The Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC) has awarded HOP into Homecare! — an app designed to streamline the onboarding and training process for home health agencies’ clinicians — a $75,000 Commonwealth Commercialization Fund (CCF) grant. The fresh round of funds will fuel the app’s growth and development.
Typically, when clinicians’ receive orientation and education, it takes place in a classroom. When that portion of the onboarding process is complete, the newly trained clinicians are released into the field. The HOP into Homecare! app aids in the process by taking onboarding beyond the classroom, says founder Dr. Monika Virk.
“For an agency that is onboarding nurses and therapists, it helps them become field ready, and it predicts field readiness,” Virk says.
The grant funding will be earmarked for the company’s Remote Educator program, which provides home-based care agencies with a dedicated educator who will utilize the content and dashboards included in the HOP into Homecare! app to track and train new clinicians during their onboarding process.
The Inspiration Behind the HOP into Homecare! App
The HOP into Homecare! app was born out of the home-based care market’s need for a streamlined and effective onboarding process, one that can in turn improve patient outcomes through well-trained clinicians.
As the former Director of Quality Education and Program Development for hospital system-based VNA in Northern Virginia, Virk noticed agencies having the same problems when it comes to onboarding.
Virk conducted a study that found clinicians who are trained using a standardized approach perform 8% better on their OASIS assessment, compared with the existing clinicians.
Her background, as well as knowing what works and what doesn’t, motivated her to seek a standardized approach, and would eventually lead to the creation of HOP into Homecare!
Features and Functionality
As an app, HOP into Homecare! has a host of unique features and functionalities, allowing for what Virk refers to as “micro-education.”
“It’s very easy to use, because it’s in an app format,” she says. “Clinicians aren’t sitting in a classroom, getting hours and hours of content, and maybe absorbing it or maybe not. With the app, clinicians aren’t being fed too much information at a time. Then providers can integrate that with the field training.”
The app has three components: content, competencies and field visits. The content component focuses on the clinicians’ specific discipline. The field visits component focuses on tasks that clinicians must learn before entering the field, and competencies are agency specific requirements.
The Benefits for Home Care Agencies
At a time when demand for home-based care services remains at an all-time high, having highly-trained clinicians who are competent in the field is what will set an agency apart from its competitors.
Having a strong training and onboarding process also aids agencies with their retention efforts, as clinicians are more likely to remain at an organization that makes this a priority.
During the height of the pandemic, home-based care lost some of its most experienced industry veterans — nurses in particular — due to either burnout or retirement. One value-add of HOP into Homecare! is its ability to help agencies leverage the experience of these clinicians to assist industry newcomers.
“Home health is losing a lot of nurses,” Virk says. “They are getting burned out and they are changing fields. With the remote educator role, we can harness that experiential knowledge and use that to train the next generation of home health nurses.”
The Future of Onboarding in Home Health Care
As home-based care agencies look to simplify and standardize the onboarding and training process, particularly the clinical side, Apps like HOP into Homecare! will become more prevalent.
As for HOP into Homecare!, the long-term plan is to continuously improve the platform by adding functionalities and leveraging machine learning techniques on the platform user data to generate automated education plans for frontline clinicians and predictive analysis to enhance field readiness.
This article is sponsored by the HOP into Homecare! app. To discover more about how it is revolutionizing home health clinician onboarding, visit www.hqcpro.com.
