If you provide Pediatric Home Nursing, Behavior, Therapy, or Adult Personal Care Services you have either moved to electronic or mobile app charting in the field or you are planning to do soon (if not, you are burying your head in the sand).
This means that you have discovered that mobile devices and data plans, not to mention IT professionals, are not free.
Luckily, there are viable alternatives that can cut these costs to (or very near) zero. That’s right. Nada.
How you say?
Mobile Apps and B.Y.O.D.
B.Y.O.D. stands for “Bring Your Own Device” and is becoming more prevalent as smart phones get bigger, cheaper, more powerful, and well, smarter. BYOD is exactly what it sounds like: each employee uses their own tablet or smartphone to complete their documentation and mobile app charting each day.
At CubHub we see an adoption rate nearing 99% across all business lines of BYOD, and this includes among HHAs and Techs. The fact that these lower-wage employees are consistently buying quality smartphones is a good indicator of how viable this strategy can be.
If you are a small company with under 100 patients you can expect each device to cost around $15/month, assuming you get “free” cheap tablets with your data plan contract. If you multiply that across each field employee you will pay between $5,000 (therapy) and $72,000(nursing) annually to give them all a device. Once your company grows a bit, you can then expect to hire an IT professional to manage the setup, deployment, updates, maintenance, and support of the devices and software.
At the low end that person will cost upward of $50,000 per year.
Field employees already own their device, know how to use it, and pay for data anyway. If a phone breaks, they fix it or get another one. It simply isn’t your problem.
Yes, there are outliers who refuse to use their own device, and a few whose phone is so old it won’t support current apps. You can still give them a cheap tablet and send them out!
One large company recently found that out of 400 field staff, only 6 had devices too old to support the CubHub mobile app. But, rather than those employees demanding they be provided a tablet, most chose to upgrade on their own because they didn’t want to be responsible for a cheap tablet that wasn’t user-friendly anyway.
You have very few opportunities to increase employee satisfaction while reducing costs.
BYOD is that Holy Gail of Homecare management, so begin your quest today! CubHub offers the Mobile App Charting technology and BYOD guidance (including policy templates) to make it happen. Sign up for a free demo now.