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Touching Hearts at Home looks to CareAcademy and WellSky Personal Care to reduce manual processes and increase caregiver training participation

Providing high-quality care in homes and communities

Some things are better together. In the world of home care, this includes CareAcademy and WellSky (formerly ClearCare), two integrated technology solutions that are helping caregivers and agency owners alike.

According to Chris Greene, owner of a Touching Hearts at Home franchise location in Westminster, CO, the intuitive technology combo has been transformative for business.

Touching Hearts at Home looks to CareAcademy and WellSky Personal Care to reduce manual processes and increase caregiver training participation Touching Hearts is a strictly non-medical home care company of professional caregivers who provide services including light housekeeping, medication reminders, and transportation to errands and appointments. The company also provides some personal care services. Greene started his franchise a little over 10 years ago with the dream of helping people.

“When I was about 18 years old, my grandfather suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, and it was a family crisis that really exposed me to home care,” said Greene. “When I finished college at the University of Colorado Boulder, I realized how much I wanted to give back to my community, leading me to launch my own Touching Hearts franchise.“

In a decade, his business grew from 10 caregivers to 100.

“Our reputation sets us apart from our competition. While we’ve been in business for 10 years, it was always my intention to build this company at a pace that allowed us to ensure that, as we grew, we didn’t sacrifice any quality of care that’s delivered to our clients,” said Greene. “I always figured that if we’re providing exceptional care, then word-of-mouth will speak for itself. That’s what has helped us to grow to where we are.”

A growing business needs solutions that grow with you

Years ago, Greene’s team held annual compliance training in-house. But as the business grew, providing continuing education for more and more caregivers became increasingly challenging.

“In the early days when we only had 10 caregivers on staff, it was very easy for us to get everybody in for training in our conference room,” said Greene. “But now, we can’t even fit our 100 caregivers in our conference room–not to mention COVID restrictions or concerns.”

Monitoring that training, he said, was becoming too difficult. Not only was there mixed attendance at the in-person trainings, but manually tracking each caregiver to ensure compliance with state requirements was an administrative burden.

“We had at least six different fields that we’d have to populate whenever we hired a new caregiver to remind us when they were due for particular education throughout the year,” Greene said.

“Compliance is a crucial leg on the stool,and we knew that we had to streamline our process.”

He needed a solution: a quality, easy-touse system that could deliver and manage compliance training, increase participation, and reduce data entry for his team.

He tried other training vendors before finding CareAcademy, a caregiver enablement solution that offers self-paced training through a mobile-first, web-based platform.

The administrator dashboard allows automatic class enrollments and easy reporting, drastically simplifying the process of tracking training compliance.

For Greene, CareAcademy’s integration with WellSky Personal Care was the icing on the cake.

Better together

Greene’s business loves WellSky Personal Care for its full suite of solutions: scheduling, payroll, billing, electronic payments, credit card processing, a family access portal, and more. Caregivers use WellSky’s caregiver app to log their client visits and tasks. When it’s time to complete their continuing education courses, caregivers easily access CareAcademy training right from the mobile app.

“Caregivers click on a couple of buttons, and then they’re off and running,” said Greene.

“We’ve even found that caregivers are quicker to get their continuing education completed because the integration between WellSky and CareAcademy has made the training so easy to access.”

Easy onboarding for caregivers and administrators

The integration between CareAcademy and WellSky Personal Care makes onboarding nearly effortless. Activating a new caregiver is a frictionless process, and as Greene explains, the integration means caregivers don’t have to manage multiple apps and logins.

During onboarding, Greene’s team demonstrates the ClearCare Go app, then shows caregivers where they can easily navigate from the app to their assigned CareAcademy courses. CareAcademy is optimized to run from a mobile web browser, so caregivers can learn anytime, anywhere, on any device.

This platform gives staff the tools to know exactly what education they need to complete. If for some reason they fall behind on their courses, it’s very easy for us to identify. Then, it’s just a quick communication to that individual.

CareAcademy automated this process, saving us a ton of time and reducing the potential risk of human error. It’s never been easier for us to manage compliance and for our caregivers to meet their requirements.

Chris Greene

Owner, Touching Hearts at Home — Westminster & Fort Collins, CO

Simplifying to scale 

Greene is highly satisfied with how CareAcademy and WellSky work together, especially as his business grows. The integrated platforms, he said, are almost like the heartbeat of the business.1

“Together, these tools really simplify operations and compliance management,” said Greene. “Once your home care company has scaled to a certain size, managing continuing education becomes a burden, so it’s an absolute no-brainer to use CareAcademy and WellSky together. These platforms scale with growing businesses, they save you a ton of time, and they make training highly accessible for your caregivers.”