How to Schedule “Just Right” (Part 1/2)

How Goldilocks would use WellSky® Personal Care (formerly known as ClearCare Online) to effectively manage and analyze schedules.

As the owner or operator of a personal care agency, you know that scheduling is at the heart of your business. This article is to help you learn how to schedule just right. The pandemic created new hurdles for effective scheduling. This is largely due to the extensive caregiver shortage that has plagued the industry across the nation. Now we are dealing with the aftermath of this extensive shortage, successful agencies must use every tool available. These tools are here to help schedulers match caregivers with clients, keep caregivers working at full capacity, and help reduce caregiver turnover.

In this article, we’ll review some of the tools to help caregivers and your staff maximize the utilization of each caregiver without overwhelming or overworking them. We’ll also review some dashboards and tools that help analyze and provide insight into the effectiveness of your schedules within ClearCare.

At the crux of this article is that like Goldilocks, to keep caregivers, it’s important to make sure their hours are “Just Right”… not too many and not too few.  Of course, it’s also important to make sure their assigned tasks match their skill set and that assignments don’t require them to travel too far.

Let’s look at tools available to agencies using WellSky® Personal Care (ClearCare):

Tools for the Caregiver

The first tool to discuss includes two features of the mobile application. This will help caregivers inform your office about changes and updates to their personal schedules.

• Encourage caregivers to input their “Hours Wanted” in the mobile application.  This can be used to track and manage caregiver utilization and help reduce turnover by improving caregiver satisfaction.
• Take advantage of the “Caregiver Unavailability” features of the mobile application and software.  This helps the caregivers keep your office up to date on changes to their availability. However, it doesn’t allow the caregiver to request time off if they are already scheduled. This furthermore helps to avoid accidental cancellations of shifts.

CareFinder and Match Criteria

The second tool is Caregiver and Client Matching. 

• Next, utilize the “Skills, Background & Certifications” section within a caregiver’s profile. Also, use the client’s “CareFinder Match Criteria” to make matching clients and caregivers a breeze. Remember the old maxim though, “garbage in, garbage out”. So be sure to keep both the caregiver and client profiles updated.
• The matching criteria can also be used with ClearCare’s “First Come First Serve” tool when you need to fill a shift quickly. 
• CareFinder can also use the Match Criteria. This is to quickly help identify which caregivers are a good fit for skills and distance from the client. This can be used with or without “First Come First Serve.”  This makes sure the caregiver does not have to travel too far to each client. This is another big caregiver satisfaction point.
• Finally, CareFinder can help avoid unnecessary overtime payments by showing caregivers who match the criteria but will not hit overtime (depending on the filters selected).

Live View by Client and by Caregiver

• Lastly, use the features of the LiveView to actively manage hours scheduled, completed, in progress, and requested. This will allow you to balance out the hours between caregivers, without sacrificing consistency during the scheduling process.

If you would like more information about the topics in this blog, please reach out to us for your FREE consultation. My email is crichardson@seniorcareba.com and we look forward to hearing from you!

Now that we’ve reviewed a few tools and tips to help schedule effectively, check out the next part of the series: How to Schedule “Just Right” Part 2, to review some reports and dashboards that can be used to analyze and provide insight into the schedule.