A leader in its field, Elara Caring offers a wide range of in-home healthcare solutions and services that include skilled home health, personal care services, behavioural health, palliative care and hospice care for individuals of all ages in the United States. It has a strong commitment to holistic, patient-centred care that promotes quality of life through independence and dignity in the home setting.
To deliver on this commitment, Elara Caring retains and hires the very best caregivers in the industry while making the team-member experience a key focus for the organisation. The compassionate care delivered by Elara caregivers is scaled to diverse service areas in 17 states, with 26,000 team members and approximately 12 million in-home health visits annually. While the organisation had core systems of record, it needed a platform for digital transformation that would streamline team members' interactions with those systems, no matter the employees' region or role.
"My job is to figure out how to best use technology—whether it's automation, AI or new workflows—to reduce complexity, allowing our caregivers to focus on what they do best: providing compassionate patient care", said Chris Mate, CIO at Elara Caring. "Our caregivers choose home health to take care of people, and technology needs to support that, not overshadow it."
Optimising healthcare enterprise operations
ServiceNow and Elara Caring have been working together since 2022 to implement new solutions and unify systems and processes, bringing about a more modern and optimised way of working. This partnership also enables the healthcare provider to safeguard care delivery through the HIPAA-secure platform.
With ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM), Elara Caring streamlined its IT operations and built a solid base to apply new solutions and digitise all processes and workflows for caregivers in patients' homes, as well as for care coordinators in the back office. This has improved caregiver operations and enhanced patient experience. Elara Caring forecasts 20% in IT cost savings with the changes. "With ITSM, we've seen significant improvements in service levels across the board", said Chris.
What's more, Elara Caring's deployment of ServiceNow App Engine, to create custom low-code apps, resulted in additional time savings for the organisation. One example is the Medication Administration App, a digitised patient form used by caregivers to document the administration of medications during a patient visit. A previously manual process, the app helped provide more timely documentation and reduced medication errors.
The Elara Caring IT team was also able to swiftly put together an application that pushed out text notifications to remind patients of upcoming scheduled visits. With the enhancement, Elara Caring immediately saw an improvement in patient CSAT scores.
Finally, using ServiceNow App Engine, a low-code app, Room & Board (R&B), was developed for managing hospice expenses related to room and board in skilled nursing facilities. Before implementation, this expense process was manually intensive, involving multiple spreadsheets, email correspondence and Microsoft Teams integration. Now, Elara Caring has a consolidated workflow allowing these expenses to be completed accurately and efficiently.
"ServiceNow App Engine has allowed us to solve multiple point solutions where manually intensive workflows were previously needed. We look forward to continued iteration and optimisation", Chris said.
Improving employee experience for better patient care
Elara Caring has increased efficiency while providing compassionate care with Field Service Management (FSM) and Workplace Service Delivery (WSD). With ServiceNow, Elara Caring aligns shifts with caregivers' location, improving employee experience and providing optimised scheduling for a workforce division of approximately 18,000 team members.
And while machine learning and AI capabilities can match patients with potential caregivers geographically, other considerations are also built in. For instance, caregivers with allergies will not be sent to a house with animals and, with nine different languages provided by Elara Caring team members, patients will be matched with caregivers who speak their language.
"When you think about trying to manage a million visits a month, good logistics can take friction out of a caregiver's day", commented Chris. "Field Service Management has helped us greatly."
What's more, by offering caregivers shifts via WSD, a more strategic marketplace approach to care delivery can be adopted, offering caregivers autonomy and flexibility.
"We want to be the employer of choice", said Chris. "Part of this strategy is keeping our people engaged and offering them patient care shifts that are aligned to their expertise and preferences. ServiceNow gives us the capability to do that."
To further simplify operations and improve caregiver experience, Elara Caring adopted ServiceNow HR Service Delivery (HRSD) and Employee Growth and Development (EGD). Both modules will enable faster onboarding and deliver better talent development experiences for team members—helping the company mitigate the home care industry's high employee turnover. Although specific improvements depend on geography—with some states having more stringent regulations regarding caregivers—onboarding time for new staff members has, in some instances, been reduced from weeks to a single day. This provides enhanced visibility into the talent pipeline and allows the company to realise cost efficiencies while ensuring caregivers are quickly brought on board and ready to provide exceptional patient care.
The company is also leveraging HRSD to build out an employee portal on Employee Center Pro, creating a premium experience for all HR questions and requests, including payroll, PTO, benefits, payslips, general queries and more. These will be managed through access to the right tools, whether it is a portal, a chat, a Virtual Agent or generative AI capabilities, making employee experience frictionless. With EGD, staff will further benefit from self-driven, continuous development tools that enable them to personalise growth plans and take control of their career journey.
"ServiceNow allows us to differentiate the experience our caregivers have working for us compared to other home health agencies and, subsequently, the experience our patients have in receiving our high-quality care", Chris said. "We are excited for this next chapter and the new capabilities at our disposal."
Centralising and simplifying systems
Elara Caring is leveraging ServiceNow in a centralised fashion that positively impacts all levels of the business. For example, ServiceNow Automation Engine—more specifically, Integration Hub and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Hub—is used to connect to systems like AlayaCare (a core back-end system for Elara's Personal Care Services), Workday and the company's primary electronic medical records (EMR) system, Homecare Homebase. This streamlines patient referrals and expedites the process in which a patient is brought on to the service.
The company is also building a rules-based engine on ServiceNow, with RPA playing a big part in it thanks to its integration with multiple legacy systems.
Additionally, ServiceNow's Healthcare and Life Sciences Service Management, which Elara is also using, will play an increasingly important part in the company's evolution, an example of which is Elara Caring's HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) compliance. The importance of a centralised, efficient and secure exchange of patient information, clinical data and medical records ties into Elara's patient-centred approach to care.
ServiceNow gives Elara Caring a competitive edge by leveraging state-of-the-art technology to elevate both team member and patient experience while strategically positioning the company for future growth. Elara Caring's use of ServiceNow through a centralised approach—paired with the agility provided by low-code automation—allows the organisation to continue expanding its digital health offerings through investments that tie into its strategic roadmap.
"What I love about ServiceNow, is that it delivers one platform", said Chris. "It really simplifies things. With other products, we would have to build a lot of integration bridges, so the way ServiceNow brings this all together is powerful for us. The platform allows us to make investments in different places with a long-term roadmap to integrate them easily. I could not ask for more in a partner. ServiceNow is giving us a view of our business that we didn't have before. Soon, we'll be in every state with ServiceNow; it's the core of our digital transformation roadmap."