Home Instead Cannock

IQ:timecard helped Home Instead Cannock move away from manual timesheets, to an electronic call monitoring system which has made managing attendance at appointments much easier, keeping standards high.

The Challenge

Home Instead Cannock are a domiciliary care provider who manage eighty staff members and hundreds of elderly and vulnerable clients. The services provided include personal care, care in the community and home help, the Care Professionals are constantly busy catering to the needs of their clients, working to rotas and visiting various different locations

Before Home Instead Cannock implemented IQ:timecard, they used a system whereby Care Professionals had to text a given number when they arrived at a client’s home. The text was picked up by a member of office staff during the day, and by an on-call team during the night shift. All timesheets were inputted manually, which was effective enough at the time. But as the company began to grow in size, the monitoring system and the manual management of timesheets grew too time consuming, and there was a large margin for human error.

The Implementation

Home Instead Cannock took the plunge and implemented IQ:timecard, which was already in use at many of the other Home Instead offices around the country. Since then, they’ve enjoyed a myriad of benefits.

The management of on-call facilities has been made much easier by the service, and the ability to see where a Care Professional is, and which client they are with, has been invaluable when there have been problems, especially when carrying the on-call phone from home. A text alert system when someone has not logged in allows managers to follow-up on any non-attendances, ensuring that their clients get the call they’re expecting and keeping standards high by monitoring lateness. The new billing system is also far more accurate and time-efficient, with no manual input of data and no margin for human error.

The Results

Fran Sayer, Director of the Home Instead Cannock office, believes that there have been many areas that have benefitted from the service: time management, admin hours, efficiency, improved management and a reduction in operational costs are all advantages that have been noted. She says:

“The Care Professionals are now much more aware of arriving on time, and staying for the correct duration, as they know this will be monitored on a daily basis. Our on-call team also find the system much more efficient – it gives them all the information they need on their iPad or iPhone to deal with a situation quickly should they need to. Our admin staff have noticed a huge difference – billing is much more efficient, less time consuming and easier to control without waiting for timesheets to be submitted to produce invoices. And from a management perspective, it has enabled me to utilise staff more efficiently and have greater control over all the teams in the office, the seniors and the Care Professionals, by being able to monitor exactly what is happening and who is where at all times.”