Blog > Home healthcare > Sleep apnoea: how can we optimise monitoring of the growing number of patients?

The regular monitoring of patients, particularly those suffering from sleep apnoea, is essential to guarantee high-quality care. But organising these visits can be a real headache! Fortunately, solutions like AntsRoute route optimisation software can help. They simplify route planning, offering providers and patients more efficient monitoring and better quality care.

Table of contents

• What is sleep apnoea?
• Overcoming the challenges of patient monitoring: impact on quality of care
  • The limits of the regulation system
  • Meet the required frequency of visits
• Optimise your home visits with route planning software
  • Make it easier to schedule appointments for greater productivity
  • Track technicians in the field in real time
  • Train your teams to use our software for efficient management
  • Transform your maintenance management
  • Benefit from concrete results

The sleep apnoea requires rigorous and regular monitoring of patients at home. Optimising this monitoring improves the quality of care. Dedicated tools enable healthcare providers to simplify this task.

What is sleep apnoea?

Sleep is essential to our well-being, but disorders such as sleep apnoea can ruin our nights. Apnoea occurs when breathing is interrupted or slowed down for at least 10 seconds, causing frequent awakenings and a reduction in oxygen in the blood, according to the National Health Service.

For those affected by this disorder, regular monitoring is essential to maintain their health and quality of life. This often involves the use of devices such as continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP). This device keeps the airways open by supplying pressurised air during the night, usually via a mask connected to a machine. In this way, patients can return to restful sleep.

This is where service providers come in. They are responsible for installing, maintaining and delivering these devices to patients’ homes. And with more and more people affected by sleep apnoea, their role is becoming increasingly vital.

Overcoming the challenges of patient monitoring: impact on quality of care

The sector faces a number of major challenges:

1. An increase in the number of patients: The growing demand for medical services for sleep disorders is putting additional pressure on care providers. Managing appointments and operations is becoming increasingly complex.
2. Difficulties in recruiting sleep technicians: Finding qualified technicians is becoming increasingly difficult, leading to delays in visits and reduced availability. This shortage of qualified staff compromises the quality and effectiveness of care.
3. Management of trips: Excessive journeys affect route efficiency and increase operational costs.

These challenges call into question the relationship of trust between patients, doctors and technicians. In short, they can lead to lower patient satisfaction, higher costs for care providers, reduced availability and a need to become more specialised to cope with increasing demand. As a result, the overall quality of care can suffer, putting patients’ health and well-being at risk.

The three challenges of monitoring patients at home.

The limits of the regulation system

To meet these challenges, many companies adopt a regulation system. This system, managed by regulators or planners, aims to make operations more efficient and better monitored. For example, by using maps to organise daily visits or operations and by meticulously planning each appointment with patients.

But this process can be tedious and sometimes inefficient. Laurent Hamza, Team Manager at Help Air à Domicile, confirms this: “Although the technicians have a good understanding of their service area, they sometimes scheduled appointments that were too far apart geographically, which had a significant impact on operational costs and travel time. The organisation of the business was therefore not optimal”.

To respond effectively to patients’ needs, it is essential that teams continually look for solutions to improve the planning of appointments and deliveries of respiratory equipment. In addition, in-depth expertise and precise knowledge of the area are essential to ensure effective patient follow-up, while managing maintenance and installation with responsiveness.

Improving the planning of appointments and deliveries of respiratory equipment helps to meet patients’ needs.

Meet the required frequency of visits

To ensure that sleep apnoea patients receive the care they need, companies must meet strict requirements. This means complying with defined visit frequencies to install and monitor home respiratory devices.

Typically, an initial appointment is arranged with each patient to install the necessary respiratory equipment at home. This is followed by scheduled monitoring visits at specific intervals: after 7 days, then at 3 months. Thereafter, regular checks on the equipment are scheduled every year by the technicians.

To ensure that these visit frequencies are respected and to avoid any delays that could compromise treatment, many companies are turning to innovative solutions. Route planning and optimisation software such as AntsRoute are particularly effective.

The optimisation of home visit routes on AntsRoute.

Optimise your home visits with route planning software

Do you manage a company specialising in medical services? If so, choose AntsRoute for seamless management of appointments and deliveries to your patients. Our solution, already approved by more than forty companies treating sleep apnoea, will simplify your life in just a few clicks.

The planning of two technicians generated on AntsRoute.

Make it easier to schedule appointments for greater productivity

Be more productive! Our software simplifies appointment scheduling, avoiding unnecessary travel between visits. Thanks to a workable and balanced route planning, the expectations of patients and healthcare professionals are taken into account.

According to Laurent Hamza, using our software saves your team time and improves productivity by 15 to 30%. But the benefits don’t stop there! By reducing fuel consumption, AntsRoute also helps to protect the environment, enabling you to take another step towards more sustainable management.

Track technicians in the field in real time

Live track your technicians in the field with route optimisation software! This solution makes daily itineraries available at a glance on their smartphone. No more juggling paperwork or incessant calls to check upcoming visits. Everything is at your fingertips, making every trip easier.

The software goes even further by managing critical details, such as the departure and arrival locations of technicians, and the availability of patients. By centralising all this information, they offer a complete solution for efficient management of field operations, ensuring optimum customer satisfaction and increased productivity.

Live tracking of technicians in the field with AntsRoute.

Train your teams to use our software for efficient management

If you adopt our solution, we train your teams to ensure successful integration and deployment in your departments.

Here’s how the process works:

1. Presentation of the tool: We give you a detailed explanation of how our solution works, in just one hour.
2. Filling in a form: We help you set up the connector by filling in a form, which takes about an hour.
3. Checking ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) settings: We ensure that all the settings in your management software are correctly configured for seamless integration with AntsRoute.
4. Training and deployment: We organise two 2-hour training sessions for you and your team to familiarise you with the tool and deploy the solution effectively.

Transform your maintenance management

Our integrated approach simplifies maintenance management:

• Smart Data: Thanks to our API and Webhooks, we smartly retrieve and integrate data from your business software into our AntsRoute calendar, taking into account geographical areas and priorities.
• Effective Communication: We make it easy to communicate with patients by sending them scheduled appointment dates, giving them the option of confirming or rescheduling them. This reduces unnecessary technician travel and improves patient satisfaction.
• Smooth Planning: Appointments are then integrated into your management software, taking into account technician availability and patient time preferences.

The monthly planning is just a few clicks away and your patients are contacted by SMS in less than 15 minutes.

Link enabling patients to confirm or reschedule an appointment.

Benefit from concrete results

By adopting route optimisation and planning software, you will see significant results:

• A significant increase in the number of operations per route.
• An increase in turnover.
• Fewer calls from patients thanks to our SMS notifications.

These facts speak for themselves!

Here’s what you can really expect:

• Technicians can focus fully on their technical tasks, lightening their workload and opening up new growth opportunities for the company.
• Less stress for technicians, guaranteeing better traceability of their work and improved quality of service.
• No delays in regulatory visits, ensuring optimum patient care.
• The number of visits per day increases from 5 to 8, without compromising service quality.
• Thanks to text messaging, patient calls are down by 40%, improving communication efficiency.

On average, using AntsRoute means that two to three extra field operations can be carried out per route. For a team of 7 technicians, this translates into an additional €15,000 in turnover per month. Benefits that deserve to be taken into account!

Don’t wait any longer, start a free 7-day trial by clicking here!