really strong financial backgrounds and interviewed with over 15 agencies over a two-month searching period, Wilson said.
“Our first goal right now is this smooth transition,” he added. “We don’t want to overwhelm both the management and the direct care staff with multiple things at once. We’d really like to focus and nail down the EMR, and then start looking at the numbers and where we were looking to go [in terms of growth].”
Optimal has always been patient-focused, but in order to grow and succeed at its full potential, it has to look out for its employees as well, Wilson said.
“Without the retention, the support, and the effort that all of these field clinicians and support staff and office staff put in, we can’t really grow,” he said. “Our employees really want Optimal Care to do well and be seen in the community. They want people to know that they work for Optimal Care so I think it’s important, from our standpoint, to make them a part of that growth.”
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