Providing high-quality care in homes and communities

On any given day, VNS Health has approximately 40,000 patients and health plan members in its care and works proactively to promote their health and well-being by providing high-quality, cost-effective health care to vulnerable individuals in their homes and communities.

Partners in Care, the home care and home health aide arm of VNS Health, employs over 6,000 licensed caregivers and personal care workers.

Bringing an in-person training experience online

New York was hit hard at the outset of the pandemic — at one point, VNS Health’s staffing capacity was down 30 to 40%. The organization had to adapt quickly to rapidly onboard staff members and deliver critical, high-quality, and up-to-date training while keeping both staff and clients safe.

New York has traditionally required in-person home care training and certification — but the COVID-19 pandemic forced home care agencies to innovate and leverage remote tools to train and certify their home care aide workforce.

At this pivotal moment, Partners in Care and VNS Health trusted CareAcademy. By leveraging CareAcademy’s mobile training and compliance platform, Partners in Care could empower its staff to achieve and maintain home care certification via mobile-friendly online courses — for the first time in New York State history.

"With over 6,000 home health aides on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic each day, we have constantly examined ways to improve how we deliver care, and how we engage with our workforce to ensure that the vulnerable New Yorkers who depend on us receive the care they need.

Partnering with CareAcademy to deliver high-quality, on-demand training for our direct care workforce is one of the bright spots to come from this focused effort.

For the first time, we can provide the critical training our staff requires in a flexible manner, enabling them to safely receive training when and where it is convenient for them. This ensures that our staff is able to execute at the highest level possible as we serve more than 40,000 people in our care each day."

Dan Savitt, President and CEO, VNS Health

Simplifying reporting and compliance management

Additionally, Partners in Care’s partnership with CareAcademy would drive significant results for critical areas of their business, allowing them to quickly deploy initial training and improve caregiver knowledge with ongoing educational opportunities. 

Having easy access to reporting across locations for state records and credentialing, managing complex curricula for direct care workers, and having portable credentialing systems were essential needs they met via the CareAcademy platform.

The future of health care depends on our ability to be adaptable, especially in such turbulent times, and along with our stellar Education and Recruitment teams we now have a new tool in our tool belt to be even more successful.

Anthony Dawson, VP, Quality and Customer Experience, VNS Health

The workforce shortage for home health care workers is growing, and the pandemic accelerated that shortage. That created the need for us to be able to offer training for new individuals to do this work. But the pandemic also put a pause on all of that.

The success of this new online training program expands our ability to attract and retain some of the best talent out there and to take care of our consumers now and in the future.

James Rolla, SVP, Partners in Care