VON’s mobile solution increased productivity by 25 percent

At VON Canada, 6,400 staff and 6,200 volunteers bring a wide range of nursing, personal support, and community services to more than 10,000 people every day in Ontario and Nova Scotia.

Delivering exceptional patient care is paramount to the organization, and VON Canada needed a more effective and efficient way to coordinate home care and ensure secure communication in the field.

If field staff couldn’t get real-time answers to patient care questions or didn’t feel tightly connected with the central planning team, care quality could be impacted and service levels could be missed.

Adding to these challenges was the need to address ever-changing regulations and funding requirements.

Sharon Goodwin, senior vice president of home and community care, said, “Our manual field processes were no longer working for us and were resulting in service issues. We needed to automate some of the work to improve delivery of care.”

The organization needed a technology solution that would facilitate communication, increase efficiency, and improve documentation accuracy and workflow automation.

If it could do all that and reduce administrative costs, all the better.

VON Canada started by bringing in frontline personnel to identify all of the organization’s operational processes, in order to identify opportunities to better connect management, staff, and patients.

Mapping these processes brought important insights to light: from the moment a client referral came in, it took 169 distinct steps to get field staff to that client’s home.

It became clear that automation would need to play a key role in any solution. Additionally, the solution would need to integrate with their back-office software system.

CellTrak’s Care Delivery Management solution provided everything VON Canada needed.

It would allow the organization to better manage frontline staff; connect staff with patients; and automate processes to improve compliance, communication, care, and cost.

And it is integrated with their existing software, providing seamless back-office operations.

But that didn’t mean execution would be easy. As often happens when implementing new software, several complex integration and change management issues arose that required expert attention.

CellTrak and VON worked closely to address and overcome those issues and leverage the Care Delivery Management solution to help VON improve client care.

Using CellTrak is part of the solution that has allowed VON Canada to increase productivity by 25 percent and reduce mileage expenses by up to 15 percent. By strengthening their service strategy, VON Canada is now fully equipped to implement a metrics-based approach to managing its staff and resolving problems before they become missed opportunities.

Combining automated workflows with an improved service chain has redesigned the way work is done and has helped staff connect with each other.

They’re communicating better, faster, more securely, and more often – and they can update documentation in real-time instead of calling in.

“Using the CellTrak solution has made connecting field staff with patients easier. We gained a new understanding of where people are and what they’re doing. This has helped us provide the right care at the right time,” Goodwin said.

Moreover, the steps involved in servicing new clients have decreased dramatically.

“Since connecting people in the service chain and automating some of our processes with CellTrak, we reduced that number to around 50,” noted Goodwin. As a result, each staff member now has the time to see one additional client per day.