How to make your care operations efficient: the four metrics you need to measure

In times of increasing costs (such as rising National Insurance contributions) impacting already tight margins, it's never been more pressing to find ways to 'do more with less' in care. Finding operational efficiency is no longer a subject for the ambitious - it's one of survival.

But it's also easier said than done.

This article - drawn from Birdie's new eBook on 'How to grow your homecare business with the power of data' - sets out to make it simpler. Through speaking to hundreds of agencies every day, we've narrowed things to just four key metrics you need to optimise for.

1. Time spent on administrative processes (office staff)

What is it? 

This is the % of your office team's time spent on administrative processes, such as hiring, creating and updating care plans, and processing invoices. Don't include in this the time spent on 'growth activities' - these are activities that contribute to the growth of your business, and include recruitment and marketing.

How does it help? 

Unlocking growth means that you'll need to deploy more resources in growth activities such as recruitment, research and tendering. Hiring more people is one way to do this - but that comes with cost and therefore risk.

The much more sustainable way is to first see whether you can 'unlock' more time from your existing team in order to deploy them on growth initiatives. Knowing exactly how your office team spends their time is therefore one of your most critical actions as a leader.

Where you can find it 

The Homecare Association reports that the cost of delivering one hour of homecare at the National Living Wage is £28.53, of which only £0.91 of cost should be on back office staff salaries.

2. Time spent on administrative processes (carers) 

What is it? 

This is the % of your care team's time spent on anything other than care and travel - for example, completing visit reports or communicating with the office.

How does it help? 

Every minute a carer spends on admin instead of care is potentially billable time going to waste. When you consider the fact that on average, the largest part of your expenditure per hour of care is the cost of the carer themselves (£19.90 per hour, if paid at minimum wage), every minute is critical to having a healthy margin.

It's also a potential compromise on the quality of care, which can have a domino effect on your ability to receive strong inspection reports and therefore win new tenders and private clients.

Where you can find it 

Audit a sample of visit reports to check for key issues, such as:

• Is the carer duplicating information e.g. in task notes and observations?
• Are they reporting unnecessary information e.g. opinions or more detail than is helpful to a reader

3. Travel time (carers)

What is it? 

The amount of time spent by carers moving between calls whilst on a run.

How does it help? 

If your carers are spending long amounts of time on travel, then you're facing more than just high fuel costs: you've likely got inefficient use of your team that could be holding you back from taking on new packages.

This is a perfect case of 'take care of the pennies, and the pounds take care of themselves'. Truly efficient rostering takes into account travel time between calls in order to make every run as efficient as it can be - this might only be minutes saved on each run, but over the course of a week that could be an hour.

Applied over multiple carers over the course of a month, this potentially unlocks days of billable time for your business - a profit lever lying hidden in your schedule.

Where you can find it 

Your rostering solution should be able to give you a report of this - if it can't, it's time to think about switching to one that can!

Helpful benchmarks

The Homecare Association reports an average paid travel time per hour of 12.34 minutes, or 20.56% as an hourly percentage.

Birdie data for the first six months of 2024 shows that Birdie users report less; travel time is 10% of paid care time. Note that there are variables here - agencies operating in rural areas may require more travel time than those in more urban areas.

Additional note: If your business pays your care team in shifts, rather than based on calls, you should consider also monitoring your utilisation rates (the % of time in a shift that a carer is on visits and therefore billable).

4. Paper and printing costs

What is it? 

The money that you spend on paper, ink and printer maintenance, as well as your spend on postage.

How does it help? 

Dependence on paper processes is the biggest Achilles' heel of a care business: it has many negative implications on everything from compliance (paper documents are much harder to ready for inspection time) to care management efficiency (i.e. shuffling care plans back and forth from office to clients' homes every time they need updating).

But critically, they also have a cost of their own. The amount of money your business spends on maintaining this system may be much more than you expect - and it could be doing critical harm to your efficiency and therefore your margins.

Where you can find it

With either your finance team or the vendor you use for these services - collect these costs for the last six months or year, then average on a monthly basis.

Helpful benchmarks

The Homecare Association reports that 'other business overheads' (exclusive of IT, rent and utilities and insurance) average 1.8% of the hourly cost of delivering care.

Bonus: automating the decision-making

Automated scheduling

If you've found that your data on travel time is showing that your scheduling efficiency is leaving much to be desired, this is where automation should be your next port of call. After all, travel time isn't the only consideration: continuity of care, as well as carer skills and experience are also factors that need to be woven into making a schedule that puts outcomes first.

For Care Managers and Care Coordinators to get this right is possible, but can take a huge amount of time and effort - this in itself could be a different hit to your efficiency.

To solve the problem, deploy rostering tools that have auto-allocation capabilities, matching carers to the right calls with travel time factored in for maximum efficiency (and hours bought back for your office team).

Ready to learn more? 

If you're ready to make your business the slickest and most efficient it can be, then it's time to start taking data seriously. To get started on your journey to becoming a data-driven team (and reaping the rewards in revenue), download Birdie's new free eBook here.

For more on how Birdie's smart care technology can support your journey to operational excellence, click here.