Best Route increases capacity and reduces costs for home care sector
From Canadian Healthcare Technology, October 2009 issue
By Jerry Ziedenberg
Home care agencies typically have hundreds – even thousands – of nurses and workers on the road visiting clients. Driving back and forth on these visits is costly and time-consuming, but it must be done – after all, clients rely on home-care personnel for help.
Now, Victoria-based Procura, a home-care solutions developer, has produced an innovative system which may dramatically reduce the amount of time that visiting nurses and other home-care workers spend on the road. It does so by optimizing routes and schedules through the use of innovative geographical software.
Company vice president and product architect Scott Overhill notes the new system, called Best Route, is expected to slash the cost of mileage paid out to visiting nurses and other home care workers by up to 25 percent. The company has worked with historical data from its customers to develop the software and to arrive at the estimated savings.
Cost reductions of 25 percent can work out to be a considerable savings, since some agencies are paying out hundreds of thousands, and in some cases, millions of dollars in travel fees each year.
Overhill said that one agency the company works with spends some $12 million annually on mileage and time costs for its home care workers. By achieving a 25 percent reduction, it could conceivably save the organization $3 million annually.
“That saving of $3 million is the equivalent of 50 more nurses,” commented Overhill.
Visiting nurses and allied workers are usually compensated for travelling to the homes of clients, either with a mileage or time fee, or a combination of both. According to Procura, agencies pay between $1,500 and $3,000 annually per employee in mileage and travel time fees. Rural home care workers, in particular, can spend a good deal of time on the road, due to the long distances they must travel to reach clients.
Procura president Warren Brown observed that while cost control is always a challenge for home care agencies, they are also grappling with serious personnel shortages. By reducing the time that employees are on the roads, they can increase their time with clients. Put another way, by optimizing their routes, home care personnel can see more clients each day.
“The system is addressing the capacity issue,” said Brown. “It can give home care workers 10 percent of their time back.”
He added that, “If you can recover 10 percent of your time each day, there are significant benefits.”
Brown gave the example of a large agency with 3,500 workers using Best Route. “That’s like having 350 more workers available each day.”
There are similar gains for agencies of all sizes, he said.
Overhill said that Procura has created the new application by customizing the popular MapQuest system, which can be found on the web. In a partnership agreement with MapQuest, Procura has adapted and integrated the solution into its own home care management system.
“It’s a snap-in module, and with our customization, it looks and feels just like Procura,” said Overhill.
Procura has utilized the MapQuest Plat-form: Enterprise Edition to optimize routes for dozens or hundreds of workers in an organization. These workers, moreover, have multiple destinations each day. “A nurse could have eight or 10 visits each day,” Overhill said.
Used as a front office application for planning and management, Best Route can be used to schedule the best routes to take for a whole week’s worth of appointments.
To the best of his knowledge, no other North American home care company has integrated such a system – capable of optimizing routes for an entire enterprise – into its software, said Overhill.
The system reduces mileage and time on the road by optimizing routes, and automating the paperwork that’s traditionally been required when planning schedules and claiming expenses.
It can:
- Determine the best routes to client sites, reducing time and mileage on a daily and weekly basis, and quickly make this information available to employees.
- Avoid misreporting of mileage and travel time.
- Automate the process of entering mileage and travel time, and reduce the time needed for audits.
- Eliminate unintentional rounding-up and misreporting by employees.
At the time of writing, Procura was about to begin pilot tests of the Best Route system with customers in Ontario and British Columbia.
