After graduating from medical school over a decade ago, I have been working with home health agencies of all different sizes and needs. I observed that onboarding was extremely challenging, regardless of the size or resources of an agency.

Educators & Clinical Management were “recreating the wheel” every time a clinician was onboarded. There was no standard process or content that was in-place. Content had to be updated every time regulations changed, due to competing priorities, content was always lagging regulations and evidence-based practices.

Gap in communication between different functions meant either the new hire was released too soon, or not soon enough.  Both scenarios created disengaged new hire who is likely to quit within first 90 days! 

I searched for content already available that could help me onboard clinicians and streamline my department's processes.  I reviewed content libraries provided by the biggies (Elsevier, Medbridge, Relias)...

More than ever, Covid-19 crises has demonstrated the value of having a holistic approach to patient management.  Covid-19 crisis has shown how age, underlying chronic conditions, socioeconomic status, and other risk-factors can influence mortality of a patient. 

In my prior post, I talked about how home care agencies providing high-quality, cost-effective care can position themselves as value-adding entities during this pandemic. All patients being admitted into home care are not alike, agencies must develop clinical training and management strategies that help clinicians case manage patients coming from different referral sources with different referral source based risk factors.  

Since majority (>75%) of home care patients admitted into home care services are from in-patient settings (short term acute care hospital, Skilled Nursing Facility, inpatient acute rehab) it is paramount for home care agencies to develop a specific clinical assessment focus and clinical...

There are over 10,000 skilled Medicare-Certified home care agencies in the United States employing over hundreds of thousands of skilled clinicians providing care to over 2.4 million elderlies annually. The annual turnover rate for an average home care agency is over 60 percent, with replacement costs estimated at $50k per nurse.

This means Industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to train tens of thousands of clinicians to keep up with their current patient needs. With Baby Boomers beginning to utilize Medicare resources, demand for skilled home care clinicians is expected to grow significantly (per BLS Data ~40%) over the next decade.

A robust orientation and meaningful mentorship program have been shown to be two important protective factors for nursing retention. A successful transition-to-practice helped new nurses become competent and confident in their roles and enabled organization to build a dedicated nursing staff to achieve their mission (Pennington, Gwen et....