The Good Old Days of Home Care
posted on February 9, 2012
Chris Chimenti, MSPT - Director of Therapeutic Services
It’s amazing how much Home health practice has changed over just a few years. When I began my career as a home health Physical Therapist in 1999, a stack of new referrals, a variety of paper documentation forms, a pen, and a pager were standard issue for home care field clinicians.
The pager was my lifeline to the home office. When the office needed to contact me, I would get a page containing the office phone number. (The phone number followed by the numbers “911” was code for an urgent patient care need.) While in transit between patients without a cell phone, I would find the nearest pay phone to reply to the page. By the time a phone booth was successfully located, the person who generated the page would likely have left their desk to attend to another matter somewhere else in the office and this communication cycle would start again.
Paper documentation was completed to log the details of patient care. Photocopies of these notes were produced to build a “travel folder” to serve as a portable record. Unless I spoke directly with the nurse or social worker involved in the case or stopped by the medical records department to review the patient’s chart, there was no means of gleaning valuable clinical information about my patient without the physical documents in hand.
A new era of home health care has dawned, and at HCR technology is at the heart of operations becoming an irreplaceable necessity. Today we have touch screen tablets connected to a wireless network available 24/7. Clinicians maintain a full medical record on the device through our cutting edge, industry-leading software.
Through the tip of a finger swipe, the clinician can access the patient’s referral, physician orders, diagnosis list, medications, and visit notes completed by each member of the interdisciplinary care team. Internet access can be utilized to retrieve valuable community resources or health-related information for the patient.
Email alerts are readily apparent on the device, so each clinician can easily monitor and process information arriving from the office or fellow colleagues. Cell phones replace the old phone booths for field clinicians, allowing instantaneous communications on behalf of their patients. Now communication with the office from the field is easy, efficient, and effective.
The road to becoming an industry-leading provider has been paved with cutting-edge technology and skillfully navigated by the expertise and dedication of HCR employees. It is hard to imagine the barriers to quality care that once existed. Looking back, the good old days of home care weren’t actually that good after all.
