by Kristin Rowan, Editor

The workforce shortage, caregiver burnout, after effects of the pandemic, and the advent of “quiet quitting” have impacted home care agencies’s ability to fully staff and care for their patients. Hiring new caregivers is not always an options. Agencies must put time and effort into recognizing, rewarding, and retaining their existing caregivers and clinicians.

The Rowan Report recently came across a company that is helping agencies do just that and we had an opportunity to sit down with their founder.

Victor Hunt’s grandmother was a career nurse who started her own home care agency. However, the operation was too hard for her to handle on her own. She made the difficult decision to close the agency and go back to shift work. Victor realized that we need more home care agencies. But, he knew there had to be a way to help the people who have “home care heart” and can provide great care. There had to be an easier way.

Before Victor and his team could address the difficulties faced by home care agency owners, they first had to understand them. With his co-founder Dan, Victor embedded himself into home care agencies. They took shifts, followed schedulers and recruiters, and experienced the problems up close. During this process, they got to know one agency in particular and one caregiver who was a rockstar. She picked up shifts, did training, contributed the company culture, visited patients in the hospital, and had referred more than 100 caregivers to the agency. In short, she was the home care clinician all agency owners want.

Using this rockstart clinician, Victor and Dan set out to create a system that could turn every caregiver into an “Ava” and make every agency one that caregivers like Ava would want to work for. The mission of Victor’s and Dan’s company is to “make home care agencies destination employers.”

Home care agencies suffer from high turnover rates and performance challenges. THere is a lot of legwork that needs to be done to fill in the gaps and fix what isn’t done well. According to Victor, it comes down to a challenge of engagement and morale. Being a home care clinician is a lonely and thankless task. Caregivers can feel stuck in their career track unless they are actively pursuing higher credentials. The problem home care agency owners face is:

“How do we engage employees so their work feels recognized and meaningful?”

The Ava team surmised that in order for caregivers to feel valued and appreciated, something had to give. The question, they wondered, was whether it would be margins or administrative overhead. AI was at the center of these conversations. But, traditional EMRs limit the implementation of AI solutions.

Because EMRs limit AI applications, Ava is an app but is also a stand-alone system that operates in a mobile browser. No download is required for use, yielding an 85-90% adoption rate within agencies offering Ava.

Ava includes automated messaging to recognize employees without taking valuable time away from administrators. The app sends recognition texts to all staff to congratulate clinicians for reaching certain benchmarks. Announcements can be sent by email or SMS to all employees at once. Additionally, Ava includes HIPAA compliant two-way communication between agency and staff.

Additionally, administrators can create groups within the system to send mass reminders to specific people. For example, you may create a group that includes all employees whose driver’s license will expire in the next 60 days. Within that group, reminders are sent to ensure updated information is added to the employee file. The system updates automatically each week, adding and removing employees from the group based on the criteria created. 

Surveys are a great way to keep a pulse on the level of commitment and satisfaction your employees have. Studies suggest that engagement is a large factor in why employees leave their workplace. Ava includes pre-built survey templates but also allows you to crete a survey using an AI query. The survey questions and answers are customizable, can be “required”, set to “read only”, and can include a comment box to gain additional insights. Administators can filter survey responses to only see a certain type of answer.

Referrals from employees is not a new concept. However, it is not always a visible part of your recruiting strategies. Ava has a referral bonus program with automated milestones. The bonus program spreads the referral bonus out across multiple agency milestones. 

Ava also allows for manual tracking of Google Reviews or any other event or milestone where clinicians can be measured, tracked, and rewarded. 

In addition to the custom survey questions and benchmarks, Ava includes custom naming conventions to track clinicians. One agency uses the term “activity tag” to categorize achievements. If your agency already uses different terminology, that can be added to the system. 

Currently, Ava operates and switches between seven different languages. Additional languages can be added to the system and Ava can support those as well. 

Recruitment processes are also customizable. Agencies can give candidates access to the system during the hiring process and they can earn points for attending the interview, completing onboarding paperwork, finishing the first training shift, or other measures. This allows the agency to reward a new employee with, for example, a coffee gift card by the end of their first day. 

When your agency finds an exemplary employee, the unicorn, the “Ava”, keeping them becomes a top priority. Finding and training new employees is costly and time consuming. It is far easier and less expensive to reward your current high-achievers.

In addition to daily, weekly, and monthly goals, Ava has a tier system called “Badges.” Badges are long-term drivers of engagement, satisfaction, and success. The current badges are Orange (Avas brand), Silver, and Gold. There are points multipliers at each level. 

Once an employee reaches a badge level, they have to maintain a consistent 90% goal completion rate in daily, weekly, and monthly goals in order to maintain their badge level. Loss aversion to lowering back down a level encourages a high completion rate of other tasks. 

Caregivers and clinicians should be constantly learning to stay ahead of the newest trends and technologies in the industry. Ava includes learning management system (LMS) integrations with several of the top training companies in the industry. Clinicians can access learning modules through the app or browser and can earn rewards by completing training modules based on individual agency settings. 

Reports within the system go beyond badges and benchmarks. The system consolidates reporting from various data sources and allows you to see your business health at a glance. These reports can help catch burnouts before they happen, focus performance improvement plans, and automate process than can save an agency hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars per year.

Like most software solutions, the first iteration of a usable system is never the last version. Ava has already integrated with WellSky and can access several other EMRs. As they continue onboarding customers, the team at Ava is very open to the suggestions of their users and will continue adding features.

Some current limitations we noticed in our intial demo:

The badge system has only three levels. Longer term employees may want to see higher badge levels to maintain motivation. Victor noted that AI systems can help add account-specific customizations.

The app is designed for caregivers and clinicians. There is not currently a model for back-office administrators and support staff. While some customization could make the app usable for the back-office, it is not designed with them in mind.

Mass messaging through email or SMS is limited to one-way, read-only communication. There is an option to add “likes,” but currently there is no option for a group or individual to respond, even privately to a company-wide announcement.

The two-way communication is limited to internal staff. Employees cannot communicate with patients from the app to advise them of their arrival time, reschedule an appointment, or ask questions before an appointment.

The manual tracking of Google reviews is not scalable.

When The Rowan Report sat down with the team at Ava, we asked about some of these limitations and additional ideas for future iterations of the program. Victor and his team have already hired at least one person to focus on new feature requests.

Gamification is not a new concept in many industries. In fact, most of us probably have a memory of a teacher or parent with an activity board to earn stars for tasks completed. We’ve been unknowingly using gamification for many years. 

Smart phones, advancing technologies, and AI have increased the adoption of gamification and is infiltrating the care at home world quickly. The ongoing workforce shortage will make implementing these types of gamified systems even more important for an agency’s financial well-being. 

Ava may not be the first of its kind, but it has shown innovation and ingenuity in it application. If your agency is looking for ways to reward employees, needs to stand out among rival employers, is looking to reduce administrative costs, or needs a simpler way to see reports and statistics from multiple sources, Ava may be a viable solution. 

We see great things coming with future iterations of the app and the software and I’m sure this is not the last we will here of Ava. For more information, visit joinava.com.

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Kristin Rowan has been working at Healthcare at Home: The Rowan Report since 2008. She has a master’s degree in business administration and marketing and runs Girard Marketing Group, a multi-faceted boutique marketing firm specializing in event planning, sales, and marketing strategy. She has recently taken on the role of Editor of The Rowan Report and will add her voice to current Home Care topics as well as marketing tips for home care agencies. Connect with Kristin directly kristin@girardmarketinggroup.com or www.girardmarketinggroup.com

©2024 by The Rowan Report, Peoria, AZ. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Healthcare at Home: The Rowan Report. One copy may be printed for personal use: further reproduction by permission only. editor@therowanreport.com