ClearCare is an online home healthcare business administration platform. It includes features for scheduling in-home care visits, messaging between patients and caregivers, and marketing caregiving services.
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UpToDate
Score 9.5 out of 10
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UpToDate from Wolters Kluwer supports clinician decisioning with instant access to drug information, patient data, diagnosis support, and shareable data for patient information.
It a great tool for the agency because it is easy to use (scheduling) and not too "techie" for individuals who are not very computer or browser savvy. For large scale, or complicated sales efforts it could use more features for tracking potential clients. If you are entering a lot of detailed and/or complicated narrative for care plans or potential client tracking, the interface is very basic and can be hard to work with. You are only given a small window where you're entering information.
ClearCare is quite user friendly. It was easy to pick up just by starting to use the software, clicking around to learn functionality.
By its nature of being web-based, we can access our full system after hours. This means that evening or weekend call-offs are much easier to staff. I can't imagine going back to software that is not web-based in this day and age.
While the noting of caregiver availability did take some time to get used to in the beginning (you enter the hours they are unavailable and work around that), it really does seem the best way to do it. The system will alert you if you are scheduling them for a shift they aren't actually available to take. As an added bonus, it also alerts if the shift triggers overtime. These alerts require an extra step to confirm that you want to add the shift.
The billing and payroll pages are pretty straightforward. We always have several people look over the numbers before exporting, so we don't usually have any errors in invoices or paychecks. If there is an error on an invoice that needs to be corrected, it is easy enough to edit and reprint.
The software includes a telephony system that requires caregivers to clock in and out of shifts. This adds a level of accuracy to both billing and payroll. If a client would ever question their invoice, we have verification that the caregiver was there, even if their parent with dementia claims nobody was there that day.
NOTE: ALL CAPS USED HERE FOR EMPHASIS, SINCE BOLD OR UNDERLINE IS NOT AVAILABLE.
New caregiver application feature allows smart phone users to apply, BUT most don't complete their application, they only fill out the first screen. After that, it is like "herding cats" to try to get them to finish. ClearCare needs to provide instructions to SCROLL ALL THE WAY DOWN TO FAR RIGHT CORNER AND CLICK THE ORANGE "NEXT" BUTTON UNTIL ALL SECTIONS HAVE BEEN COMPLETED. Also, there is a button we can click in the partial application to obtain a link and copy and paste it into a message to the applicant asking that they finish their application. HOWEVER, it is incredibly long! It runs off my email screen. If that link could somehow be shortened....
Messaging is tricky for caregivers. Although ClearCare allows simultaneous sending of email and text, the long, unique email "from" address often causes those messages to go to SPAM/Junk. And the text messages come from a different area code, so many applicants ignore them. We have two pages of instructions for understanding ClearCare messages, and which ones NOT TO REPLY to that we go through during caregiver training, but they still forget.....if the automatic text reminders could possibly say DO NOT REPLY TO THIS AUTOMATIC REMINDER, that would help a lot! And is there a way to "spoof" our area code?
Care plans can only be typed using plain text. This makes it very hard to read. If they could allow HTML text, we could use numbers, bullets and other formatting to make care plans easier to read. Then it would be MORE LIKELY THAT CAREGIVERS WOULD FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS ;-).
I have used ClearCare for about a year now and have only experienced positive outcomes with the system. It has everything you need from simple note reminders to detailed medial information regarding your client. If anyone in the health field takes the time to view this software, they would be hooked.
They are reasonably responsive with simple questions, but when it comes to the software not functioning as expected, resolution is very slow. I had a situation where I would click "cancel" in a scheduling window and it would go ahead and make the change (i.e. I didn't realize a caregiver wasn't actually available or that it would create over time, so I would cancel out of that window to go reevaluate, but when it closed that window, the change would be made regardless). That took 8 months for them to resolve, during which time they released a number of relatively useless updates. Currently, I am waiting for them to fix Safe Mode, which is supposed to give us basic access to personnel and scheduling. A select few clients/caregivers actually show up in this system, rendering it largely useless. I have been waiting since late August without an update or resolution, it is currently mid-February. For software that touts safe mode, I would think they would make sure it's actually functional for all users. They have to advertise it in the network because the software goes down with some frequency, at least every few months.
UpToDate provides evidence-based, currently relevant medical information in an easy and clear method. The software has directly helped me stay up to date in medical treatments and new information on etiology of diseases. This information has directly and positively improved my care and treatments for various musculoskeletal conditions and diseases.
This is a similar system that was created for organizational purposes for health businesses. Ortho2 is not as user friendly and takes much longer to learn the different ins and outs of the software system. I used it for over six years and still did not use all of the features in the system
UpToDate offers a much more comprehensive tool when compared with Epocrates. Although both provide good drug references UpToDate goes far beyond the Epocrates tool in terms of clinical disease diagnostic data.
I don't know that ClearCare has been the reason for growth directly, but it has allowed us to handle fluctuations in scheduling with more grace and ease.
