SkyMail^® Case Study

SkyMail In The Home Healthcare Industry

Case Summary

Challenge
How to reduce the burden of administrative paperwork for home health care nurses — especially the Medicare Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) — to provide more time for direct patient care.

Solution
SkyMail provided an easy-to-implement solution for dictating patient information, allowing it to be quickly transcribed by administrative staff so each nurse could care for an additional two to three patients each day.

The Background
A home health care agency provides services across a large county in Arizona. The agency’s territory covers approximately 120 square miles. Its home health care nurses are required to complete daily paperwork to document patient notes and other records. Especially daunting is the 20-page Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) form required by Medicare for every new patient.

The Challenge
According to the patient administrator, the combined challenges of geography and paperwork were resulting in low levels of productivity and efficiency. Reporting requirements typically translated to close to two hours of administrative time per nurse per day. Coupled with the time and expense involved in getting the documentation to their office, paperwork was proving costly to the agency in both financial and employee-satisfaction measurements.

The Solution
“We were actively looking for a better form of communication,” says the administrator, when we discovered the benefits of SkyMail. The service was quickly implemented, and, after a single 20-minute training seminar, nurses were ready to completely change the way they managed paperwork. Using SkyMail, nurses immediately dictate the necessary information rather than filling out forms by hand. Each call is documented and entered in the transcriptionist’s email inbox. Messages, including the nurse’s voice and time and date stamp, can be saved on the agency’s servers for documentation and reporting purposes. Rather than repeated trips to the office to file paperwork, nurses now come in just once a week for patient case conferences, savings hundred of dollars per nurse each month in travel expenses. Completed paperwork can be filed in a more timely fashion, resulting in improved cash flow for the agency. However, the greatest impact is the subsequent increase in productivity. By alleviating “hours and hours of paperwork, we can maximize patient care. Nurses are seeing an average of two to three additional patients a day,” says the administrator.

Customer Benefits

• Reduced expenses and enhanced productivity — Nurses make fewer trips back to
  the office, cutting travel expenses and allowing each to add two to three patients to their daily schedule.
• Improved cash flow — Paperwork is submitted to Medicare for reimbursement without unnecessary delays.
• Employee satisfaction and retention — Staff can concentrate on quality patient care rather than administrative duties.
• Better quality of information — SkyMail’s simplicity fosters prompt use, resulting in
  more accurate detail and less forgotten information.
• Automatic documentation — Messages with time and date stamp are archived on the agency’s servers.
• No equipment investment — SkyMail utilizes each nurse’s existing cellular phone, and requires no time-consuming training or costly software downloads.