What if we could transform the complex landscape of home health care to better support frontline nurses? Dr. Monika Virk, a dedicated physician and an innovator in home health care, helps us explore this possibility. With guest host Erin Vallier, Dr. Virk discusses her approach to structuring the onboarding process and the crucial role of technology in enhancing it. She further explains how home health agencies can create a nurturing environment that fosters learning and growth. Tune in as we uncover the potential of home health care and how it can be revolutionized with the right tools and education to empower nurses in the field.
If you liked this episode and want to learn more about all things home-based care, you can explore all our episodes at alayacare.com/homehealth360.
What if we could transform the complex landscape of home health care to better support frontline nurses? Dr. Monika Virk, a dedicated physician and an innovator in home health care, helps us explore this possibility. With guest host Erin Vallier, Dr. Virk discusses her approach to structuring the onboarding process and the crucial role of technology in enhancing it. She further explains how home health agencies can create a nurturing environment that fosters learning and growth. Tune in as we uncover the potential of home health care and how it can be revolutionized with the right tools and education to empower nurses in the field.
If you liked this episode and want to learn more about all things home-based care, you can explore all our episodes at alayacare.com/homehealth360.
Welcome to Home Health 360, a podcast presented by AliyahCare. I'm your host, Jeff Howell, and this is the show about learning from the best in home health care from around the globe.
Erin Vallier:Welcome to another episode of the Home Health 360 podcast, where we speak to home care professionals from around the globe. I'm your guest host, Erin Vallier, US Director of Sales for AlayaCare Software, and today I am joined by Monika Virk, a physician who chose not to pursue medicine and dove headfirst into home health. Monica has 13 years of home care experience and during her tenure, she developed clinical, quality, operational, and educational programs for home care agencies and health systems in Virginia, West Virginia, Washington DC, and a bunch of neighboring states. Monica also has four years of consulting experience with home health agencies, pharmacies, and health systems. She's assisted clients with business development, quality improvement, compliance survey, readiness orientation, emergency management, and a host more subjects here, and most recently she developed a learning management tool called Hop into Home Care.
Erin Vallier:Welcome to the show, monica. Thank you so much, erin, for having me. It's such a pleasure to have you here. You've got such a wealth of experience and I'm hoping that we can draw on that today. But before we dive into the subject at hand, I'm super curious and I bet the audience is too. What led a brilliant, bright physician to completely abandon the practice of medicine in pursuit of career in home health? Because I know we have to go in and educate physicians that home health even exists. How did that happen for you?
Monika Virk:It was completely by accident. I actually dialed a wrong number yes, it was that big of an accident and I was calling a home pharmacy because I had Lyme disease right after medical school and I was taking a year off. And I called the wrong number and I accidentally spoke with the owner of a home care agency and she was intrigued that I am a medical student or a recent graduate and I do not know anything about home care. And I was intrigued what is home care? And in my mind I was thinking my perception was oh okay, maybe the nurses go in to check in on Mrs Jones and hold her hand for a few hours and then that's home care. That's what my perception was.
Monika Virk:But she invited me to her agency. She took me out and our first patient was a chemo patient, where she was actually delivering chemo medication in patients' home. Our next patient was a wound care patient, a wound so complex that she was managing it perfectly in home care. And that just blew my mind. And that's where my journey started and I felt I can do so much more in home than I can do in a hospital setting. Both my brother and my sister they were in residency at that time and it's grueling, and they both gave me the confidence that I should do something different. And, of course, my husband. At that time I was newly married and he supported me and that's how I got in.
Erin Vallier:That's wonderful. What a synchronicity that the universe handed you. You dialed the wrong number and look where it led you. In your career You've had such a wonderful experience, a breadth of experiences in the milk space.
Monika Virk:I was reading the Black Swan by Nicholas Talib and I thought this was a Black Swan event for me. Yes, A right book at right time, I guess.
Erin Vallier:Hey, it all worked out just perfectly. How did you become so passionate about nursing education? Because you ended up going to a company called Hop into Home Care. Tell us a little bit how you went from that phone call to being so passionate about education, and then tell us a little bit about this new tool that you've developed.
Monika Virk:It again relates to my first response to your first question my journey. The reason I came into Home Care was that I saw the possibility of providing higher level of care in home health. Here I saw this single nurse and it's not like she had a huge agency. She had two more nurses. They were getting cases from the hospitals because they were providing this higher level of care in home health. I wanted to take that and blow it across the nation. I wanted to see if we could build huge programs.
Monika Virk:First, at a system level. I was working with a health system in Northern Virginia After I left my initial internship. I was pushed a couple of times because I held a few health systems save money. Another competitor health system saw that. Oh, I helped another health system save the penalties from readmissions in 2012. They'll come work with us. This is how I got to a huge health system.
Monika Virk:I saw that we can build these complex care programs in home settings. One of those programs was Hospital at Home. I built that program. I started in 2013 and I finished it in 2014. It was an excellent program. The health system would have been perfect to implement it, but the home health agency was not ready to take on such a complex care program. When I built a house call program which was implemented, then another program I built, which is a very complex program, was the oncology at home I saw there was a pattern that I'm building these complex programs and they're not getting implemented.
Monika Virk:Then, as I became the director of quality education and program development, I saw the gaps were in education. We do not have a training platform or a way of training nurses that can help manage these programs. If you want to do anything in home health, you need to empower the frontline nurses. You need to empower them with education, with training.
Monika Virk:When we are in the business of home health, we can hardly keep up one foot in front of the other, let alone build a program that can provide complex care in home settings. For that it's a completely different mindset, completely different agency that is required To do that. You almost have to halt your way of doing business in home health. If that makes sense, you have to halt that and you have to think okay, this is what I want to build For this, I have to train this many nurses. Yeah, this program or that program. The long answer, the short summary, is that I wanted to build complex programs. I could not, because education was the gap. If you cannot educate and train your frontline clinicians, you're only going to be building the programs on paper, not in the actual field.
Erin Vallier:I love it that you saw the need and then you ran with it. Tell me a little bit about Hop into Home Care.
Monika Virk:I wanted to build complex clinical programs and I could not because I saw the need that there's no training and they say that evidence-based practice is lagging in health care. And if it's lagging in health care it's really lagging in home health. I worked with a client after I left my health system job. I started my own consulting and I saw it wasn't just me at the health system, with all my resources, with an educator, with all the clinical management support, that was struggling with orientation and education. It was also the small home care agencies or the national level home care agencies that were struggling with orientation and education. Again, that passion came through, that I thought that I will be consulting with clients and building big programs and here I was trying to help them. I saw the pattern again in my consulting and I was like, okay, there has to be something we can do. So the first step I took was let's standardize just the education. So I took one of those online programs like WordPress. It was called Kajabi and I built a standardized way of providing orientation to a client agency with seven branches across East Coast and we onboarded 59 clinicians through this program where I was their educator. They watched the content online and then, if they did not pass their assessment, they did a one-on-one mentoring call with me and then I helped them through these assessments that I built myself. I built the content, I built these assessments and what happened was at the end of the almost eight to nine month period of onboarding these clinicians, we looked at their data, we looked at the clinicians that were trained under me and the clinicians that were part of the agency during this time, and we saw that the clinicians that were trained under me, they performed a percentage point better on their OASIS assessment and when I looked at their risk assessment, they performed a really good risk assessment as well. Just standardizing the education gave me this insight that, okay, there is data behind this. If I take this, maybe something can be done here, maybe if we standardize the orientation education and if I will tell you there is no program right now, when I was doing this in 2019, I could not find any program that could help an agency standardize their orientation and onboarding education. There are a lot of HR programs, but none that focuses on the clinicians. There are a lot of programs for CNAs, but none that focus on the nurses and the therapists for skilled home care agencies. So this is where I saw the need and again, the passion was that one day I'll be able to use these nurses to build an amazing complex care program at home.
Monika Virk:Still, that was going on and then COVID hit and I lost all my clients. My goal was to take it further. My goal was to do more research with additional clients, but I couldn't do it. I thought during COVID I was gonna end up becoming a housewife, and that fear of becoming a housewife led me to think okay, what else can I do with this data that I've just gathered? That's what. Basically, I went down that path of improving the education.
Monika Virk:Then I was like okay, education is good, we need another layer to this. We need to be able to provide this in the field. We are missing field visits, we are missing competencies. Modules are great, but we need that field content as well. And that's where this whole comprehensive learning management system and the app came into play. Where it just does not provide modules, you're able to track your clinician's field visits, what they're learning in these field visits. You can dictate what they must learn in these visits. You can dictate which competencies must be signed off before the clinician is field ready. All of that, and which in-house sessions must be completed before a clinician is field ready. All of that is captured right in the app through the learning management system.
Erin Vallier:It sounds like a really comprehensive tool for home health agencies and I think you and I talked a little bit about it actually is pretty good at getting brand new grads into the field. As you and I discussed in preparation for this episode that historically home health agencies sort of shied away from hiring brand new grads for a number of reasons. I mean, home health is kind of like the wild west there's no direct supervision in the field and a new grad if they're not really careful, they got zero experience and they'll get themselves into a lot of trouble. But then, like you said, covid hit. Everything changed and we definitely saw a shift in that trend and more and more home health agencies are willing to hire brand new nurses. But that doesn't relegate the need for them to have the skills and the support to be successful in the client's home. So my question for you, I guess, is how can home health agencies create this effective training program that's tailored to the needs of those new nurses?
Monika Virk:Yes, so I built the app. I'm not trying to plug my app here, but one of the reason I built the app was because we needed a platform that could accommodate three levels of clinicians. The first level is someone who has home care experience and just changing jobs and coming into a new agency. Second level is someone who has no home care experience but has been a nurse for a number of years. And then the third level is someone who's brand new nurse, who has never done home care or has never even been in a hospital settings. So these are the three levels that the app accommodates, and the reason I wanted to build this level was the new grad level is because I have always believed that there's role for new grads in home care, and now there are more and more studies that are being done that shows that there is a role for new grads in home health. I think we have usually held ourselves to that standard. That we are not going to hire a new grad is because we did not have the support for that new grad and which I believe it was rightly so when we did not have the technology to support the decision. Now we have technology, while now we can open up home care to new grads and I think there's a strategy that home care agencies should use that I should talk about today. There's a schematic I built that was published in the leading practice library of joint commission and if you have joint commission access you can find it there. But I think we should find somehow to tag that schematic somewhere maybe on LinkedIn or somewhere and you can see that in this schematic there are four phases that an agency should take their new grad through.
Monika Virk:The phase one is where your new grad is not going to see the laptop or the tablet at all. All they're going to be doing is observing and maybe assisting, because you cannot learn to drive unless you're behind the wheel sometime. So here this clinician is observing the microculture of the agency. They're observing the microculture of home environment, microculture of their day to day. All of that they're observing, but they're under intense supervision. They're also going through theoretical basic theory and what I recommend is, for first three to four weeks, do not show your new grad the laptop or iPad. Have them observe, give them assignment for these observations, have them observe their preceptors, follow a patient from start to finish and then for the first week, I'll give an example of first week because it's very intense. I will not go into every single week. I think it should be 12 to 16 weeks. So I will give an example of week one, where you make the new hire observe and then you bring them back at the end of each week and you do a one-on-one.
Monika Virk:During this one-on-one, the preceptor or the educator should be connecting the dots for this new hire or the new grad. They should do this for new hire too, for the new grad, they you know where you are bringing them together in a group setting or on a one-on-one, where the preceptor or the educator is drawing from their own experience and teaching the clinicians that, okay, you were out in the field, you were with your preceptor. What did you see? Did you observe any house with clutter? Did you observe any house, any patient with infection? Your patient with infection was the patient discharged from the hospital or from the SNF? Oh, I don't know. Let's find out. So, going through all of these scenarios and just helping the clinician connect the dot, that why is it important that we must know where the patient is coming from when it comes to infections? Why is it important when we must find out where the patient is coming from? When it comes to the risk for readmission, how many weeks was it before your patient was readmitted? All of these questions should be answered for this new grad as they are going through their first few weeks.
Monika Virk:But that's where the preceptor comes in.
Monika Virk:They're not necessarily or educator, they're not necessarily there to stand in front of the room and lecture the new hire.
Monika Virk:They're there to connect the dots for these new clinicians. So again, for first three to four weeks they should not see any laptop or any documentation. They should be observing the microculture. Phase two they should be assisting. So phase one, they're observing the microculture. Phase two, they're assisting. Phase three they are under observation, but they are independent quote unquote independent because their documentation is being observed. Someone is reviewing their documentation, someone is reviewing their day-to-day activities. So they are independent but still under observation. And then phase four is when they're independent, but they're still under that period where the continued education, where they're tagged into this continued education. So there are four phases that a new grad should go through and again, like I said, this is not a task for an agency without resources. This is a task that we need technology and that's the reason I built the app, that technology is needed to make all of this easy, that if you do not have the resources, you have technology to help you.
Erin Vallier:That's awesome and I like the way you've structured it. It's very simple and it's important for agencies who are considering these new grads to take this into consideration, because it is an undertaking you want them to observe, then to assist, then to be observed and then to continue to grow for a period of time. Grow forever. I like the way it's organized. Yeah, grow forever.
Monika Virk:In phase four. Basically, by this time I'm saying the clinicians have understood that. Do they want any subspeciality, or do they want to understand more about wound care, or they want to understand more about infusion, then maybe the agency needs to start providing them with those resources so that they can grow their own pool of trained clinicians. And in order to do that, we need to understand what the clinicians' needs are.
Erin Vallier:Yeah, absolutely. Now that covers the onboarding. What are some best practices for providing support and training to home health nurses after that initial onboarding, so on through phase four. What happens now?
Monika Virk:It's a very good phase to be in which a lot of home care agencies do not pay attention to when, once we onboard the nurse or the clinician and they have passed their 90 days, we do like a little party in the head and we're like, hey, they made it. And then we drop them completely. So the app accommodates this Again. I'm so sorry, it's just. I made the app for myself because I struggled with this. I'm my own customer because my pet pee was that every month we would bring in at least 200 clinicians out of the field. It was an operational nightmare to train the clinician, to continually provide them with education. So, if you can imagine, we're taking out 200 clinicians once a month over two days to accommodate everybody's schedule. We are halting patient care and we're bringing these clinicians in and giving them two hours of education. The clinicians are distracted because they're waiting for a physician call, they're waiting for labs, they're waiting for oh, I need to go upstairs and get these forms or I need to pick up these supplies, while somebody in front of the room is standing there and giving them a lecture for two hours. That's completely disjointed from the environment of care the home health is. So, on the app. I created this platform for clinicians who have graduated orientation. They are automatically enrolled into clinical huddles and at that time they also become the preceptors as well. So they're not just getting the education, they're also becoming the preceptors and they get the education continued education as well, through these clinical huddles.
Monika Virk:If you can think of clinical huddles, it's a drip-drip methodology. So let's suppose we have to cover OASIS-E. It's a good example because we recently went through this huge OASIS change and it's called OASIS-E and it was one of the biggest changes to OASIS assessment in a very long time. So what majority of home care agencies did is they probably did OASIS-E marathons, where they brought the clinicians in September or October and they probably trained them all on OASIS-E for two hours or maybe four hours and then completely forgot about OASIS-E until January 1st. So three months later, here comes January 1st. You're now supposed to retain, to recall all that information you covered. Yeah, it's not going to work.
Monika Virk:So what clinical huddles do is they do this drip-drip methodology. So we took OASIS-E and we divided it and we looked at the content and we said we need at least eight clinical huddles and over eight weeks. So what we did was first, clinical huddle introduced. Oasis-e second clinical huddle talked about what we introduced a week later that was released, what we talked about in week one, and then we covered week two content. And all of this is just 10-minute drips. So over eight weeks they are released in, like these episodes.
Monika Virk:If an agency wants to release these drips every day for eight days, they can do it. If they want to release them over once a month, they can do it. If they want to release them twice a week, they can do that. How are they want to do it? They can release these drips. We did them once a week for eight weeks and the clinicians just loved it. My clients love it, the clinicians, the frontline clinicians I have two pages of accolades, or how much they love the clinical huddles. It's because they are not having to come into the office and learn this content. They can watch a video for 10 minutes or read a case study for five minutes and answer two to three questions and they are done. And they are also accruing CEUs. While they do this, they're sipping their morning coffee and getting their education and then they're out in the field and applying this education.
Erin Vallier:It sounds like it's in really by size, mandible chunks because we have all lost our attention spend. I don't know if anybody else has this problem that when you ask me to sit down and listen for four hours, I just check out. After about one I got to move my body. I can maybe make it for an hour, but then I just got to break up. I got to do something different for a second so I can focus.
Erin Vallier:I like the structure that you have going here and this is important for folks who are interested in the app and who are just interested in developing their own. So you've got this program where your past phase four and, in order to solidify the learning we make you become the teacher because that's the best way to learn anything is. You got to teach it. So you've got that going on. And then their continued education is in these bite-sized chunks and it's expensive to call everybody in. I used to do that piece for a home health agency. It's like herding cats to get 200 clinicians in at the same time. You end up having to do four or five different sessions and that ties up your office staff. That ties up your field staff. They're not doing visits, so it's very costly to the agency when you look at it that way, and it's a really good argument for having a technology platform to help you disseminate this information, whether that be yours, which turns out is amazing or if they're going to try to develop this on their own, if they have the resources.
Monika Virk:Exactly. And let's not forget the data aspect through the orientation right now. If I was to ask any given executive who has multiple branches, even within the branch, if I was to ask an executive, how many clinicians do you have right now, that will be field ready next week. I do not think an executive will know the answer of that, but I think those exactly. But we do not because we do not know what field readiness means for our agency, because we have not created an official orientation and onboarding program where we track how many weeks it should take a new hire, which content they must cover in order to be considered field ready, what are those benchmarks they must accomplish in order to be field. So this app actually tracks all of that for the agencies.
Monika Virk:My biggest pet pee was that I did not have data and I'm a data girl. I need to know what is happening. I say we cannot just go on feelings that maybe in three weeks this clinician will be field ready. That leads to a lot of chaos. Either the clinicians get disjointed, they lose interest in the orientation because the orientation is too long, or they can hide in orientation because they do not have the confidence to be out in the field by themselves. This way you can track every single training, their progress, where they are and everybody in the management knows where the clinician is, not just the orientation educator or the preceptor, or the clinical manager, the director, say executives. Everyone will know when the clinician is field ready and what type of visits they can start taking given week, one, two, three, four, whenever they'll be ready.
Erin Vallier:Yeah, you brought up some really important points about technology. It gives you visualization or it highlights who's ready. It gives you the data to track their progress. It recommends what additional education they should need, based on their performance so far. That's a lot of stuff that's hard to do manually, and I think technology is the appropriate helper in this situation. What else can a digital tool do to assist a home health agency in the ongoing training of nurses? But beyond what we've already discussed, so ongoing.
Monika Virk:I think the digital tools they are very important. I will put it very bluntly Technology is not going to replace a person. You need someone dedicated to your agency's growth. When it comes to education, Technology can assist. And when you have someone who is an educator and they have the resource of a technology to assist them, they can do their job better. So technology, for example, if you have an educator that is dedicated to your branch and you're, let's suppose, managing 1500 Medicare patients per year and you have one educator because that's all you can afford at 1500 senses, that educator is going to be focused on orientation and onboarding, because that is a very complex process, so that one educator will be focused just on orientation. You can expand that educator's role to include ongoing education and help build ongoing education if you use technology.
Monika Virk:I recently spoke with the educator of a huge home care agency and she's the only educator they have. They manage upwards of, I think, 25,000 patients or something like that, like huge, and I was shocked that they only have one educator and she is responsible. She has two field educators as well, but this agency has hospice, skill nursing, private duty and you name it. They have all of these programs and this one executive is responsible and she is managing five to six different calendars for one orientation period. Her whole job is to manage calendars for an executive a job that can easily be done by technology and this educator felt bad because she felt like she was neglecting her current clinicians. She was not able to provide continued education or build a preceptor program or to do all those things she has on our wish list, because all of our time is tangled in these managing these orientation calendars.
Monika Virk:And she's not the only one. I remember having an educator who was helping me manage the orientation. I know that that's a real struggle. I know she cannot do anything else except orientation. It's because I know that is a struggle to manage so many calendars. So there's a calendar functionality as well.
Erin Vallier:Oh, I love it. There's a calendar. You've thought of everything. I thought of everything because you've lived it, and that's like where the best tools come from is you've lived it.
Erin Vallier:You know the problem inside and out. Now you can solve it. Yes, that's amazing. We've talked a lot about the process and we've talked a lot about the technology and how that can help, but I think in order for a program to be most successful, there has to be this culture built around embracing learning and ongoing education. How can a home health agency create that culture of learning and growth?
Monika Virk:That's a very good question and it's going to be a very hard answer. It's going to be hard because it's not easy. The hard part is education needs to be part of growth. Okay, you cannot say we are going to grow externally, we are going to expand our area, our jurisdiction, we are going to expand it and we're going to hire this many nurses.
Monika Virk:There needs to be a balance between static and dynamic growth. Static growth is where you build the agency internally, where you strengthen the clinicians, the teams, the leadership. That needs to be part of the growth. And during static growth you cannot have dynamic growth. So that will mean that you may not be able to expand into a geographical area you want to, or take on a new referral client because you're going through static growth. The leadership needs to find a way to provide static growth In balance with the dynamic growth. If you stay static you're not gonna grow. But there needs to be a balance between static and dynamic and if you have just dynamic growth, you are also not going to grow. You're gonna break down your root to fragile. So I will say the hard truth is that sometimes you will need to sacrifice your external growth for your internal growth. And if you can't find the courage to do that, you will avoid this fragility. Yeah, I will say we'll just avoid the fragility.
Erin Vallier:Yeah, that makes sense. You have to have this really firm foundation. I think it's applicable across all sorts of topics. You have to have the foundation there before you can grow and expand, otherwise that house is gonna come tumbling down.
Monika Virk:It will come tumbling down and I have seen that happen. It happened to us with the health system. The house did come tumbling down. We had to sell our agency into a JV because we were under such pressure to grow that the house came crashing down. Our agency was sold. Our V&A 78 year old V&A was just sold into a JV. And that still breaks my heart and I think that's another reason I built the app is because I do not want to see that again. I don't know one good agencies with good hearts going down Because they did not have technology or tools to assist them with the growth and with capacity management. I use the word capacity management in 2013 or 14. I forget, but at that time this word was unheard of in home care. And then in 2017 to late 2017, early 2018, our agency was sold into a joint venture because we could not keep up with the capacity management and it was that quick.
Erin Vallier:Wow, yeah, I'm so glad that you have created something to help agencies and if anybody's listening and they're feeling like this is familiar to them, we should probably connect with you after this podcast. What are some key metrics that home health agencies should track To measure the effectiveness of these beautiful programs that you are suggesting we implement?
Monika Virk:The first one is how long is your orientation period? If I was to sit anybody down right now, they will give me our orientation is three weeks long. But then when we'll start looking at each individual Commissions will find out someone was in orientation for only two days or three days and then they were released in the field. Or someone was in orientation for six weeks and they're still not field ready. It's like if whatever you measure, it improves. So first of all you need to know what you're measuring. I think one of the basic for orientation the agencies should measure is how long is your orientation period? How much are you spending on your orientation and on? I know we talk a lot about on-boarding how much we're spending. But once the clinician has hit the door, how much are you spending from the time that they sign their first day they are on board it, they get their HR letters and then they're signed the HR letters to the time they see their first patient independently, without any supervision. What is that time period and how much does that cost the agency? And then how many resources? A lot of times the agencies will say, oh, we have an educator, she manages orientation. Then you go to the educator and then you ask so who helps you with this or that? This clinical manager Does this session, that clinical manager does that session. So it's just not the clinical educator that is involved in 2012 or 2013.
Monika Virk:I did this lean study where we Did value stream mapping off of our orientation, and we were blown away. We were like, oh my goodness, we thought we had just the education department, which was myself and an educator, you know, managing the bulk of orientation, and it turned out every single person in the back office orientation, every single person and significant time, and it was significant time that was spent by them every month. Our orientation period was twice a month and they spent significant time helping us on board clinicians. Our orientation at that time was 12 weeks long and we had so many redundancies, we had so many Processes that were wasteful that we took out during that value stream mapping and we streamlined our orientation. We took six weeks off of our orientation and this was all done by hand. We did not have any tools, we were not measuring any data Just by hand, and can you imagine if we had technology, we could have done such an amazing job. That's why I built this app.
Erin Vallier:I Completely stream on it and there's a direct correlation between the time that somebody's hired To the time that they actually get to have their visit. The longer that is, and more complicated that is, the more likely they're Out to churn. And so if you're going through this very manually right now and you're evolving what your staff their costs to replace an employee who's churned because they're not happy about your onboard, yes, is probably a lot more than you think. Oh, yes, wow, that is very eye-opening. Well, I know we have kind of approached our time here, the conversation. It's just been wonderful. I could talk to you all day and I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge. I feel like you've provided some actionable steps for agencies to consider looking to evaluate their, your training and onboarding programs, and I know that you have a special offer for the listeners today, should they be interested to learn more about your services, more about your app. What is that offer and how can our listeners get in touch with you to take advantage of it?
Monika Virk:Reach out to me and I will give you one month free trial. You can onboard your clinicians for one month for completely free, using the app and I'll give you all the personas on the app. That includes the trainee, the educator, the preceptors, the clinical managers. I'll give you all of them. If you do twice a month orientation, you can put two of your classes through orientation on the hop app and completely free, so you can test the. You can test the app out. You can take it out for a ride.
Erin Vallier:That's huge. How many reach you?
Monika Virk:they can contact me on my email monika. virk@hopintohc. com, and wonderful we can also put that in the show notes to awesome.
Erin Vallier:So people have a better visualization of how I get in touch with you Wonderful. So I just want to thank you so much again for having this conversation with me. It's been a real pleasure.
Monika Virk:It's actually an honor to be on your podcast, Erin. When I got in touch with you I did not know you were the Aaron from that podcast. I spoke into so many people and you are the most listened to podcast and the best podcast in home health, so congratulations on that.
Erin Vallier:Thank you so much.
Monika Virk:It is such a pleasure being here.
Jeff Howell:Thank you, thanks, home health 360 is presented by a lie care. First off, we want to thank our amazing guests and listeners. To get more episodes, you can go to alayacare. com/homehealth360 that's spelled home health 360, or search home health 360 on any of your favorite podcasting platforms. The easiest way to stay up to date on our new shows is to subscribe to Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. We also have a newsletter you can sign up for on alayacare. com/homehealth360 to get alerts for new shows and more valuable AlayaCare in your inbox. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.