We've brought together a team of educators and home care experts to answer the burning questions that you and every home care owner will ask at some point.
Marissa Snook President/CEO of corecubed care marketing
Ilya Vakhutinsky Careswitch CEO, home health aide's son, Forbes 30 Under 30, caregiver advocate
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Brett Ringold Vice President of A Long-Term Companion & HCAOA board member
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Jeff Wiberg President of the Home Care Association of America board and CEO of Family Resource Home Care
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Debbie Miller Former pharma sales rep who built a $10M home care company and founded 52 Weeks Marketing
Debbie Miller Former pharma sales rep who built a $10M home care company and founded 52 Weeks Marketing
Brett Ringold Vice President of A Long-Term Companion & HCAOA board member
Mark Johnson EA specializing in home care agencies
Jason Chagnon CEO of Home Care Marketing Pros; digital marketing consultant to senior care businesses
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Becki Harrington-Davis Senior Content Marketing Manager at CareAcademy
Sabrina Sattler Account Executive at Careswitch, home care agency advisor specializing in startup success and longevity
Ilya Vakhutinsky Careswitch CEO, home health aide's son, Forbes 30 Under 30, caregiver advocate
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Rachel Gartner Former home care recruiter who was so successful that she founded her own recruitment firm (Carework)
Gregg Mazza Founded a home care agency, almost ran out of capital after two years, figured things out and scaled past $5M
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Jennifer Ramos Managed and sold three different home care agencies; CEO of JR3 Consulting
Jennifer Ramos Managed and sold three different home care agencies; CEO of JR3 Consulting
Brett Ringold Vice President of A Long-Term Companion & HCAOA board member
Erica Horner Home care sales consultant & project manager at corecubed
Erica Horner Home care sales consultant & project manager at corecubed
Brett Ringold Vice President of A Long-Term Companion & HCAOA board member
Jennifer Ramos Managed and sold three different home care agencies; CEO of JR3 Consulting
Angelo Spinola Home health, home care and hospice chair at Polsinelli
Jennifer Ramos Managed and sold three different home care agencies; CEO of JR3 Consulting
Adam Corcoran Director of Business Development at Golden Care, owner of Home Care Flyers, helped build a multimillion dollar agency from the ground up
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Greg Coopman President at SeniorCareCX
Miriam Allred Head of Partnerships @Careswitch, former host of Vision: The Home Care Leaders Podcast
Brian Cottone Jr. Benefits expert at VItable Health
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Jeremy Fuller Managing Director of Grow Home Care Marketing; website, SEO, and digital marketing expert
Julio Briones Home care consultant specializing in helping 7-figure home care agencies grow
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Connor Kunz VP @Careswitch, former head of education @ Home Care Pulse, scaled a service business 7 figures in 3 years
Scheduling is one of the core processes at the heart of a home are agency. As such, it’s one of the most essential workflows to get down to a science.
This piece will walk you through various schedule optimization tips throughout the process, which our team divides into three phases: pre-scheduling, scheduling, and post-scheduling.
We’ll be drawing heavily from an interview with Brett Ringold, VP of A Long Term Companion and a member of the Home Care Association of America Board; those familiar with our content will recognize him as a frequent flyer on our podcast, webinars, and other articles.
The best way to explain Brett’s expertise (which comes from experience in every role at a home care agency as a well as a recipient of home care himself) is that if scheduling is like solving a Rubik’s Cube, Brett is that roommate you had in college who could solve it in 30 seconds behind his back.
You can listen to both of our interviews with Brett here and here. I highly recommend you do so, possibly multiple times. Consider these a quicker, more skimmable companion to the long-form content in the episodes.
Let’s dive in.
As mentioned, we think about scheduling in three phases. If you aren’t considering the unique needs of each phase, you’re probably missing out on key ways to optimize the process.
This isn’t a comprehensive guide to all steps of scheduling; instead, we’ll walk through each phase and highlight ideas you might not have considered or strategies you might not be using fully.
#1: Decide an optimal caregiver-to-client ratio based on your business model and track it on an ongoing basis.
Why is this important? Once you find the right ratio and track it continually, watching this one number will help you avoid a variety of other problems.
If this number is too low, it’ll usually impact your ability to fill shifts, especially if anyone calls out. If the number is too high, it will impact caregiver retention as you’ll likely have trouble giving your team full schedules.
Depending on average hours per client, the sweet spot for most agencies will be ratio somewhere between 1.8 to 2.2 caregivers to each client.
#2: Create an automated process that updates caregiver availability once to twice a week so that your scheduler always has updated information.
A relatively simple way to do this is to set up automate text messages within your scheduling software or integrated SMS system that send caregivers a link to update their availability.
Depending on whether your process includes sensitive information, this could be in an online spreadsheet or a HIPAA-compliant form system like JotForm. The caregiver simply takes two minutes to update their upcoming availability, with the data automatically being gathered in a spreadsheet where your scheduler can see it and incorporate the updated info into the next schedule.
#3: Hold a quick meeting between members of different departments to ensure that the number of incoming/available clients and caregivers are in sync.
This should take place no less than biweekly and potentially as often as every day. At least one member from your HR, recruitment, sales, and scheduling teams should be present.
The purpose of the meeting is for the scheduler, who has a clear vision of the daily operations of the agency, to communicate the specific needs of incoming clients (for instance, number of clients starting that week and types of schedules) and coordinate that alongside the availability of caregivers, especially new incoming caregivers.
While keeping a balance between clients and caregivers is easier said than done (many agencies currently have a waitlist of clients), this will still help keep your staffing within your designated caregiver-to-client ratio.
#1: If you can’t schedule someone for their first shift from orientation, schedule them for a shadow shift.
One of the surest ways to lose a new caregiver is to keep them in limbo at the beginning by not giving them a paid shift to look ahead to when they leave their orientation. Scheduling a shadow shift buys you extra time to prevent this from happening.
While this appears to result in extra cost, it’ll save you money by helping you retain more new caregiver hires.
#2: Decide how much overtime you can budget for.
According to our Compensation Report, 88% of agencies offer overtime hours to caregivers. However, that doesn’t you should offer overtime willy-nilly under any circumstance, or become too reactive in offering overtime.
Instead, we suggest using one (or both) of two metrics to decide how to budget your overtime: percentage of total payroll cost allocated to overtime, and percentage of billable hours that can be allocated to overtime. The numbers will vary significantly from agency to agency, but this will help you be intentional about your overtime costs.
Paying overtime can obviously cause some challenges with rates. If you’re relying on government payer sources such as Medicaid, your hands are tied when it comes to charging overtime rates. For private-pay clients, however, you can work an overtime clause into their agreement that passes the overtime cost to them.
We recommend explicitly stating that a requested visit will put their caregiver into overtime and obtain additional verbal permission to charge an overtime rate for the visit.
#3: Track the right metrics to keep an eye on your volume and efficiency.
These will generally include:
Callout trends are particular valuable to track over time, as you’ll begin to spot patterns and learn to predict when callouts might occur and with how much notice.
Our team has spent a significant amount of time researching no-call no-shows; our research shows that the average agency is foregoing an amount equal to 7% of their total revenue due to the impact of no-call no-shows.
If you’ve followed all the tips above, your scheduling and operations will likely be a well-oiled machine. However, there’s at least one more critical step to remember: establish processes to follow up closely on new client/caregiver pairings over their first few weeks to make sure it’s the right match.
At the same time, work to continually build your relationships with caregivers so that (among many other reasons) you can be alert to their capabilities and recognize when their unique skills or traits might be a better fit for a client than that client’s current caregiver.
If you’ve read this far, you’re clearly dedicated to keeping solid operations and good scheduling within your agency. Here are some additional resources that might be useful to you:
Lastly, you can join our email list here and learn about our AI-powered home care software here.