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Employee retention is one of the most significant challenges for any business. High turnover rates result in business owners as they’ve to constantly train new workers. Due to this, new workers are not designated a proper amount of time to build knowledge, experience, and trust. While many business owners face this challenge, it is the most significant in the home care industry.

According to a study, caregivers are quitting at a rapid pace, showing that caregiver turnover rates in elderly care are at an all-time high- approximately 82% as of 2019.

-Benchmark reports

High caregiver turnover rates are a big source of concern for home care agencies. It considerably deteriorates the quality of care provided to the elderly clientele and may even drive an agency out of business. An unexpected caregiver change can also cause a lot of distress to the elderly clients who become habitual of receiving consistent care.

From a business standpoint, caregiver turnover reduces the quality of care provided and increases operational costs for home care agencies.

As per research, the cost of losing a caregiver is approximately 16% of the annual salary, which is surprisingly high. Additionally, for a caregiver earning an average of $12/hour, the agency has to spend around $4,000 for hiring and replacing the same caregiver if the tables turn.

-Center for American Progress

Employee churn is known to be a triple-edged sword:

• Firstly: staff shortages force an agency to turn away potential clients.
• Secondly: it increases the risk of missed visits, making existing clients unhappy and forcing the schedulers to scramble at the last minute.
• Thirdly: caregiver churn creates a continuity gap. Clients who had become comfortable with the same consistent routine, resulting in poorer client outcomes.

Job satisfaction helps recruit and retain top talent, making employee churn less frequent and less of an issue. Workers often feel that they aren’t getting the hours they want, in the locations of their choice, and with the compensation they wish to work for. This often leads them to search for newer employment opportunities, or worse, they tend to leave the industry entirely.

However, it can be daunting for agencies to meet the needs of employees in a complex and shifting environment. They need to manage their clients care plans, and multiple visit requirements, among other things, making consistency seem improbable.

How Does Artificial Intelligence Help Address Caregiver Churn?

Technology can help make the impossible possible. Studies show that the number of telehealth visits in the United States in 2020 was 63 times more than in 2019. An operation with smart home care software paired with mobile technology can go a long way in relieving inefficiencies that contribute to departures and burnouts.

Research shows that modern home care software increases caregiver utilization by 10-20 percent and reduces weekly travel time & recruitment costs by 33.5 percent and 15 percent, respectively.

With in-home care and biometric research, artificial intelligence promises to automate tasks, which helps deliver a faster diagnosis and offer better care. AI is becoming sophisticated at doing what humans do, but at a lower price, with much efficiency and accuracy.

Additionally, artificial intelligence has the potential to gain information, process it, and give a well-defined output.

Caresmartz is leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help home care businesses grow. CareSmartz360, the all-in-one home care software, gives agencies a comprehensive dashboard for viewing their business and monitoring the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in real time.

Agencies can offer their staff the support they need, mitigate everyday challenges, and tackle churn most efficiently in the following ways:

1. Smart Scheduling:

Undoubtedly, better schedules are directly proportional to a satisfied workforce. Despite knowing this fact, an ongoing issue in our industry is poor scheduling, which makes remembering caregiver and client preferences difficult for agency staff.

Using technology to create schedules help with real-time and accurate information monitoring and make the workload for back-office staff much easier. CareSmartz360’s advanced home care solutions, home care agencies can use a color-coded calendar for setting daily, weekly, and monthly schedules. They can use an all-in-one dashboard for smart scheduling in just a few minutes and match caregiver expertise with client needs, making more time for productivity.

Additionally, with CareSmartz360’s Scheduling Dashboard, home care agencies can time track effectively, helping caregivers know about their assigned shifts. Agencies can save a lot of time scheduling when using an all-in-one home care scheduling software, allowing more time to focus on employee satisfaction and retention.

2. Create a Better Caregiver Experience:

While most home care agencies aim to create the best caregiver experience to reduce churn, schedule optimization and client visibility are the ways to help achieve this. Home care agency owners using CareSmartz360 experience modern innovations to reach new heights of success in their business analysis:

• Leverage AI for Caregiver Retention:

  CareSmartz360’s AI solutions help reinvent the home care industry’s workflow. The AI dashboard allows agencies to analyze valuable insights regarding caregiver retention, caregiver value index, performance, and much more.

  Additionally, agency owners can foresee caregiver turnover risk, analyze individual performance, enhance productivity, improve revenues, and minimize caregiver churn rates.

  Using a Caregiver Retention dashboard, agencies can access the overall performance and know the likelihood of a caregiver leaving your company. This means agencies can launch their retention efforts early and effectively.

  CareSmartz360 also provides valuable insights to determine caregiver analysis, performance, and caregiver retention score.

• Wave a Goodbye to Paper:

  GPS-enabled home care management software helps streamline client care, record-keeping and electronic visit verification, enabling home care professionals to eliminate the tedious tasks of completing timesheets.

• Strive for Complete Transparency:

  Mobile software allows real-time communication between caregivers, clients, and agency staff, making room for accurate and rapid data collection and reporting. Also, this helps in bringing transparency to the business which in turn helps build trust between the agency and the caregiver.

• Enables Sales Forecasting:

  CareSmartz360 uses AI to launch a sales forecasting feature to predict sales by analyzing previous sales behavior and determining the current care delivery demands. Using the sales forecasting feature, agencies can foresee caregiver demand for clients and take the necessary steps to prevent caregiver burnout & churn.

The Conclusion- Preparing for the Future

Caregiver churn has become a severe concern for home care agencies. However, with the right technology by your side, agencies can prevent employee turnover far before an employee considers leaving.

Technology such as Artificial Intelligence has the power to predict employee churn by taking into account specific indicators, which act as guiding factors to explain why employees leave. Through AI, agencies can study large chunks of data, such as attrition rates, and map these patterns for the future to make adjustments to their business model and increase employee satisfaction.

Ultimately, the best remedy for employee churn is to predict it and take steps to prevent it. An all-in-one home care software can work wonders in addressing the issues faced by home care agencies- all thanks to new advancements that help with understanding, attracting, and retaining top talent.