4 Ways to Improve Home Health Nurse Job Satisfaction & Retention

In the past few years, the demand for home health has dramatically increased.¹ More nurses are needed to meet the increase in patients—a projected additional 600,000 workers will be needed annually in the next decade, more than in any other industry.² The U.S. population of those ages 65 and over, who are the most likely to need home healthcare services, is projected to nearly double by 2060 and also have more complex medical needs.³

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of telehealth was 38 times higher than before, and 40 percent of consumers expect to continue using telehealth post pandemic. With up to $265 billion worth of care services shifting to the home, it is more important than ever to streamline operations so clinicians can focus on what is most important—high-quality, accessible patient care.⁴

With ongoing staff shortages, you’re probably hiring nurses who are new to home health, either new graduates or nurses who are leaving other areas of healthcare (such as acute care) for a variety of reasons, including burnout. These nurses must be quickly brought up to speed on crucial clinical and non-clinical skills so they can provide confident, competent care.

In this new hiring paradigm, home health agencies must compete for nurses. Nurses want a reason to work for your organization, so how can you stand out in your industry?

Increase Job Satisfaction

One way you can achieve this is by promoting better job satisfaction at your organization—and delivering on it with engaging, high-quality training created for a home health-specific audience that builds both competence and confidence and onboards clinicians more efficiently so they can do what they love—patient care.

Create an Action Plan

How do you implement this idea into action in your organization?

This checklist provides an ideal onboarding solution for attracting and keeping top nursing talent for your organization:

• Online/digital skills assessment and training assignment
• Short skills training courses that provide patient demonstrations
• Engaging high-quality, home health-specific video-based training
• Mobile-first training delivered on an easy-to-use and intuitive app so clinicians can fit learning in anywhere, even from a patient’s driveway
• Targeted training that gets new clinicians seeing patients faster
• Confidence in their knowledge and training, so they know they’re providing patients with the best care possible

MedBridge’s Solutions

Though this checklist is ideal, incorporating each item into your organization’s onboarding system can feel a bit intimidating.

MedBridge does the work for you by combining these items into our all-in-one Home Health Care Solution, helping you deliver higher quality of care at a lower cost and reducing logins by combining powerful staff and patient digital engagement tools with a learning management system that simplifies and streamlines training, reducing administrative burden.

These four components of the MedBridge Home Health Solution are proven to engage staff and boost retention.

1. Skills and Competency Manager (SCM)

Streamline onboarding and improve quality of care with MedBridge’s Skills and Competency Manager.

• Efficiently onboard new nurses, elevate competency, and reduce the risks of paper-based checklist programs with our digital skills self-assessment checklist and user-friendly dashboard.
• Effectively train staff on crucial skills, provide targeted on-the-job training, and support nurses in the field with a vast library of home health-specific clinical skills and competencies courses and mobile-friendly training videos available on the go.

Case Study: Interim HealthCare of the Upstate
Interim HealthCare of the Upstate made the move to online training with the MedBridge Skills & Competency Manager. Their results included:

• Reducing onboarding expenses by 11.5 percent for home health nurses
• Reducing onboarding time by seven days for home health nurses—allowing Interim to serve more patients in their community as well as improve the experience of nurses who are new to home health and hospice as they prepare for the field

When Interim staff members were surveyed about their onboarding experience, 100 percent reported that the quality of onboarding training they received was good or excellent.

2. Targeted OASIS/HHVBP Training

Boost OASIS accuracy and thrive in home health value-based purchasing (HHVBP) with our targeted training taught by industry experts.

Effective onboarding and ongoing staff training leads to higher patient satisfaction and engagement, which leads to higher quality scores and improved reimbursement for your organization.

Case Study: Everest Home Health & Hospice
Using MedBridge’s OASIS-E Onboarding & Training Solution, Everest Home Health & Hospice saw a 28 percent decrease in recommended OASIS corrections for each of the targeted M-items.

With these results, they can likely expect to see $150 additional reimbursement per patient episode when the 2025 reimbursement adjustments occur.

3. Learning Management System (LMS)

Through the LMS for Healthcare Organizations, staff can:

• Remove the guesswork and reduce administrative burden by auto-assigning content to the right people at the right time
• Boost staff engagement using our high-quality interactive video training or upload in-house organization-specific training materials
• Improve consistency of training and care with intuitive admin tools and HR integration
• Remedy performance gaps and identify compliance risk with real-time visual dashboards

4. 5-Star Rated Clinician Mobile App

Our Clinician Mobile App allows staff to access CE courses and skills training anytime, anywhere, making it easy to learn a new skill on the go.

Utilizing MedBridge’s Home Health Care Solution has been proven to increase job satisfaction and productivity throughout organizations and can potentially result in $58,000 saved for each FTE retained in their first year, $7,000 saved per new hire by decreasing time to productivity, and 31 percent decrease in the cost of managing chronic conditions.⁵

Schedule a demo today to learn how MedBridge’s Home Health Care Solution can work for your organization.