With the extra $600 in unemployment checks, many found it was more economical to NOT work, which only added to the COVID-19 staffing crisis for healthcare providers. Now that the boost is gone, applicants may be lining up for re-employment, providing much-needed relief to senior care facilities.

While you may be tempted to hire fast, we challenge you to hire smart. Why? Because hiring smart versus fast may have caused you to come up short-staffed in the first place. And now is definitely not the time to hire the type of people that will flake out or burn out.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, we’ve learned that our world has changed. Senior care/living facilities drastically changed. Along with chaos, change can bring wisdom. It’s become even more critical for you to hire staff who have good judgment and are ready for the long haul.

If you look at COVID-19 as an opportunity to restart your businesses, you can start by hiring right the first time. When you take time to really assess your applicants before hiring, you intentionally create stronger teams that fit better and are more productive together.

As you hear us say often, technology can help. And our primeFORCE application has some unique screening features you will want to consider for your ‘new’ business.

Here are two webinars to tell you more.

Live Webinar, August 25: Using Data to Fine Tune Your Staffing

• Provides strategies for hiring staff with the goal of retention. These hot tips can reduce turnover by up to 20%!

Webinar On-Demand: When Staffing Takes a 180, Assess Don’t Guess

• Discusses incorporating the Judgment Index (based on the Hartman Value Profile) into your applicant assessment process.

If you would like to find out how our primeFORCE technology can help, get in touch.

While many public health emergency waivers related to COVID-19 will carry forward to October as part of the emergency extension, the Payroll-Based Journal (PBJ) reporting waiver will not.. This means, your 2Q data is due August 14, 2020.

Other good to know details about your staffing data:

• Current Five-Star Reports will remain frozen with the December 31, 2019 staffing data
• 1Q data will NOT be used to calculate staffing star
• Providers auto-downgraded to one staffing star based on December 31, 2019, data will show ‘not available’ as current rating
• Five-Star Report with staffing measure will be updated in October with your 2Q data

Despite the waiver, 60% of facilities still reported 1Q data. CMS also encourages the submission of retroactive data, even though it will not be used to calculate ratings. With the correlation between increased staffing and better control of the COVID-19 spread, CMS seems firm on getting PBJ reporting back on schedule.

The American Health Care Association/National Center for Assisted Living (AHCA/NCAL) reacted by reminding the CMS "that the fight against this virus is far from over for our long term care providers, and they need continued support from our federal government. We hope CMS recognizes this and the urgent need to prioritize resources to protect long term care staff and residents."

With your resources and budgets being stretched, the efficiencies technology can bring are more critical than ever.

So, how can we help?

PrimeVIEW with PBJ reporting

• Generate and edit PBJ reports in a snap
• Quickly predicting your next staffing star
• Oversee your staff to patient ratios in near-real-time

• • Expedite the process to fill open positions and onboard
  • Utilize Hartman Value Profile to find people of sound judgment

Get in touch if we can help – we understand the demand on your time, we'll be brief!

Amy Stewart with Provider Magazine recently offered eight simple tips for "Assisting Staff through Adversity." We've summarized these into a quick-scan infographic for your convenience. Click to download and print the PDF.

Expediting critical care decisions during and after COVID.

We’re following the headlines every day and of course, it’s hard to NOT be in the moment right now. Is your data in the moment with you?

Here are five ways to evaluate if your data is in the moment.

1. Can you view your most critical data near real-time?
2. Can you access it via mobile app?
3. Can your system easily integrate data from other partners?
4. Can it help alert you and easily trend diagnoses/symptoms – like COVID-19?
5. Can you cost-out incoming patients in just a few clicks?

If you answered NO, your data is not at your fingertips to help you through COVID, and it can't help you mitigate the CMS-mandated changes to come.

So how do you get ready for a post-COVID, return to normal – or something close to it?

• Seek out a tech partner who is looking toward the future, while you deal with the ‘moment.’
• Use an app that integrates multi-source, critical data for daily meetings and action-required updates.
• Build a team with varying skill sets to evaluate clinical performance alongside your revenue return.
• Zero in on those referral partners who fit your clinical and financial success patterns.

Want to hear more? Check out our Centers of Excellence webinar series led by Clint Maun.

The first, Using Data to Determine Your Clinical Niche, is on July 29.

Additional sessions include:

• August 25 – Using Data to Fine Tune Your Staffing
• September 29 – Using Data to Determine Your Reimbursement Niche
• October 27 – Calibrating Your Data for Marketing and Referrals

Register for all four and make your way toward becoming a Center of Excellence!

If you haven’t met a CRM, it stands for customer relationship management (app). CRMs were initially targeted to high-yield sales teams in the corporate world. They’ve evolved quite a bit since then. Some are even built specifically for senior care. Used effectively, it can become THE data hub for the prospect and resident details that directly impact your revenue.

So, how can a CRM help you? Think of it as the contacts app from your smartphone – on steroids. It’s a place to centralize all contacts with interest in your senior care community – either directly or as a referring source. For potential residents, it enables you to manage their entire lifecycle with you – from introduction to tour to move in – and for some, discharge.

This provides communities with a way to manage census, inventory, referral sources, and each resident’s contacts. It can even offer valuable insight into readmissions. What’s more, it can all be accessed from a mobile app on your phone, so you can get to this information anytime, from anywhere. If you have a sales team, this means they could literally be in the stairwell of a hospital tracking targeted patient types as referrals. 

But, it doesn’t end there. Most CRMs now include various types of marketing automation, enabling you to send mass emails to those with a vested interest in your community. Or, it can be a multi-channel social media tool, allowing you to press one button and post to all social outlets. This can be a tremendous time saver for those of you wearing multiple hats in your community.

The best of the CRMs go even further to allow integration with all of your essential software – back office, EHR, billing, financial, and more. Add to that a robust reporting system that can help you tie it all together.

Data is power in this day and age. So, is a CRM a worthwhile consideration for your business? Absolutely. Used effectively, it can become THE data hub for the prospect/resident details that directly impact your revenue.