Ohioans Home Healthcare creates a culture of satisfaction with an easy-to-use EHR

Ohioans Home Healthcare was founded in 2007. With more than 25 years of combined industry experience, the company vision has always remained the same – to provide outstanding, quality care and customer service for clients within the comfort of their own homes. Since inception, it has added seven additional branch locations, servicing 34 counties throughout Ohio and Michigan.

Challenge

When Josh Adams took over as CEO of Ohioans Home Healthcare in 2011, he realized that employee satisfaction would be central to the agency’s success.

“When we started out, we had a small group of employees who had all worked together at another agency, just six or seven of us,” said Kimberly Schmeltz, RN, Director of Operations at Ohioans Home Healthcare. “Josh and the team realized the importance of keeping those people happy. From our previous experience, we saw such a positive difference when we had a nurse who loved her job and enjoyed her work.”

A few years after taking the reins at the Perrysburg, Ohio-based home healthcare agency, Adams and other leaders noticed that many of the homecare nurses were using big plastic bins to transport reams of paperwork. The leaders figured that the nurses simply couldn’t be happy with the situation.

This practice prompted leaders to examine the nurses’ day-to-day work lives more closely, and they realized the need to improve clinical documentation practices so that nurses could more keenly focus their attention on patients.

The agency launched a search for a new EHR that clinicians could be trained on quickly, would result in a high level of user adoption and ultimately increase employee satisfaction.

“We needed to have a smooth transition to an electronic system for our field staff. We were working with nurses who had never utilized any form of electronic charting, and we were transferring them from their paper documentation to learning to use a device and software,” Schmeltz said.

We don’t feel desperate for staff. In fact, about 85% of our new employees come to us as a referral from somebody else.”

Kimberly Schmeltz, RN, Director of Operations, Ohioans Home Healthcare

Solution

After examining several options, Ohioans’ leaders decided to implement myUnity – citing its ease of use as one of the key deciding factors. “It’s very user friendly. The initial training with our nurses only took about an hour. The screens in myUnity are so simple. The nurses only see what they need to see, and it’s very simplistic for them,” Schmeltz said. Indeed, the EHR has been widely adopted for clinical documentation. They grab their iPads, and they’re good to go,” Schmeltz said.

Results

Ohioans is also experiencing:

More streamlined documentation

“With the electronic system in place, the nurses have said goodbye to the all the paper disorganization that they had been dealing with. Now, they can simply document care on their iPads and they are done,” Schmeltz said. In addition, these on-site capabilities make it easier for nurses to more accurately document care.

The agency has grown from just seven employees serving 50 patients in 2011 to more than 350 employees who serve about 2,500 patients today.

Improved overall agency workflow

Our clinicians may not live close to our office locations, which meant they had to travel long distances to courier the paperwork to the office. With the EHR in place, clinical documentation is sent electronically, making it possible to streamline the entire coding and billing process.

Enhanced patient care

myUnity has created customized forms that perfectly match the specific needs of Ohioans nurses, enabling nurses to more keenly focus on patient care. “When a nurse arrives in a home, she can quickly fill out what she needs to and then turn her attention to the patient,” Schmeltz said. “She’s not spending a lot of time on back-end processes or trying to figure out how to navigate the system. She can focus on the patient while she is there.”

Being able to focus on patient care resonates with the type of nurses who work at Ohioans. “We attract nurses who want to be nurses for the right reasons. They want to provide one-on-one patient care and went to nursing school because they really wanted to see people improve and see the outcomes,” Schmeltz said. “A nurse in a hospital might get to see a patient for one or two days. But here at Ohioans, the nurses get to see the patient from beginning to end and leave the patients when they have reached a state of independence.”

Improved customer service

The EHR also is used to track patient satisfaction. “We call every patient within 48 hours of opening their case to make sure everything is going well, that their nurse is a good match and that they’re satisfied so far. We use tracking and reporting systems in myUnity to manage all of that,” Schmeltz said.

Patient satisfaction surveys published on the CMS Home Health Compare sites indicate that patients rated the overall care from the home health agency at a 91%, compared to 82% Ohio Average and 84% National Average.

Kimberly Schmeltz, RN, Director of Operations, Ohioans Home Healthcare

Experience the right kind of growth

The utilization of the EHR is one factor that is helping the agency continue to grow while it stays true to its vision of unparalleled employee satisfaction. In fact, the agency has grown from just seven employees serving 50 patients in 2011 to more than 350 employees who serve about 2,500 patients today.

This growth is occurring in an environment where employees are truly satisfied with the care experience. In 2015-2018, Ohioans finished on top of the Toledo area’s midsize companies category in The Blade’s Top Workplaces competition.

The agency is also finding it easier to recruit nurses, “ even as other care providers struggle to attract clinical staff. “Being a nurse, I get emails and calls every day from organizations offering huge incentives, sign-on bonuses and other perks. It makes me smile because we don’t have to go that far. We don’t feel desperate for staff. In fact, about 85% of our new employees come to us as a referral from somebody else,” Schmeltz said.

Such satisfaction is contagious – as patients also seem to be happy with the care they are receiving. “The same type of word of mouth is helping with patients. They’re going to their doctors’ offices and saying great things about their nurse. Everywhere they go, they’re talking about how their nurse helps them or some experience that they had. That word of mouth has been great for us,” said Schmeltz.

“This is what we set out to accomplish years ago. We knew that if we concentrated on making our clinicians happy, we could make our patients happy – and our agency would grow. But perhaps most important, we projected that our agency would grow by offering a high quality patient care experience, and that is exactly what has happened,” Schmeltz said.