Amidst the COVID-19 emergency, home health providers are busier than ever. Along with the already growing preference for home-based care, the public health emergency has accelerated the idea that the home is often the safest place to receive care.
For home health providers, this trend increases the need to keep staff trained and up to date on compliance — and national accreditor Accreditation Commission for Health Care (ACHC) is at the forefront of this effort with its learning management system HealthTrainU.
Here are four tips for choosing a home-based care compliance training program that meets the demands of today’s home health workers.
The program should be online
There’s no question that the COVID-19 emergency has caused people to spend more time online. Everything from doctor’s appointments to birthday parties take place virtually, as people try to uphold social distancing efforts.
Along these lines, people have become more reliant on services that enable them to learn and train remotely. Home health staff training is no different. ACHC’s online learning management system, HealthTrainU, gives caregivers the ability to access virtual continuing education training.
“Education is a necessary commodity in this industry,” says Mike McKillip, product manager at ACHC. “One of the benefits of providing education online is the ease of accessibility. They can have access at any place with any computer, or even a smartphone or tablet.”
A company-managed program puts agencies in control
HealthTrainU is a comprehensive online training platform for health care providers, developed by industry professionals with firsthand knowledge of home-based care’s challenges and needs.
The platform allows users to tailor training programs to fit agency needs. Users choose a person within their agency to act as educational coordinator — the person responsible for onboarding the caregivers or students. Caregivers can take their courses based on their own schedules, working through preloaded or customizable Mastery Programs.
Caregivers can also guide themselves through HealthTrainU’s available courses.
In other words, HealthTrainU puts home health providers in the driver’s seat.
“Having a company manage their educational expectations really, is the best way to go about this,” McKillip says. “It’s up to the educational coordinators, and our subscriber company, to say, ‘This group of people here need this education, and this group of people here need this other education.’ We’re not going to go in there and make a blanket statement, such as, ‘You need to take this 20 hours.’”
Home health education should meet various requirements
At a time when home health providers nationwide are seeing more demand for care services, it’s important for staff members to have the right credentials.
“If you’re a nurse or LPN (licensed practical nurse), you want to do education that satisfies your yearly requirements,” McKillip says. “It needs to be approved by your credentialing organization because you don’t want to take this course and then still have to take others to satisfy that yearly or bi-yearly requirement.”
HealthTrainU creates coursework that is sent to different credentialing organizations for approval. The majority of these courses fulfill requirements through the American Nurses Credentialing Center and the International Association for Continuing Education and Training.
This is crucial because a continuing education program with courses that don’t help students meet the necessary requirements can cost an agency valuable time and resources. It slows down the agency’s ability to offer care to more clients.
Find a program approved for RN and LPN credit
Because RNs and LPNs have different educational and career paths, home health providers must have access to training for both.
Typically, RNs coordinate care plans, administer medications, perform diagnostic tests and analyze results.
Meanwhile, LPNs are responsible for ensuring the comfort of the patient. They typically perform basic nursing duties, including performing and documenting physical assessments and executing a nurse care plan.
Currently, HealthTrainU has over 40 courses and counting. Of these courses, about 35 have been approved for credit for RN and LPN students.
“When choosing a learning management system, you want a partner to provide you with a ready-made program that is efficient and effective,” McKillip says. “I can’t think of a better partner than HealthTrainU.”
This article is sponsored by Accreditation Commission for Health Care (ACHC), a nonprofit accreditation organization that has stood as a symbol of quality and excellence since 1986. To learn more about how to choose a home-based care compliance training program, visit ACHC.org.
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