The Increasing Importance of a Business Management Platform to Manage Remote Employees

by Brian Perry, Direct Care Innovations

Everything surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic is demanding more staff that has never worked remotely, or that require supervision, to move into temporary remote positions, and agencies have to quickly define policies and procedures for dealing with this sudden need. This is stressful and can be financially detrimental to any agency that is not prepared. Many of the business management platforms providing Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) can assist you in managing your employees’ hours and location, and may even provide you with a secure messaging platform to be able to communicate with the entire team in a HIPAA-secure environment.

One of the first steps is to ensure you have written the necessary policies to govern the employees working remotely. This helps ensure everyone is on the same page in regards to communication. The next step is finding the technology needed to ensure each employee can complete their job duties remotely, determining who will answer phones remotely, and how — and when — they respond to messages.

Once you define job duties and how everyone works, you need to ensure there is the ability for easy communication, as time and attendance and location-tracking become a necessity. None of us, or our agencies, want to revert to paper time cards! Having a time-entry system that can allow for real-time remote clock-in and clock-out is crucial. This will help ensure you are capturing the true time worked and, hopefully, the location as well.

Most business management platforms also provide a secure means of communicating with your staff, to ensure that you can freely discuss client needs, concerns, and issues without risking a HIPAA breach. Make sure you have an easy way to allow for this communication for the protection of those we serve, and their families, during this trying time.

EVV can also help confirm that you know where your DSPs are, and ensures that clients are being looked after. There are also use cases to be made for administrative staff and supervisors being able to utilize these tools to geofence employees to the locations in which they are working remotely. This can bring security and supervision to your new remote staff that was not available in the past, and also helps to ensure the job is being done.

These are a few useful cases that your business management platform can assist with in managing remote employees. We at Direct Care Innovations (DCI) come from the provider side and understand how stressful and frustrating it can be to try and manage employees remotely. We are here to help, so feel free to reach out with any questions about our platform and how we can help you better manage your staff and maintain compliance and training, all while still meeting he needs of the Cures Act.

Brian Perry has 15 years of sales and sales management experience, and nine years of health care IT experience managing teams of sales executives and project managers.