It’s one of the greatest roadblocks to growth as well.

The public health emergency has only compounded the staffing challenges that have plagued providers for years, a recent survey from AlayaCare and Home Health Care News revealed. Of 162 home-based care professionals surveyed, about 60% said employee churn increased within their organizations as a result of COVID-19.

Caregiver churn is one of the top five pain points for providers in 2021, along with inconsistent scheduling for team members, utilization of existing team members, the caregiver shortage, and poor routing and workflow management.

One way providers can get ahead of caregiver churn is by tracking and examining data around their organization’s hiring and onboarding process, Naomi Goldapple, head of AlayaLabs at AlayaCare, said during a recent webinar hosted by HHCN.

“If there’s a big lag between the date that [caregivers] are hired and when they get their first shift, … they have a tendency really to churn,” Goldapple said. “If we can have that data at our fingertips and are able to monitor exactly what they’re doing in the first 30, 60, 90 days — making sure they have shifts, making sure they feel like they’re part of the fold, making sure they’re being onboarded properly — that can do wonders.”

Montreal-based AlayaCare is a software platform and secure cloud-based system that includes clinical documentation, client and family portals, remote patient monitoring, and mobile caregiver functionality.

Amid the COVID-19 emergency, ensuring employee safety also goes a long way in reducing churn.

“Not unnecessarily putting them in harm’s way is super important in today’s outcomes-driven economy,” Brett Kirhofer, associate director of sales at Hireology, said during the webinar. “Are you training employees on proper sanitation protocols? Are you providing them with the appropriate PPE to enter the workplace or a patient’s home? Overemphasizing and over-communicating the importance of them being safe will get them more eager and excited to come work for your organization.”

Hireology is a talent-technology platform that provides candidate marketing and recruitment CRM services to home care and home health agencies, along with companies in other industries.

Another key finding from the survey: a lack of hours or inconsistent hours is a main driver of caregiver churn. Compensation, training and the demanding nature of the job are likewise factors.

Overall, 80% of the AlayaCare-HHCN survey respondents said that caregiver churn is disruptive to their organization’s bottom line. Even so, just half said their organizations were willing to invest to address the issue.

Many of the survey respondents said their companies are trying to better predict caregiver churn. To better retain employees, many are leveraging training-and-development programs.

Training and development allows home care providers to professionalize their workforce. This is especially important at a time when providers are competing with other hospitality industries for talent, according to Aaron Dun, senior vice president of marketing at CareAcademy.

“Think about what traditional employers, if you will, are doing to engage their workforce — and bring some of those tactics into our industry,” Dun said. “If Starbucks can offer a training program for their baristas that includes college credit, then we should be able to do the same.”

CareAcademy is a Boston-based training platform for home care professionals. The company currently serves roughly 1,000 home care clients and locations.

Ultimately, providers shouldn’t rest on their laurels. It’s important to continue to throw resources behind curbing caregiver churn, according to Kirhofer.

“People investing in employee retention programs now need to continue doing that. It’s not like the clouds are going to go away, the sun’s going to come out and everything’s going to be dandy,” he said. “Retention will be a problem … for this industry for a long time.”

The post Caregiver Churn Remains Key Challenge for Home-Based Care Providers appeared first on Home Health Care News.

While traditional media advertising — such as television and radio — has been essential in helping the Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania-based agency rise through the ranks, the future is social, according to Senior Vice President of Global Operations Dave Ritterling.

“Geotargeting, Hulu, Youtube,” Ritterling told Home Health Care News. “Those really are the next extension for all of us [home care providers]. We need to be where the people are, and they’re on phones.”

Ritterling shared those insights with HHCN at Visiting Angels’ annual conference last week in Nashville, Tennessee, where he said the importance of social media and emerging technologies took center stage.

“The days of the Yellow Pages are over,” Ritterling said. “What people are doing is using social media. I think we’re just going to see that trend really go quickly.”

The prominence of online advertising is nothing new.

But with studies showing that 86% of consumers read online reviews and 67% of adults age 65 and older use the internet, online advertising is becoming increasingly important in capturing clients.

Specifically, the average person seeking senior care online is a woman between 50 and 70, according to third-party market research compiled from more than 4,500 respondents and used by Caring.com. Most often, that person is the care recipient’s adult child (39%) or spouse (29%).

Lately, Visiting Angels has been researching new — and better ways — to capture those audiences.

“A lot of our strategies have been with cable, but now that cable’s changing, we’re going to a lot more digital sources,” Ritterling said. “We’re on NPR now, which is unique for us. We’re finding new areas where listenership trends are happening.”

Beyond bringing in new clients, social media has also been hailed as a way to recruit caregivers, as retention is at an all-time low and demand for services is at an all-time high.

“It has become table stakes — an effective multi-channel marketing effort,” Hireology CEO Adam Robinson previously told HHCN. “Recruiting via social media certainly includes potential applicants that read your post, click on a link and apply to a job, but equally important is brand building. Word of mouth is heavily influenced by a company’s online employment brand.”

Medicare Advantage play

Beyond digital advertising, another area of interest for Visiting Angels is Medicare Advantage (MA), Ritterling said.

“The more we think we know, the more we find out we don’t know,” Ritterling said. “I think there’s a lot more work to be done in that area for us to get our arms around it and figure out how we’re going to approach that. We see it as an opportunity but as we learn more and more, we’ll engage that more.”

While Ritterling declined to go into specifics, he said Visiting Angels is “looking at, developing and discussing” MA partnerships.

“We’ve got our feelers out,” Ritterling said. “We’ve got such a great experienced director group, many of which have lots of experience in that area. We’re working with them and sort of helping them chart the way as we approach this.”

The post Visiting Angels Exploring Hulu, YouTube as Next Frontiers in Client Recruitment  appeared first on Home Health Care News.

That means agencies need to start building their online brand now to stay competitive, Hireology CEO Adam Robinson told Home Health Care News.

Hireology is a talent-technology platform that provides candidate marketing and recruitment CRM services to home care and home health agencies, along with companies in other industries.

“It has become table stakes — an effective multi-channel marketing effort,” Robinson said. “Recruiting via social media certainly includes potential applicants that read your post, click on a link and apply to a job, but equally important is brand building. Word of mouth is heavily influenced by a company’s online employment brand.”

In the past five years, the use of social media for job searching in the health care industry has nearly doubled, according to Hireology statistics. Meanwhile, about 42% of home health care job seekers engage in social media for job searching purposes.

About 84% of companies across all industries currently use social media as part of their recruiting efforts, a recent Society for Human Resource Management poll found.

“Nearly half of candidates leverage social media as a channel for which they learn about companies, learn about jobs or interact with employers. That’s huge,” Robinson said. “It’s half the labor pool.”

To best use social media for recruiting, home health and home care agencies need to identify and join the right conversations on Twitter, job boards and various other challenges. On Twitter, for example, that might mean monitoring activity around #CaregiverJobs or #HomeCareJobs.

Additionally, Robinson said, when not actively recruiting, agencies should still keep up their online presence by commenting on other posts, sharing agency updates and promoting company culture.

“[Social media] is not something you can do once or twice every quarter or so,” he said. “You have to be consistent with it. It’s really less about the agency and more about why working for that agency is going to be a good thing for [the applicant] relative to the other job opportunities.”

In part, millennials more often applying to become caregivers is driving the increased use of social media recruiting as well.

Roughly 73% of millennials found their last position through a social media platform, a past study from the Aberdeen Group suggests.

Broadly, industry insiders have carried mixed opinions on how effective social media is at recruiting new hires. Some, however, have previously touted the benefits of a social media recruiting strategy to HHCN.

They include, for instance, Interim HealthCare Chief Administrative Officer Sonya Hinds, as well as BrightStar Care franchise owner Gary Ratkiewicz.

The post Home Health Agencies Ramp Up Social Media Recruiting Efforts appeared first on Home Health Care News.