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From Lead to Client: Six Proven Strategies to Optimize Your Home Care Client Intake Process

Published on January 14, 2025 by Dan Wenger

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The client intake process is arguably the most critical stage in the home care client lifecycle, laying the foundation for all future interactions. Done well, it facilitates the beginning of a productive, engaging, and harmonious partnership and helps new clients and their families transition smoothly into the home care experience.

From a financial perspective, the client intake process is a particularly important area for home care agencies to optimize because it falls outside the scope of the client’s representation, meaning providers aren’t getting paid for the time they spend on it. By streamlining this process and making sure it’s consistent and repeatable, agencies can reduce admin time and cost, provide a better experience for clients, and drive conversion rates.

By focusing on improving your client intake process, your agency will be much better positioned to grow and thrive.

In this article, we share six ways to optimize your client intake process to make your operations more efficient, build lasting relationships with your clients, and set the stage for your home care agency’s success.

1. Acquiring and nurturing leads: implement CRM software

The client intake process begins as soon as you acquire a lead, which is a potential new client inquiring about your services. These leads can come from various channels, including referrals, ad campaigns, and website traffic.

Regardless of the source, your intake process should begin the moment someone reaches out to you, as this is effectively the first stage of the sales cycle. You cannot afford to respond too slowly, forget to follow up, or not offer enough information upfront. Not only will this create a negative impression of your agency, but there are other agencies hot on your heels, ready to take advantage of any oversights like these, which can severely impact your conversion rate.

Implementing a home-care-specific CRM system is a key step toward optimizing your lead management process (and overall client intake process). 

Customer relationship management (CRM) tools are one of the easiest ways to streamline your sales process, allowing you to easily see where leads are coming from, track each lead, record valuable information, set reminders for timely follow-ups, and, ultimately, win more clients. Benefits include:

  • Enhanced personalization
  • Curated experiences
  • Streamlined communication with automation
  • Time- and cost-efficiency
  • Centralized, organized data that’s secure and easy to access
  • Increased conversion rates (at lower cost)

In addition to helping you build strong relationships with potential clients, foster connections at every stage of the sales funnel, and keep your business top of mind, CRM software can also track success analytics to provide valuable data-driven insights you can use to continually improve your intake process.

“Businesses that use CRM, Sales, and Marketing automation solutions as part of their customer acquisition process grow their businesses 3x as fast as those that don’t, achieving first positions in their markets.”

Scott Zielski, Sales Strategy Instructor, University of Wisconsin School of Business

2. Collecting client information: streamlining data management 

caregiver talking to senior woman about personalized approach during her stay in a senior home

Gathering comprehensive client information (and keeping track of it all) to evaluate care needs is a core step in the client intake process. Still, it can cause issues for many agencies, with staff often juggling multiple spreadsheets and paper-based notes.

Manual processes are not only hugely time-consuming and inefficient but can often lead to inaccurate, incomplete, or duplicated data, directly affecting the care planning stage. They also pose a real risk for home care agencies in terms of compliance with HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act).

Investing in data collection and management tools is the best way to optimize this stage of your client intake process, ensuring all information is centrally stored and managed in a well-structured, secure way – and easily accessible to authorized staff.

These tools come in many forms, including document collection platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, and client portals.

Use online intake forms and electronic signatures

In addition to using standardized questionnaires and home care intake forms, consider collecting and recording the client data you need directly into a database. In a structured database, the information is not only more secure but also easily searchable.

You can further reduce the burden on back office staff by using online intake forms, where clients or family members can fill out their information online at their own convenience. This can also eliminate the burden of clients/families repeatedly being asked the same questions by different people.

Incorporating electronic signatures into your intake forms can further streamline the process, eliminating the need for clients to print, sign, and scan multiple documents. 

Integrate with a CRM system

Integrating client intake forms and document collection with a complete home care system can improve workflow efficiency by automating data entry and eliminating the risk of errors or duplication. It also ensures you have all the client information in one centralized area, including verified medical, insurance, and payment details – which can all be easily located by authorized team members as needed.

Invest in a client/family portal

Investing in a home care software with a client/family portal is an excellent way to give clients and their families real-time access to forms, documents, and other information necessary during the intake stages to speed up the process and boost engagement.

It’s also worth its weight in gold once clients have signed up with your agency, providing advanced communication tools, and on-demand mobile notifications to give staff, clients, and families everything they need to stay engaged and connected.

Overall, putting systems in place to streamline data collection and management will increase your agency’s operational efficiency, ensure you capture all relevant client details and documentation, and result in the best possible care for your new clients.

3. Personalized care plan development: invest in home care management software

Following the client assessment stage, agencies should have all the information needed to determine the appropriate level of care required and start developing a personalized care plan. 

Clear, easily accessible documentation during this critical step is essential, as it lays the foundation for delivering tailored, high-quality care. (It also ensures agencies can easily provide supporting evidence to support care coordination and provide reference materials if CMS-OIG requires further details, where relevant.)

Using a home care management platform can significantly elevate your care plan development and ensure effective communication with clients and their families throughout the process. 

Through digitized assessments, streamlined data entry, and dynamic care plans generated in real-time, your agency can rigorously meet care goals and exceed client expectations. These systems also deliver the benefit of being able to easily update and adapt care plans later down the line as clients’ needs evolve.

Additional features such as customizable templates, secure client profiles, integration with digital scheduling tools, and efficient information sharing with clients, families, and caregivers all help increase efficiency, reduce errors, and minimize admin effort during this stage. 

By investing in the right tools, your agency can create flexible, client-centered care plans in close collaboration with clients and their families to drive satisfaction and boost operational efficiency.

4. Scheduling the first home care visit: match the right caregiver(s)

senior caregiver talking and conducting home visit, concept of client-caregiver matching

Correctly scheduling the first home care visit is pivotal in ensuring a smooth transition from care planning to care delivery. At this stage, matching the right caregiver to the client’s specific needs, personality, and preferences is also crucial for establishing a positive and trusting relationship that will stand the test of time. 

Factors such as the caregiver’s skills and qualifications, location, and availability must align with the client’s requirements to foster compatibility and satisfaction. Clear communication with the caregiver, client, and client’s family about expectations, schedules, and care goals is essential to guarantee a successful start.

You can easily optimize this stage by leveraging digital scheduling and caregiver matching tools that use sophisticated algorithms to match clients and caregivers based on multiple criteria, ensuring a seamless fit.

Additionally, automated scheduling tools will help simplify care coordination, reduce errors, and provide real-time updates to all parties involved. 

By utilizing these technologies, your agency can efficiently manage logistics, enhance client-caregiver compatibility, and ensure a positive, personalized experience from the very first visit.

5. Building and maintaining trust: provide access to a client portal to elevate communications

The home care client intake process should go beyond simply gathering data, getting signatures, and setting up schedules. At every touchpoint, you have the opportunity to build rapport, establish trust, and create genuine connections with new clients. 

This requires open and consistent communication throughout the entire intake process, including prompt responses to inquiries, regular updates, and going that extra mile to keep clients and their families informed and engaged.

However, using multiple channels – emails, phone calls, and texts scattered across different devices and systems – can pose a significant risk in home care communication. Not only does it mean that communications can’t be appropriately recorded and tracked, but it can also lead to data security issues and potential HIPAA violations.

Implementing a client portal will enable fast, effective, two-way communication to facilitate easy, timely, and secure exchanges of information during the intake process (and beyond).

Access to a client portal via a mobile app means your clients can securely upload documents and communicate with your agency to streamline document sharing, enhance communication processes, and guarantee everyone’s always on the same page.

6. Creating a culture of continuous improvement: regularly collect feedback and track performance

caregiver talking to family members, home care policy of regularly collecting feedback and track performance for caregivers

Regularly reviewing your client intake process based on client feedback, staff experiences, and KPI tracking is instrumental in providing valuable insights to help drive continuous improvement and process optimization.

Collecting feedback

Use short surveys and feedback forms to ask new clients (and also leads who did not become clients) about their experience with your agency’s intake process. 

If you have access to tech tools like Aaniie Care’s client portal, it’s even easier to send and collect this type of feedback in one centralized location.

Tracking performance

With the right software, like Aaniie Care’s business intelligence tools, you can set clear KPIs to track things like intake times, data accuracy, and client satisfaction – to help identify bottlenecks, gaps, or barriers in your client intake process. 

Being able to visualize and analyze real-time data can offer multiple insights to help drive continuous improvement, ensuring your intake process evolves with new technologies and clients’ needs.

Optimize your client intake process with Aaniie Care (formerly Smartcare Software) 

Clients are the foundation of your home care agency, driving its growth and success. Building strong relationships with them improves your agency’s reputation and ensures long-term stability. And it all starts with a robust, streamlined intake process.

While investing in individual software packages to optimize different stages of your intake process is feasible, more providers than ever are opting for an all-in-one, home-care-specific platform that offers all the features needed to deliver a better experience for their clients and staff.

“Aaniie software has eliminated so many redundancies that we had in our process and our flow. The time it takes for us to collect an intake, put it in as a lead, notify our director to schedule the intake, and get all the paperwork. It’s shortened the turnaround time for starting a new client to 24 hours, whereas when everything was on paper, it could take up to two weeks.”

Katie Ortell, CEO-Owner

With Aaniie Care, you’ll have everything you need to make your client intake process fast, efficient, and effective, fuelling your agency’s growth and long-term success. Tools include:

To learn more about how our customizable suite of tools can help optimize your client intake process and drive your business forward, please call us today or request a free demo.