“Just Right” Scheduling (Part 1 of 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. The pandemic created new hurdles for effective scheduling, largely due to the extensive caregiver shortage that has plagued the industry across the nation. To help combat this, successful agencies must use every tool available 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 that help the 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, but doesn’t allow the caregiver to request time off if they are already scheduled, avoiding accidental cancellations of shifts.

CareFinder and Match Criteria

The second tool is Caregiver and Client Matching. 

• Utilize the “Skills, Background & Certifications” section within a caregiver’s profile along with 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 to quickly help identify which caregivers are a good fit for skills and distance from the client with or without “First Come First Serve.”  This helps make sure the caregiver does not have to travel too far to each client, which 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

• Use the features of the LiveView to actively manage hours scheduled, completed, in progress, and requested to balance out the hours between caregivers, without sacrificing consistency during the scheduling process.

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

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!