When you hear the words “house call,” what do you think? For most, the image of a doctor carrying a small black bag will come to mind. Often, that doctor arrives in a horse-drawn carriage, while sometimes it’s an old-fashioned automobile. Either way, few will picture anything modern when hearing that phrase. Yet, the house call is making a comeback, and there are a host of benefits coming with it.
5 Benefits of In-Home Care
In-home care provides a number of benefits for both providers and the patients they serve.
- House calls allow for better patient care. When patients have difficulty getting around, it can affect their healthcare. With in-home care, providers can maintain a strong relationship with their patients regardless of their mobility status. Additionally, when providers can assess a patient’s environment, they can get a better understanding of the factors impacting their patient’s health and take those items into consideration when planning care.
- Care providers who offer house calls may find they have a better reputation. Offering a service such as house calls today is bound to make people talk due to how uncommon it can be. “Word-of-mouth” advertising is often more effective at reaching potential patients than expensive ads. Providing in-home care will differentiate you from your competition and likely increase interest in your practice.
- Providing in-home care can create a greater sense of fulfillment. Prioritizing your patients’ needs and making sure they get care in a way that’s convenient for them is likely to make you feel more fulfilled as a provider. Most clinicians entered the healthcare field in order to help people, and providing this level of care feels like the exact definition of helping people for many.
- In-home care can help to avoid unnecessary hospitalizations. Because patients can more easily receive the care they need when they need it, issues that have the potential to require admission can be addressed earlier, avoiding the need for a hospital stay. This not only improves the patient’s care outcomes, but also lowers healthcare costs across the board.
- House calls are good for infection control. With in-home care, patients can avoid going out and sitting in a crowded waiting room. This helps to reduce the spread of pathogens among patients, some of whom may have compromised immune systems.
3 Tips for Modern House Calls
With so many benefits available for providers willing to implement house calls, it’s easy to see why an increasing number of clinicians are bringing back this practice of the past. While it can be intimidating to consider fitting in-home care into your schedule, there are ways to optimize your time to allow for this level of care.
- Create efficiency wherever possible. One way to achieve this is by scheduling a particular day’s house calls in a similar geographic area to the best of your ability. Another important step to take is to set a specific schedule for house calls so that it can become routine to a certain day and time of day. Consider implementing a smart scheduling platform to ease some of this burden.
- Record your notes immediately following each visit. Not only do you need accurate records to provide the highest level of patient care, but accurate documentation is integral to reimbursement, so it’s best not to rely on memory for this. If you can document during the visit without compromising patient care, great, but if not take a few moments in your car before moving on with your day. Using a Natural Language Processing (NLP) solution is a great way to make this task run even more smoothly.
- Utilize technology. The most convenient way to fit modern house calls into your schedule is to harness technology such as medpod’s MobileDoc. This incredible tool transforms any environment, including your patients’ homes, into a clinical care setting. With the help of a qualified presenter, you can perform detailed house calls, on par with in-office encounters, without ever leaving your practice.
Between the benefits in-home care can bring and the opportunities provided by emerging technologies, it’s clear that house calls are unlikely to remain a relic of the past. Therefore at Henry Schein SolutionsHub we are dedicated to bringing you the technology that will allow you to provide the utmost in care, such as medpod’s MobileDoc. This case the size of a carry-on bag contains everything you need to mobilize your practice.
