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Facility-Based Post–Acute Care 2022
Top Challenges in the Aftermath of the Pandemic
Author
Paul Hess
Author
Paul Warburton
Author
Cimone Smith
The COVID-19 pandemic brought a wave of challenges to facility-based post–acute care organizations (i.e., SNFs, LTCHs, and IRFs). Staffing has become a particular pain point, with organizations citing burnout, increased competition with staffing firms, and intensive patient care for severe COVID-19 cases as contributing factors. To help organizations understand how peers are approaching the current environment, KLAS interviewed 82 leaders from facility-based post–acute care organizations regarding the top challenges they face and the technology vendors they use or have considered investing in to address these challenges.
To read about the most common hurdles home-based post–acute care
organizations encounter and how they are being addressed, click here.
Respondents Look to EMRs & Online Recruiting Technology to Address Top Challenges
Staffing is the number-one challenge respondents report facing today, followed by regulatory requirements and the pandemic. However, these challenges often overlap and perpetuate one another. For example, both the pandemic and documentation workflows—which are often made challenging due to new regulations or changes to reimbursements—exacerbate burnout and can prompt staff to leave. To address these challenges, respondents are looking to online recruiting tools, EMRs, and COVID-19 screening tools—see below for details.
Note: Visit the following links for performance data on OnShift, MatrixCare, and PointClickCare.
MatrixCare, PointClickCare, and Indeed Most Commonly Deployed to Address Top Challenges
Many respondents are looking to address top challenges with the technology they have already deployed at their organization. MatrixCare and PointClickCare are most often mentioned by respondents, who are hoping to alleviate staffing challenges by giving staff easy-to-use tools that will streamline workflows and improve the user experience. Epic and WellSky also have respondents looking to them for streamlined documentation workflows. The two vendors have smaller footprints in the long-term care market; Epic serves primarily large IDN customers, and WellSky is live in mostly IRFs. KLAS performance data for MatrixCare, PointClickCare, Epic, and WellSky indicates they are well positioned to help tackle workflow challenges; each customer base generally reports satisfaction with their respective product’s ease of use and the delivery of new technology. Indeed and Meta (Facebook) are the recruiting tools most mentioned by respondents. Enquire is the most-mentioned vendor that doesn’t offer an EMR or staffing solution; they instead offer various products tailored to CRM, referral management, care transitions, and preauthorization.
Note: “Ease of use” and “Delivery of new technology” are measured through KLAS’ standard software evaluations—additional standard performance data can be found here and here on the KLAS website. The rest of the data in this report was collected via a supplemental evaluation. See the About This Report section for more information.
Respondents Often Consider Investing in New EMR to Improve Documentation Workflows
About one-third of respondents are considering investing in additional technology to address their top challenges. They are most likely to invest in a new EMR; KLAS’ broader research in this market indicates that about 20% of facility-based post–acute care organizations (up from 13% in 2019) regret purchasing their current EMR solution or don’t consider it to be part of their long-term plans. Respondents looking to simplify complex documentation workflows and increase efficiency most often consider MatrixCare and PointClickCare. Respondents looking to address staffing challenges are focused on scheduling technology from vendors like OnShift and symplr. OnShift is mentioned because their scheduling, HR, and payroll offerings are integrated, thus simplifying back office processes. symplr is highlighted for their scheduling and secure communications solutions. Additionally, respondents hope to improve the patient experience by investing in apps that patients can use for telemedicine and scheduling; many are planning to roll out solutions from their EMR vendor. In an effort to reduce costs, respondents are considering vendors like vcpi for outsourced IT support and Flock for HR functionality.
Other Mentioned Vendors: Relias, Rosie, SHP & SimpleLTC Seen as Offering Innovative Solutions to Key Challenges
The following non-EMR vendors were mentioned less frequently than the vendors discussed above (i.e., by just two respondents each), but respondents who mentioned them say their solutions can be innovatively leveraged to address top challenges in facility-based post–acute care.
Relias: Improving Staff and Driving Patient Outcomes via Training
Many organizations hope to improve the patient experience with telemedicine and better patient satisfaction tracking, but some respondents are looking to deliver better care via staff training technology. Relias—who offers training, performance, and talent solutions—aims to help organizations identify areas of improvement and help staff become more proficient.
“We are looking at anything we can find that might help us need fewer people and still be able to provide a safe environment. We can assign staff their education requirements, and we have built all kinds of things into the education process. Staff can do their education on a phone, tablet, or computer. And the education feature facilitates on-the-go learning. If a nurse can’t remember how they are supposed to do something very basic, they can watch a two-minute video to catch up.” —VP of clinical services
Rosie: Creating More Efficient Workflows
Rosie provides an automated attendant intended to reduce the manual burden of routine tasks, like recording vitals data. The vendor typically serves long-term care facilities and seeks to save time for staff by reducing data entry.
“We will be looking at alert messaging and ways to automate some of our noncritical day-to-day tasks so that we can take some of the pressure off our staff.” —CEO
SHP: Improving Care while Reducing Costs
SHP offers several tools that track patient satisfaction to ultimately reduce readmissions. The vendor provides a broad suite of products to skilled nursing facilities and home health organizations. Two respondents report leveraging SHP’s technology to improve readmission rates and quality metrics.
“SHP is a vendor that we are using to help us manage our satisfaction, our growth, and the works.” —CFO
SimpleLTC: Helping with Regulatory Requirements
Staying ahead of all the regulatory requirements that impact reimbursements is no simple task. SimpleLTC offers a reporting tool that tracks performance so organizations can stay up-to-date on requirements and meet quality metrics.
“SimpleLTC helps us complete LTC and Medicaid information. The system also has a PBJ product, which is how we do our staff reporting. The system gives warnings if we miss something so that we can go back and make sure things were entered correctly.” —Director of reimbursement
About This Report
Each year, KLAS interviews thousands of healthcare professionals about the IT solutions and services their organizations use. KLAS’ standard quantitative evaluations for healthcare software and services are composed of numeric ratings questions and yes/no questions, all weighted equally. Combined, the ratings for these questions make up the overall performance score, which is measured on a 100-point scale. These standard ratings are available here and here on the KLAS website.
For this study, KLAS used a supplemental evaluation to interview 82 leaders from facility-based post–acute care organizations about the following: (1) what their top three challenges are and (2) which vendors’ technology they are using or considering using to address those challenges. The data was collected over the last 12 months.
Data Appendix
Writer
Sarah Brown
Designer
Jessica Bonnett
Project Manager
Andrew Wright
This material is copyrighted. Any organization gaining unauthorized access to this report will be liable to compensate KLAS for the full retail price. Please see the KLAS DATA USE POLICY for information regarding use of this report. © 2024 KLAS Research, LLC. All Rights Reserved. NOTE: Performance scores may change significantly when including newly interviewed provider organizations, especially when added to a smaller sample size like in emerging markets with a small number of live clients. The findings presented are not meant to be conclusive data for an entire client base.