What is the Birdie App? Discover complete care management software for your homecare business
%20(1).png)
tl;dr: Birdie's industry-leading eMAR, body maps, Agency Hub, care planning tools and alerts can help your business to save 30 hours a month and save up to £12,000 a year.
Do you know what really happens on every care visit?
Are you confident that your staff always have access to the right information at the right time to deliver quality care?
This article will explain how the Birdie App has been developed to help answer the key pains we hear time and time again from our care partners - like visibility concerns, medication errors and saving time.
What is the Birdie App?
The Birdie App was developed to change the way you care. During every care visit, your staff use Birdie to complete a report in just a few taps and share it in real-time with everyone involved in the client’s care — care managers, other care staff… so that everyone knows what’s going on.
Since we were founded we've been on a mission to radically improve the lives of 1 million older adults - and that starts with you: the care professional.
The Birdie App and Agency Hub (care management software for your office) aim to:
⏰ Enable care professionals to spend more time caring for their clients. With the Birdie app, there's no more paper notes and comms sheets! Even Body Maps are included on Birdie.
💪🏼 Give more confidence around the care that needs to be provided. With instant access to digital care plans and comprehensive personal information in the Birdie 'About Me' tool, you can rest assured that your care team always have the right information to care with confidence.
🚨Support care staff and care managers to be more responsive and resolve issues as they arise in real-time. With industry leading eMAR and realtime alerts you can stay one step ahead. Check in on your care from anywhere, at anytime and make changes that are relayed to your team instantly.
"It makes such a difference to be able to work from anywhere. It's a massive help - you can look in an instant and see what's happening with your service users"
Boo Care
In a recent survey we discovered that care professionals that use care management software like Birdie, save on average 7 hours a week! Time they can now dedicate to caring for their clients, growing their business and building their team.
How the Birdie App is answering the problems of today
We hear time and time again that care professionals can’t access or share information in real-time during a care visit. This problem was only further exacerbated by the COVID-19 crisis, and for those care agencies still operating on paper, timely communication was impossible.
Because most agencies are still paper-based, accessing crucial information about the care that a client needs or is receiving is difficult. This is true for care professionals on the go, and for the staff in the office. In turn, this brings a number of problems. Incidents or observations are not shared instantly, subsequently disabling the ability to respond immediately.
Care managers often do not know what actions have been taken during a visit or if they have experienced any issues. This leads to a lack of transparency with regards to the quality of the care that is being provided to clients.
Depending on the size of the customer’s care package, paper records would be collected and audited by our office team. This exercise was incredibly time intensive and a very inefficient way of working. Our office teams would have to read through reams of paper, often trying to decipher illegible scribbles. This was the only way of auditing and the means by which our teams were trying to identify any potential safeguarding concerns or medication errors that had not been reported by the field care team.
This archaic way of working was not only a risk to our business but a poor use of human resource time management.
Rahim Manji - CHD Living
But, that’s where Birdie comes in.
Monitoring your care visits in real-time
With the Birdie App, care staff can check in, access their task plan and report their care visit in just a few taps. This means that you can understand more about the care that is being delivered at the client’s home in real-time. You can get further insights into the client’s wellbeing and you'll be alerted when something is not going exactly according to plan. You can check in on your care from anywhere, and if something doesn't look right, you can rectify it immediately. Not only will this show the CQC that you are a responsive organisation, it'll also help you to deliver the best care, at the right time.
Secure GPS check-in and out
Knowing where your staff are is crucial for their safety and the safety of your clients. With Birdie we've made checking in and out easy, with a variety of options to suit you, including: secure GPS call monitoring and one time password access. Whichever you use, you'll always know when your staff arrive and leave and where they are. And with an overruns and underruns feature available, if a visit finishes later than planned, you'll be notified and the extra time spent will be logged in Birdie. You can see all of this information in detailed reports from Birdie too, so you have the right information to show your Local Authorities and CCGs.
eMAR
How many times have you settled into a medication audit and faced missed signatures and illegible scrawls? How many times do wish you’d caught a missed medication earlier?
Figures show that there are 237+ million medication errors made every year in England, with over half being made at the point of administration.
We did the maths, and we worked out that on average, our partners catch an average of 61 medication errors per week with Birdie, mistakes that could, and probably would have been missed on paper. One of our partners, Prioritising People told us that since using Birdie's eMAR: “Safeguarding due to simple mistakes on a MAR chart are completely avoided now.”
Our easy-to-use eMAR allows care managers to build specific medication schedules from the Agency Hub and see at a glance if medication has been taken. Care professionals can easily see which medications need administering when they log in to the Birdie App, which leaves no room for error and no need to initial a MAR chart.
Our eMAR is also integrated with the NHS database - so you can be sure that the information is correct when you upload new medications to a client's schedule.
Plus, with our latest feature, Visit Planning, no visit can be completed without a scheduled medication being recorded. This means there really is no margin for error and you can rest assured that your clients' receive the medication they need at the right time.
Latest task plans
Care staff have access to the latest to-do list for each of their visits, retrievable directly on their phone via the Birdie App. They can tick tasks off as they go, letting the office team know what’s been done during their visit.
Adding new tasks and making them person-centred is easy too. Birdie pre-suggests a number of tasks based on your input and you can add personalised notes to make it really clear to visiting care professionals about what needs to be done.
"One of the tasks would be a normal assist wash in the mornings, but we would make that person-centred, by saying ‘the bowl is in the kitchen, please use the yellow flannel for the top. Mrs Smith prefers to use X bubble bath’ So we can make it actually really really person-centred and the carers can see exactly what they need to do. Even if they haven’t visited the client before, they can see exactly what the client’s preferences are."
Tracey, Harino Care
Visit reports shared in real-time
As soon as a report is submitted, it will be accessible in real-time on the client’s log. Office staff can see it on the Birdie Agency Hub. This makes auditing easy, and instead of collecting paper notes and reviewing them at the end of the month, you can log in and check the status of any client visit at any time.
Wellbeing monitoring
With the Birdie app, care staff are able to capture observations about the client’s wellbeing and share them when submitting their visit report.
This means you get insights and visibility in their client’s wellbeing so you can pick up on signs of deterioration and tailor care to the specific needs of each client, being truly responsive and person-centred.
Alerts
If a concern is raised during a visit, Birdie will flag it to the care manager so actions can be taken promptly. We also generate alerts for things like a GPS check-in that doesn't look right, missed medications and for symptoms of COVID-19.
Easily store client’s information
Because care visit notes and observations are directly reported on the app, information about the care provided is stored securely in the cloud and easily accessible for audit and CQC inspections. We keep client’s information in a secure cloud system and the information that travels to and from the app is highly encrypted to avoid security breaches. You can see more about how we protect data, here.
Ease of use with a simple design
The Birdie App has been designed and tested with care professionals. It is simple to use and has been designed so that everyone can use it right away.
"Anybody can use Birdie whether they are 10 years old or 80 years old - it's that good!!"
Leymar Healthcare
See Birdie in action with a quick video:
Get started with Birdie: Speak to a care consultant today and see how Birdie can benefit your business.
Want to know more about Birdie? Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram .
*This article was updated on 08/03/2021
Related posts
Let us show you how birdie can help
You're the expert. You deserve home healthcare technology that motivates your team and helps you grow.
