#1 most frequent
United States of America
100.0%31 installations of 31
What is WellSky Personal Care?
WellSky Personal Care (formerly ClearCare) is an online home healthcare business administration platform. It includes features for scheduling in-home care visits, messaging between patients and caregivers, and marketing caregiving services.
Categories & Use Cases
Top Performing Features
Coding
The software helps users find the correct codes – whether ICD-9 or ICD-10 – for claims.
Category average: 7.1
Multi-location support
The software can coordinate scheduling across multiple locations, facilities or practitioners.
Category average: 7
Automated appointment reminders
Patients receive automated reminders via text, phone or email in advance of appointments to help decrease the number of no-shows.
Category average: 7.8
Areas for Improvement
Specialty-specific workflows
The software accounts for different workflow options based on discipline or specialty.
Category average: 6
Data backups and redundancy
The software helps ensure against data loss.
Category average: 7.3
Local mode / networking failsafe
The software provides a way to ensure that network or connectivity issues are not a work-stopping event.
Category average: 6.6
Who Buys & Uses WellSky Personal Care
Functional and reliable
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use it for scheduling, on-boarding, and marketing. The scheduling function is very robust. I use it to organize and track referral sources for marketing purposes. It also makes tracking candidates' progress through the hiring process very easy.
Pros
- Tracks the value of referral sources, so we know how to best spend our marketing time and money.
- Scheduling and the ability to mass text caregivers.
Cons
- Could do a better job linking with online job boards.
- Personally I would like some be able to keep a work history of referral sources.
Return on Investment
- More efficient scheduling and communicating-sorry I don't have hard numbers.
Other Software Used
Google Workspace Essentials (formerly G Suite Essentials), Google Calendar
It does the trick
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use ClearCare/WellSky to run our home care company. We have both caregiver and client profiles housed within the system, we build out each client team, caregivers clock in and out using the mobile app, record what happened on their shift so our Client Managers have insight into each client's day-to-day, and the analytics/reporting within ClearCare/WellSky allows us to track metrics for all aspects of our business and keep everyone informed.
Pros
- Clients can be paired with their perfect caregiver(s) using the robust and fully customizable match criteria functionality
- The analytics/reporting feature not only has great standard dashboards, but it allows us to create our own dashboards tailored to our exact use case(s), pulling from almost any data point or metric within our platform
- They host quarterly webinars that update their users on the new features planned, what's being worked on right now, and things that have been fixed or improved
Cons
- There is no capability for a couples profile. The scheduling is challenging if you keep each person as a separate profile because it will muddy the hours data with duplicate shifts, and if you combine them into one profile for scheduling ease then you don't have fields for each person's age, DOB, health diagnosis, ADLs needed, etc. so their health information/record is combined
- There are a number of sloppy coding errors that make user experience not as pleasant as it could be. Despite our best efforts to bring attention to these bugs (which we have found and reported 32 of) currently 3 bugs are in "Product Analysis," 1 has been "Accepted for Development" and the other 28 were all closed out on May 10, 2021 and no further action is being taken.
- Our caregivers have a lot of issues with the mobile app not accepting their shift comments until they re-type and re-submit them multiple times - sometimes up to 8 times until it will accept the entry. But on our end it records each of those submissions so we have to manually delete the duplicates from the client's shift record.
Return on Investment
- POSITIVE IMPACT: We can access almost any metric related to the business and build reports that allow us to set goals, identify potential issues, maintain oversight, and automate workflows with the report scheduling
- NEGATIVE IMPACT: We've been dealing with the same software bugs for over 5 years now, they slow productivity, create room for user error, require workarounds to be created, you name it, just a lot of work to make the platform's shortcomings better since they refuse to do it for us
Other Software Used
Zapier, Hireology, Slack
ClearCare--O.K. by me
Pros
- Billing - provides detailed invoices for clients, exports into QuickBooks, and processes automatic payment
- Scheduling - aids in matching care team members to clients based on skill & need. Alerts on overtime and monitors authorization for those clients who receive care services through a third party such as Veterans Aid & Attendance or Area Agency on Aging which provides a limited number of hours.
- Care Planning - assessment information is entered for each client and appropriate tasks are assigned to the daily care plan.
Cons
- Tablet & Smartphone access is cumbersome and some functions simply don't work. In a 24/7 environment, we frequently have to access ClearCare after hours and on weekends when it's not convenient or even possible to get to a desktop.
- Multiple access - with the nomadic nature of the Care Team Member workforce, they go where the hours are. Their email may only be used in one ClearCare account, so if they change jobs and both current & previous employers utilize ClearCare, the new employer cannot use the Care Team Member's email address for communication. Same goes with Client email addresses, although this is a much less frequent concern as Clients rarely change providers (I have only experienced this twice where it was an issue).
Return on Investment
- Potentially saving a office FTE, valued around $40k
ClearCare, far and above the best solution for Home Care companies - both large and small
Pros
- Managing the scheduling process form the employee and client standpoint. In one screen we can see exactly what is going on with a client. Who's there, when they arrived, when they will be leaving, etc. Plus we can manage up to the minute changes in the care plan, in real time.
- Payment processing allows us to bill and initiate client payments with a few clicks. It automatically reconciles accounts receivable. It handles both credit card and ACH payments. Saves a bunch of time.
- Background checks are fast and easy because they are integrated into the platform. When a potential employee applies it starts the system begins all the steps in the hiring process. Once they get to orientation and have completed all of the other hiring process steps, with one click we initiate a customized background check that meets our licensing requirements.
Cons
- The communication process and tracking can get cumbersome. You can send and receive messages that are connected directly with all parties through the system (as emails, and texts) sometimes the back and forth communication can be cumbersome and difficult to follow.
- The CRM system needs updating to make it a little more proactive and less about basic information collection and note taking.
- Lately it's been very laggy, or slow.
Return on Investment
- Positive. For a relatively low cost per client, we can manage most facets our day to day business needs within one system. It saves a lot of time and makes our office more efficient because everything is in one system that all team members can access. One person can easily handle what might require two or three people to manage if there were multiple systems that weren't integrated.
Other Software Used
LastPass, Microsoft 365 Business
ClearCare is clearly the best option for non-medical home care agencies like ours
Pros
- CareFinder - Caregiver & Client matching function. Making the right match between client and caregiver increases both client and caregiver satisfaction and retention.
- Scheduling - Live Dashboard is like air traffic control, let's you see what's happening with all client schedules in real time. Notifies of missed clock ins and clock outs! You can also go to individual profiles to see each caregiver & each client's monthly, daily, weekly schedule. Easy to change.
- Storage of messages & other activity - each client and each caregiver's profile stores agency's communication in "Activity" section, so team members can easily see who is communicating and what they are communicating. Also allows setting tasks for team members that remind them by email.
- Billing, payroll - Clock in and out through Telephony system creates client's bill and caregiver's payroll. Ability to set billing rate and pay rate options or customize.
Cons
- NOTE: ALL CAPS USED HERE FOR EMPHASIS, SINCE BOLD OR UNDERLINE IS NOT AVAILABLE.
- New caregiver application feature allows smart phone users to apply, BUT most don't complete their application, they only fill out the first screen. After that, it is like "herding cats" to try to get them to finish. ClearCare needs to provide instructions to SCROLL ALL THE WAY DOWN TO FAR RIGHT CORNER AND CLICK THE ORANGE "NEXT" BUTTON UNTIL ALL SECTIONS HAVE BEEN COMPLETED. Also, there is a button we can click in the partial application to obtain a link and copy and paste it into a message to the applicant asking that they finish their application. HOWEVER, it is incredibly long! It runs off my email screen. If that link could somehow be shortened....
- Messaging is tricky for caregivers. Although ClearCare allows simultaneous sending of email and text, the long, unique email "from" address often causes those messages to go to SPAM/Junk. And the text messages come from a different area code, so many applicants ignore them. We have two pages of instructions for understanding ClearCare messages, and which ones NOT TO REPLY to that we go through during caregiver training, but they still forget.....if the automatic text reminders could possibly say DO NOT REPLY TO THIS AUTOMATIC REMINDER, that would help a lot! And is there a way to "spoof" our area code?
- Care plans can only be typed using plain text. This makes it very hard to read. If they could allow HTML text, we could use numbers, bullets and other formatting to make care plans easier to read. Then it would be MORE LIKELY THAT CAREGIVERS WOULD FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS ;-).
Return on Investment
- We can't function without it! We nearly gave up on our business when we first started out eight years ago, using a faulty system. We often could not complete payroll and billing on time due to technical problems. And the scheduling system was horribly cumbersome. It was a 100% improvement.
- The care plan capabilities are the best we've seen anywhere, and we have had Hospice nurses and Assisted Living nurses (both of whom are referral sources for us) compliment us on the excellence of our care plans.
Other Software Used
Dropbox, QuickBooks Online, Microsoft 365 Business
