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US-based Home Care Company DispatchHealth Raises $330M: Know How to Build Home Care App

Quick Summary: Home care app development is where there is hope and a future both!

There are 3 major reasons that show how developing an app for home care agencies can open a wide range of business opportunities for you.

The first reason is – it’s a booming market!

“The global home healthcare market size was valued at USD 345.6 billion in 2022 and is expected to reach USD 666.9 billion in 2030!” (Source)

The second one is – investors are finding it a profitable opportunity.

Recently US-based home healthcare company DispatchHealth raised a whopping $330M to level up its platform that offers care delivery via logistics, clinical support and coordination with other parties in its ecosystem.

And the third one is the best – it solves major challenges like scheduling, caregiver retention and communication!

So, whether you are a home care business owner or entrepreneur, in this blog, we have mentioned everything regarding it so that you can start or level up your home care business ideas across the globe!

What is a home care app and how does it work?

It is a powerful tech that brings clients, caregivers and organizations under the same roof.

In other words – it streamlines workflows and improves communication and collaboration across home care organizations.

Home care software mainly works in three directions – clients can book the care services, caregivers can manage their day-to-day tasks and agencies can manage their administrative operations.

For better understanding, the following is the detailed workflow of the app for home care agencies.

home care app workflow

1. For clients

  • Request home care services online
  • Track services
  • Explore caregivers by their expertise
  • Manage appointments
  • Multiple online payment options
  • Real-time chat with the caregiver
  • Easy access to virtual care
  • Provide ratings and feedback

2. For caregivers

  • Set the availability
  • Access or reject services
  • Real-time access to schedules
  • Check clients’ location details
  • Analyze visit notes
  • Point of care documentation
  • Real-time communication with clients and agency
  • Perform a faster and more secure billing process

3. For home care agencies

  • Upload service opportunities with a care plan
  • Track your clients’ and caregivers’ progress
  • Give access to clients’ family members to play an active role in their care
  • Access caregivers’ documents and other credentials
  • Manage payroll of the caregivers
  • Real-time communication with the caregiver via secure messaging

What challenges you can solve with home care app development?

Running a home care agency comes up with so many challenges.

And it impacts businesses in the form of – time, high operating costs and poor customer satisfaction.

But with the help of home care software development, you can easily avoid such roadblocks.

Following are the common challenges that a home care app can easily solve for you.

1. Poor scheduling

This is one of the biggest reasons why most home care businesses fail.

Because poor scheduling not only costs you time and money but also increases the caregiver turnover rate.

And sometimes, it also results in a care delay that eventually lowers the customer satisfaction and retention rate.

But with the home care app, you don’t need to worry about scheduling hassles.

The app allows you to manage scheduling and activities or task lists from a single dashboard.

You can also automate your scheduling process by giving full flexibility to caregivers in managing their schedules.

2. Time lag between events

The smaller the time gap between two tasks the smaller the amount and resources needed to put in work.

And it is only feasible when you have a real-time view of your caregivers’ activities and tasks.

The home care software comes up with real-time tracking that simply helps you locate your caregivers’ live location and access information regarding their remaining tasks and activities.

With that, you can easily make better decisions about your administrative workflows.

3. Poor communication and coordination between clients and caregivers

Ideal communication and coordination is the key to improving client retention rate.

Because it enables the caregivers to focus more on the client’s needs, rather say – providing a client-centric care approach!

The senior care app allows both client and caregiver to communicate and collaborate with each other (in real-time) with a secure in-app chat feature.

Which services you can offer from your home care app?

The home care software is flexible for almost every care service.

Those services include,

home care app use cases

1. Doctor care

Doctors can visit patients in their homes to diagnose and treat various illnesses. This service also includes follow-up meetings.

2. Nursing care

This is the most common form of the home healthcare business.

It includes both medical and non-medical care services for senior or elderly people and patients who are recovering from injuries.

3. Therapy at home

You can offer physical, occupational and speech therapy to elderly people and patients.

4. Medical social services

You can provide various services like counselling and locating health community resources to help patients in their care or recovery needs.

5. Specialized care

You can offer specialized home care services for conditions like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, hypertension, cancer and post-surgery.

6. Basic assistance care

You can help seniors or patients with their personal needs such as – getting out of bed, bathing, dressing, cooking, medication etc.

What are the most common features you should consider for home care app development?

The feature set is not important just for driving user experience but also influences the development cost greatly. So, always be vigilant while deciding on a feature set.

1. Features for clients portal

  • Dashboard
  • Request home care services
  • Appointment management
  • Notification via SMS, email and app
  • Track services and caregiver
  • Explore caregivers by their ratings, reviews and expertise
  • Pay online through multiple channels
  • Communicate with the caregiver over the chat
  • Give ratings and feedback

2. For the caregiver portal

  • Dashboard
  • Manage home care services request
  • Route details
  • Electronic visit verification
  • Secure document storage
  • Visit notes
  • Access to the client’s care plan
  • Automated notification to clients when a request is accepted
  • Real-time communication
  • Billing and invoicing
  • Time-tracking
  • Secure charting and forms

3. For home care agencies

  • Dashboard to manage clients’ and caregivers’ profile
  • Appointments and scheduling management
  • Track the progress of your clients and caregivers
  • Access caregivers’ documents and other credentials
  • Manage payroll of the caregivers
  • Real-time communication with the caregiver via secure messaging
  • Generate daily, weekly, monthly and yearly reports

Two advanced features that will help you attract more customers and acquire higher ROI

To address modern use cases of home care app, your app must have some advanced features which are useful in clinical ways.

1. Remote patient monitoring

This is the best option to attract a larger user base of senior or elderly people.

It lets caregivers monitor patients’ health (at any time from anywhere) with the help of IoT or wearable devices which continuously measure and share the vital body signs data of the patient.

You can use it for patients with acute and chronic conditions.

2. Telemedicine

Telemedicine offers convenience as it allows patients to access the care they need via chat, voice and video conferencing.

You can provide telemedicine solutions to senior people with the help of GPs, doctors, physicians and other healthcare specialists.

Top three home care apps to take inspiration for your idea to build your own home care app

Before going for home care app development, it is mandatory for you to study top apps already dominating the market and know their pros and cons. This gives you more clarity.

1. Alayacare

alayacare

Alayacare is a home care software that is specifically built for caregivers.

It makes it easy for the caregivers to manage their day-to-day operations such as –

  • Scheduling
  • Time tracking
  • Access clients’ health and fitness records
  • Create and update the clients’ progress reports
  • Billing process

2. AxisCare

axiscare

AxisCare is an all-in-one home care software that allows healthcare agencies to streamline their operations, improve caregiver retention and make data-driven decisions.

Following are the top features of AxisCare.

  • User-friendly scheduling
  • Mobile app for admin, caregiver and clients and their family members
  • Custom electronic forms
  • EVV (Electronic Visit Verification)
  • Payment processing

3. ShiftCare

shift care

ShiftCare is an easy-to-use home care app that eliminates paperwork and boosts operational efficiency, and caregivers’ productivity and reduces costs.

Following are the top features of ShiftCare.

  • Care management
  • Scheduling management
  • Progress notes
  • Accounting integration

Top three things to consider before developing a home care app

Home care app development might be overwhelming for you for several reasons. But let us for now list out three major considerations you should consider to avoid disaster.

1. Make sure to design a user-friendly interface

Having a user-friendly interface is important for a home care app.

Because here, your target audience is senior people and patients. They find the app easy to use only when it has – simple navigation.

The following are the major benefits of having a user-friendly interface.

  • Acquisition of new customers
  • Increase customer engagement and retention
  • Lower customer support costs
  • Lower training costs

2. Keep data privacy and security laws in mind

Your home care app stores crucial data regarding your clients’ – health, finance and personal information. And it’s important to protect that data against data breaches.

For that, your app must be compliant with data privacy and security laws such as HIPAA, PHIPA and PIPEDA.

In case your app is not compliant, there is a high possibility of cyber attacks.

This might put you in financial and reputation loss.

Thus, it’s important to make your app compliant with data privacy and security laws.

3. Prefer healthcare-specific developers

There is a huge difference between having a ‘single great skill’ and multiple average skills!

And that’s what makes healthcare-specific developers apart from the rest.

Because, unlike non-healthcare developers, they don’t entertain other industry projects.

They only perform health tech projects.

And that’s why they own a proven mastership not just for the coding part but also for compliance and interoperability standards.

How much does it cost to develop an app for a home care agency?

The truth is – there is no fixed amount for it.

Because it totally depends on your technical, business and compliance needs and their complexity.

For example,

  • Features and its complexity
  • Technology stack you want
  • Resources it needed
  • Functionality and workflow needs and its complexity
  • Compliance requirements
  • Time-to-market

And without knowing your exact needs, we don’t want to tell you random numbers and mislead you.

So, the smartest option for you is, just tell us your requirements and we’ll prepare a personalized quote and share it with you.

In case you just have scheduling requirements for your home care agency, we have something for you that might add value to your exact needs!

We have recently launched a white-label home care scheduling web app.

It is a HIPAA-compliant app that has features like internal and external team chat, secure document storage, notification via SMS and email, user management and the list goes on and on.

📌 Check out our white-label home care web app