Scheduling home care visits and therapy sessions

This video is for home care agencies, and for therapy practices that schedule sessions. You'll add a client, set their weekly visits once, assign the day's round with travel time checked, build a run, see the caregiver's own round on her phone, and find the visit exports. A shift is a block of hours at a place you run. A visit is one client, one address and a length in minutes, like forty-five minutes at Mrs Chen's at ten. It belongs to the client, so its clock is the client's own timezone. And a caregiver's day is a route, so between two visits the question is whether she can get from one door to the next. The same rules decide who may take a visit as a shift: on the roster, clear of the exclusion list, the right role, a license that outlasts the visit, no double booking and no approved time off. Minimum rest is switched off between visits on the same day, because fifteen minutes between clients is a drive, not a rest. Travel time is checked instead, as a warning. Under Add a client, type the client's name, their phone number, and the address. The timezone is the client's, not yours, so a ten o'clock visit is ten o'clock where they live. Press Add client, then Next, set their weekly visits, to open the client's record. In Details, add the address's latitude and longitude when you have them. Without them, travel time to this address can't be estimated. With them, you can set a clock-in fence, between twenty-five metres and five kilometres, and a Medicaid ID for the EVV export. Press Save details. That's all a client record holds: what gets a caregiver to the right door at the right time. There's no diagnosis, no medication and no care plan. Every read of a client record is logged, and a caregiver only ever sees the clients she's sent to. Back at the top, under Recurring visits, set the pattern. Tick the days, here Monday, Wednesday and Friday, type the start time, ten o'clock, and the length in minutes, forty-five. Choose the role the visit needs, and a preferred caregiver, here Ana. She's put on each new visit wherever the rules come back clean; otherwise the visit is left open on the board for you. Where says whether the visit happens at the client's home or at one of your sites. Add the service code it bills under, for the EVV export, and a task list, one per line. The caregiver ticks the tasks off when she clocks out. Press Add pattern. The next four weeks of visits go on the board straight away, and a week more is added every night, so nobody has to remember next month. The record lists the next ten. Some caregivers must never go to some clients. Under Never send, choose the caregiver, give a reason, and press Exclude. It's absolute: nobody can assign them, no override gets past it, and the caregiver never sees it. Any scheduler can add one; only an owner or admin can lift it. Authorized hours takes the payer's weekly authorization as you type it, and shows it beside what's scheduled this week. Authorizations between two dates count used, booked and left. MedAligna never fetches one from a payer, and never bills. A therapy practice works exactly the same way, with sessions instead of visits: a weekly pattern for a client and a therapist, at the client's home or at your clinic, kept on the same therapist, with cancellations, missed sessions and authorized hours tracked the same way. Open the visits board. It shows one day at a time, with the week across the top. Ana's round already has Margaret Chen at ten. Harold Brooks, at five to eleven, is still unassigned. Choose a caregiver for Harold's visit. Each name says how often she's been before. Pick Ana, and the board estimates the drive from Margaret's door to Harold's: straight-line distance, times one point three for real roads, at thirty-two kilometres an hour, plus five minutes at each end. Ten minutes isn't enough, so it says so. It's a warning, not a refusal. The estimate can't see a one way street, and you might know the two clients share a building. Tick to acknowledge it, and press Assign. Ana's round now shows both visits, with a chip between them giving the minutes needed against the minutes given. An address without coordinates shows Travel unknown instead. At the bottom, Further ahead puts up to three months of visits out at once, for every client or just one. Running it over dates already done never makes a visit twice. A run is a named, ordered round, like six nursing homes every weekday from six in the morning, in this order. Open Runs, and New run. Name it, set the first stop's time and the days. Add the stops in the order they're driven. Each stop's arrival is worked out from the first stop's time, plus the visit lengths and travel before it, so changing one re-times the whole morning. Press Create run, and its next four weeks are on the board. Here's Ana's phone. My visits shows her own day, each client's address and phone number, for her clients only, and a button to clock in from the visit itself. With a fence on the client, her phone's location is required, and a clock-in outside the radius is refused, with the distance. The fence never refuses a clock-out. Clocking out records her mileage and which tasks she did, and the hours reach the time clock and the hours export, labelled Home visit. If nobody clocks in fifteen minutes after a visit's start, it's marked missed and your managers are told, with the time in the client's timezone. And clocking in and out keeps working even if the subscription has lapsed. Finally, the Exports screen has two visit files. The collection manifest is one day as a record: the run and stop order, who went, scheduled against clocked times, tasks done and mileage. The EVV visit records carry the six data elements the Cures Act requires for a Medicaid personal care visit, with a Verified column saying whether both ends were clocked. It's for owners and admins, and it's the record for your state's alternate EVV process, not a certified state submission. That's home care visits. A client record holds just what gets a caregiver to the right door. A weekly pattern fills four weeks ahead and keeps going. The board checks every rule, warns about travel and never crosses a client exclusion. Runs keep a round in order, caregivers clock in from the visit, and the manifest and EVV files leave as records.