Home Visitation Challenges in Rural Vs. Urban Settings

From urban population centers to the rural countryside, our aging population lives everywhere. As providers, it’s your duty to meet them where they are. Home visitation is a vital practice for delivering service across industries like healthcare, maintenance, and social and community-based services. However, despite the important role they play in many industries, professionals trying to conduct home visits face varying challenges based on their geographical setting. Whether urban or rural, different locations bring different difficulties to the realm of home visitation, but businesses can still navigate and optimize their operations for any environment.

Diverse Challenges Conducting Rural Home Visits

In more rural areas, the landscape of home visitation is characterized by extreme travel distances between clients, which can lead to increased travel time for mobile professionals, not to mention the increasing costs for fuel expenditure. Along with the increased distances between bases of operation in rural areas, more rural communities often have limited infrastructure, which can impact the reliability of visitation schedules. Common infrastructure issues include unpaved or difficult-to-traverse roads. Any existing accessibility issues can also be further exacerbated at certain times of year by the addition of seasonal weather conditions. 

Some rural settings also have limited access to technology or internet connection, which can disrupt communication and service documentation. Connectivity issues with internet and cellular services are frequent obstacles for providers in rural areas. Reliance on technological tools for navigation and reporting necessitates alternative solutions to these tools when service is unavailable. 

The Landscape of Urban Home Visitation

On the other side of the coin are complications posed by urban, densely-populated locations for home visitation in industries such as home health care. More than anything else, attempting to make home visits in urban areas is marked by dense traffic conditions, which unpredictably extend how long it takes to get from one place to another. Due to sheer volume of traffic congestion, even the simplest short-distance treks can become extremely time-consuming. While there’s certainly no shortage of vehicles in urban areas, there can often seem like an extreme shortage in places to park, and what parking there is available can get pricey, adding complexity to service delivery.

Urban lifestyles tend to be more fast-paced. This means that working in fields that require home visitation in urban areas demands extra flexibility in scheduling, as clients may have less predictable windows of availability. Service providers who have to constantly navigate the rapid pace of city life often need to rely on tools like adaptive scheduling and contingency planning. 

Strategies for Effective Home Visits Across Settings

Using context-specific solutions to approach home visitation will help service professionals mitigate a wide variety of geographical challenges, whether they have to navigate teeming cities or spread-out homesteads outside tiny towns. For mobile workers operating in more rural areas, strategies for optimizing travel might include scheduling fewer, longer visits per day to account for how long it will take to get from place to place throughout the workday. On the other side of that coin, urban service providers might benefit from a schedule with flexible hours, to avoid parking difficulties and to get around having to drive distances during peak times of heavy traffic. 

When traditional means fall short, technological innovations and alternative methods can help mobile workers maintain service continuity. For example, advanced scheduling software could be used by urban and rural workers alike when planning home visits. Alternative communication methods, like satellite phones or required scheduled check-ins, can help workers in rural areas circumvent connectivity issues in rural areas. For digital solutions, software that has offline modes of use could also help mobile service providers record vital data without having to rely on a possibly-unreliable network connection. 

Technological solutions for helping mobile workers plan and track mileage for home visitation can help those workers prioritize how they spend their time. For employees who travel a lot for their jobs, especially those who have to face unique environmental challenges, time is invaluable! Consider adopting solutions in the form of easy-to-use technology like mobile apps for route planning and tracking, automated processes, and centralized data storage. Streamlining this aspect of the trip can help workers manage the stress of navigating travel, helping them focus on the quality of the actual home visit, and best meeting the client’s needs.

No Matter Where You Are, CompanyMileage is There For You 

Ultimately, effective home visitation in any profession requires a nuanced understanding of the different, uniquely frustrating challenges often presented by urban and rural environments. From there, it’s vital to develop strategies tailored to each setting in order to maintain high service quality and client trust. 

CompanyMileage’s suite of intuitive, customizable software for mileage reimbursement and mileage tracking takes care of the finer points of tracking work-related travel so your mobile employees can focus on doing their jobs to the best of their abilities. 

Our suite of mileage reimbursement software makes tracking mileage simple, playing a pivotal role in optimizing the logistics and efficiency of a home visit, no matter the setting. Using our SureMobile app, employees can submit GPS location data for starting and ending locations on their smartphones. From there, SureMileage’s unique point-to-point calculation method automatically calculates trip mileage by finding the most expeditious routes based on trip start and end points. 

For our rural users, there’s an offline mode, so important data won’t go missing if service in your area is unreliable. And with our Quick Capture and Check-In features, workers can quickly and electronically record visit info, including info required to meet electronic visit verification (EVV) requirements for home health care workers. 

For businesses looking to streamline mileage tracking and reimbursement for busy mobile service workers, CompanyMileage is ready to meet you where you are. Contact us for a free demo today!