For home care providers, data-based operations are becoming key to long-term success.

Now more than ever, home care leaders are being asked to quantify what their organizations bring to the table.

“[Referral sources and payers] are saying, ‘You need to be able to quantify what you do in order for you and us to be a partner,’” Guy Tommasi, managing director at Lifetime Care at Home, said during a panel discussion at HCP’s Growth Summit Wednesday. “If we’re going to compete, and win, we have to do that with data.”

The Guilford, Connecticut-based Lifetime Care at Home is an affiliate of VNA Community Healthcare & Hospice.

At Papa’s Place Adult Day Center — a Tustin, Michigan-based all-inclusive senior care agency — Tracking data has allowed the organization to have a better picture of the business at large.

“It helped us really recognize what we were doing well, and how to increase what we were already doing well, but it also helped me recognize where we were struggling, and what areas we needed to really put focus into to be able to improve those areas,” Papa’s Place Adult Day Center CEO Nicole Haney said.

Clint Nobles, the co-founder of Home Care Ops, believes that providers should recognize that tracking data means that they can change it.

“If you track it, you can change it,” he said. “If you measure it, you can monetize it. The truth of the matter is tracking data does so much for our business. Tracking data reduces your stress 100%, because overwhelm is a mask for uncertainty. If we are uncertain in our business, it is because we don’t know our next step. Data instantly gives you the next step.”

Home Care Ops is a Chattanooga, Tennessee-based company that offers resources, templates, webinars and courses to home care industry professionals.

Nobles noted that it’s easy to determine when a business is not operating on data.

When home care leaders are feeling overwhelmed, overworked and are struggling with issues such as high turnover rates, it’s typically a clear that the agency isn’t tracking data, he said.

“At the end of the day, the data gives us the power to create calmness and certainty, so that we don’t have that overwhelming feeling,” Nobles said.

On his end, an early mistake Tommasi made was believing that his company needed to collect a large amount of data.

“I thought we needed to collect a whole lot of information, and all that was doing was frustrating my staff,” he said. “It was a blind spot, that I thought that more was better. It wasn’t until we collectively – as a result of that push back – started to scale down the amount of data, that we found there were four drivers for the success that we needed.”

As a result, the staff at Lifetime Care at Home became more excited about collecting data. The company also saw a revenue spike, which was the result of being more targeted in their efforts.

Tommasi noted that the most important KPIs at his company are caregiver and client satisfaction, rehospitalizations, functionality, impairments and outcomes.

Papa’s Place Adult Day Center has seen similar success tracking staff satisfaction.

“If our staff are invested, that will filter from the inside out,” Haney said. “We started with the experience they have from the moment that they talked to our business. What does that look like? What’s the conversion rate from hire to being in the field and working? We also tracked once they were at 30, 60, and 90 days out, where we were losing them and what was going on [during that time period], in order to figure out if there was something that we could tweak on our end.”

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