Hey, thanks Steve, for having me on a Drink with the Hurricane. So today’s topic is going to be five things you should look for in the mobile app that your caregivers use the clock in and clock-out. And before I tell you the five things we should talk first about why is it important for you to have a mobile app for your caregivers the clock in and clock out. So there’s a lot of great reasons.
The first one is that, you know in real time, what’s going on. I hate to say it, but we all know that sometimes we’re gonna have a caregiver who leaves us and doesn’t even tell us. And it’s just the worst phone call. When the client calls and says, my caregiver is not here or worse, their daughter calls and says there’s no caregiver for my mom today. So with a caregiver mobile app, you’re gonna know in real time when the caregivers came.
Now the next benefit is that it’s going to streamline your billing and payroll. So it’s not gonna be that, oh my gosh, it’s Monday. Let’s get all the paper time sheets in. So we can start figuring out the payroll between now and tomorrow and things like that. You’re gonna know right away when somebody clocked in when they didn’t. And of course, all of the information that you need for billing and payroll coming in gradually throughout the week. So you have everything that you need.
Now, a third benefit is better communication. So if we know, if we listened to Steve and we listened to home care pulse a lot of the reasons why caregivers leave our agency is because we don’t communicate with them well. And having a mobile app that gives you just one more way to reach out and communicate with your caregivers, for example to offer them open shifts.
And then the last one before we get started on the five reasons or the five features that you want to make sure you have in your mobile app is the reason is to have what’s called electronic visit verification. Now, if your agency provides any Medicaid services or VA services, you’re probably familiar with this already. This is the law for Medicaid and VA that says that you have to prove electronically that you did your visits and that you were in the right place at the right time and all those types of things. But even if you’re in the private pay long-term care insurance side of the market exclusively it has really become the standard of care for real time tracking of the clock ins and the clock outs and proving the location and all that kind of thing. So those are the reasons why you want to have an electronic mobile app for your caregivers to clock in and clock out, but now let’s move on to five features that you need to have in that app.
So I actually, I use an Android phone. This is my actual phone. And as you see, it’s on the screen on the right hand side. So the first thing I want to show you that’s an important feature in the mobile app is that a lot of us differentiate these days by providing services to clients who speak languages, other than English whether that’s Spanish or whatever languages you want your caregiver to be able choose and have their own language.
And that’s gonna be a comfort factor for both the caregiver and for the client. Who’s speaking that language. And you know that if that’s how you differentiate that that’s gonna be an important thing, that’ll help your agency stand out. So the second one is that in most apps today we have to, as you see over here, we have to log in with a username and a password the first time.
But after you do that you’re actually able to log in with fingerprint or face ID. So I have an Android phone and I use fingerprint to get in but if you have a more modern iPhone and you use face ID you wanna be able to have your caregivers get in their app. They don’t wanna have to type a password every single time. And of course the app should the caregiver out for privacy reasons, HIPAA compliance and all that. So you definitely wanna have be looking for that fingerprint or face ID to cock in. And okay, so let’s move on to the third thing that you’re gonna want is here. If I go into my visits, I’m logged in as the caregiver, Cameron and I see that she has a visit that scheduled from 10:00 PM until 11:30.
And if I say, great I’m gonna go ahead and report my arrival now. Well guess what? I’m not on time, it’s 10:13 PM. And we know how it goes. It’s just a natural piece of caregiving. Sometimes the traffic’s good, sometimes the traffic’s bad and we just have to deal with that but we wanna get all of our time on our shifts. So here, as soon as I hit that I’m recording my arrival time. It says your arrival is at 10:13 but you should the part at 11:43. So instead of the caregiver thinking they got there on time and leaving at 11:30 and then you not being able to bill for that full shift, the app is gonna tell them that exactly when they need to clock out. So that’s the third one. Okay.
So the fourth one that we’re gonna do is now that we’re all clocked in for our visit. There’s a very important feature that we want to have I’m gonna take myself off the screen here and shift some things around is, as I mentioned in the beginning, communication with our caregivers is really, really important. And so one of the features you wanna be looking for in your app is ways that you could communicate. And so here I’m actually logged in as Cameron. And if I hit this little cloud button over here I’m actually bringing up a secure chat capability.
So I could say to my caregiver, hi Cameron maybe I have another shift to offer them. Can you take another shift today? And we can send a message like that over to them. And then it comes right in and they see that in their mobile app. So I could go here and I can see that that message has come right in and it says, hi, Cameron, can you take another shift today? And just to keep things up and make this a little bit smaller on the screen so we can see everything. I can give a typical caregiver answer here. And I could say, and I could actually do this with my voice. It depends period. Who is the client, and what time is the shift?
Speak that in there and send it over to you in the office. And if I just wait a couple of seconds here or actually it’s come up already you see how the little cloud here by the caregiver Cameron’s name is flashing. So that’s how, you know in the office that there’s a message from the caregiver. So I can pop right into the chat window again here. And I see that I have, first of all I saw that I had that message from Cameron because it was flashing. And then I can see, I see the answer is who’s the client and what time is the shift? And right here, in addition to the regular chat functionality that secure and all that, we also have and you wanna look for in your mobile app the ability to have a video chat and here if I just hit the little video button as I see on the mobile app, that a call’s coming in and I’m gonna answer that call.
And it is here a little bit dark at night but I’ll just kinda use my phone to show you what’s going on in my home office here. And then you see me on the main screen. So we have this two way conversation going on and I got a little echo. So I’m gonna shut down the visit or shut down the chat rather. So we could continue your demo here. But basically by having this capability to do both chat and video chat, like we said, you could offer shifts out to your caregivers and you can do that communication.
And also let’s say that the caregiver says, Hey something seems a little strange. Mrs. Johnson today has kind of a bruise on her arm. And I’m wondering if the supervisory nurse could take a look at that. Right here you have a way that nurse, without having to go out to the home can see what’s going on. So that’s just another reason for the chat and the video chat.
And at the very last thing number five that we want you to have on your mobile app is that we are gonna have situations every once in a while where the caregiver doesn’t have mobile cellular coverage. And so here, I’m gonna show that I’m gonna go into the connections on my phone, and I’m gonna say that we’re returning off the mobile data.
So basically right now my phone is no longer connected to the internet. And if I do go back into the caregiver app and I say that I want to clock out of my visit then it’s still gonna let me report my departure. And here I’ve been here five minutes, it knows my time. And when I go ahead and accept my time, it’s going to as we talked about earlier, it’s telling me that I am not supposed to clock out for another hour and 24 minutes. So that’s something that’s important for me to know.
And here, once I go ahead and acknowledge that it’s going to let me do everything that I would normally do, get my GPS which it’s already done report my tasks. And then I could go and I could capture my notes and I can capture my client’s signature and my caregiver signature, hopefully your caregivers and client sign a little better than I just did and submit your visit. And right here, it says that your department has been recorded offline but you know, but you are offline. Your office may receive a late warning.
So here, I mean the one downside of the caregiver not being connected to the internet when they clock out or when they clock in is that you might get a late warning for their late arrival or late departure, but everything will be captured for all of your time keeping. So that’s it, those are the five things that I wanted to cover with you today. And with that, I would love to say once more thanks to Steve for having me on a drink with a Hurricane.
If you are looking for new software we’d love for you to check out our software Ankota and I’ll pop something on the screen. So you can get our contact information then we’ll turn it right back over to Steve. Thanks and have a fantastic day.