A Worry-Free Summer: Home Healthcare Providers Support Patient Well-Being

13/08/2026
11:41

reading time : 2 min

Lucie Monnot

Content Marketing Manager

Summer presents an important challenge for home healthcare providers. Discover the strategies and tools that help them ensure continuity of care, the availability of medical devices and the safety of the patients they support, even when some of their own staff are on vacation and recurring heatwaves require additional vigilance.

Home healthcare providers at the forefront of changing patient behavior

All home healthcare providers are observing the same trend: patients who require daily care or whose health depends on one or more medical devices are now much less reluctant to go on vacation.

However, they want to travel safely, with the assurance that they will find all the medical and technical support they may need at their temporary destination.

This type of summer mobility does not generally concern dependent older people or patients with the most serious conditions. It does, however, affect their relatives and the wider community of family caregivers. Taking a few days off is essential for these caregivers, but they can only do so with peace of mind if they are certain that the person they support will receive all the necessary attention during their absence.

These changes in behavior demonstrate not only the crucial role that home healthcare providers now play in the healthcare system and in the lives of people with chronic conditions, but also the trust these companies have built with patients and families by organizing their services to support and assist both those who travel and those who stay at home.

The strategies implemented by providers to maintain their services throughout the summer are based on three pillars: anticipation, communication and optimization.

Anticipating needs to improve intervention planning

More than in previous years, home healthcare providers have taken the initiative to identify patients planning to go on vacation and determine their absence dates.

Targeted email campaigns, typically organized by condition or type of medical device used, have enabled providers to give patients specific information and advice for the summer and, most importantly, collect their absence plans through a form.

Teams working with patients for care or technical reasons have also contributed to gathering this essential information, making it possible to estimate the teams’ workload as early as possible during the summer period.

Based on this information, companies have been able to:

Remove planned interventions from schedules for patients who intend to be away, including device monitoring or adjustment visits and deliveries of consumables.
Precisely identify and locate the most vulnerable patients, including those who are staying at home but require additional attention and support when relatives are away or during a heatwave.
Organize staff vacations and, where necessary, launch the required recruitment processes to meet expected activity levels and complete 100% of the interventions required by patients who are staying at home, as well as by patients temporarily staying in tourist areas.
Update and validate patient data, including contact details, referring physician and other professionals involved, emergency contacts for patients living alone, and the access codes and conditions for entering the patient’s home. This information facilitates interventions carried out by replacement staff.

Of course, many factors can disrupt the vacation plans of people with chronic conditions, and all planned absences should be confirmed a few days before the announced departure date.

However, this proactive approach is easy to implement and gives home healthcare providers greater visibility. It also gives their employees better visibility and strengthens relationships with the patients and families who trust them.

Communicating directly with patients who are going away

Some home healthcare provider networks have stood out this summer by communicating regularly with patients who are planning to travel.

In addition to practical advice and recommendations, patients using certain devices, such as sleep apnea equipment, insulin pumps and urinary catheters, received personalized information based on their condition and vacation destination by email or SMS before leaving.

This information included:

The address and contact details of the nearest network agency to contact in the event of a failure or malfunction involving their medical device, or to arrange delivery of replacement consumables or equipment to their temporary address.
A list of hospitals, doctors and nurses able to support them during their stay.
Reminders about their treatments and patient-specific settings.
Measures to take in hot weather to protect their health and ensure that their medical device or devices continue to operate correctly.

This information reassures patients and gives them greater confidence in their plans. Messages sent during their stay also remind them that their healthcare provider is available in all circumstances.

This type of service is naturally easier to implement for home healthcare providers with a presence across the country, and even more so for networks that share the same customer and patient information systems, or CRM platforms.

Centralizing information in a single system also allows any agency or field professional to access all available information about each patient, including their stay dates and exact vacation address if a technician visit or home delivery becomes necessary.

Home healthcare providers with a limited geographical presence are not necessarily at a disadvantage. Independent providers that make the effort to gather information that can help patients at their destination, even if this means referring them to a local competitor, demonstrate a level of commitment that patients appreciate and that contributes significantly to customer loyalty.

Reassuring relatives who are away

Organizations have also taken steps to allow the families of patients and older people who cannot leave their homes to go on vacation with peace of mind.

Many home assistance and care organizations have incorporated sending a message to reassure the patient’s family into their intervention procedures after every visit.

This practice is becoming increasingly common because it meets a strong expectation among families.

To make this additional task easier for field professionals and prevent it from being forgotten, it is included in the end-of-intervention procedure within their mobile business application.

It takes the form of a short questionnaire, with answers converted into a personalized message using data from the intervention management system.

In some applications, field professionals can also dictate their message. It is then automatically converted into text and sent by SMS, instant messaging or email, depending on the family’s preferences.

Naturally, if the patient experiences a problem, a different procedure applies. A manager should then contact relatives, preferably by telephone, to explain the situation, its severity and the measures taken.

Once informed, the family can make appropriate decisions based on a clear understanding of the situation.

Optimizing schedules and routes for seamless execution

Communication with patients and their relatives is particularly important during the summer. However, the main challenge home healthcare providers face during this period concerns workload management.

The question every provider must answer is: How can interventions be completed successfully when some of the teams that normally work with patients are on vacation?

The proactive information campaigns described above help providers anticipate staffing requirements and launch the necessary recruitment processes as early as possible, in a context of an ongoing shortage of healthcare professionals and technicians.

Planning and optimization solutions, such as those offered by Nomadia, provide valuable support in minimizing the operational impact of potential staff shortages, whether the work involves care, deliveries or the installation and adjustment of specialized equipment.

Based on activity forecasts, available staff and each professional’s skills, home healthcare providers using our solutions can create optimized schedules and routes that take multiple criteria into account, including:

Time commitments made to patients or their families.
Contractual delivery deadlines.
The duration of each intervention.
The geographical concentration of interventions assigned to the same professional, in order to minimize time spent on the road.

Interventions assigned to replacement staff are made considerably easier by our mobile business applications. These applications bring together all the tools and information required to:

Access the patient’s home.
Notify the patient in the event of a delay.
Know exactly which tasks must be completed.
Record visit reports.
Report a problem experienced by the patient.
Keep relatives informed.

By combining the approaches described in this article with optimization tools, home healthcare providers have been able to maintain their services throughout the summer under the best possible conditions for patients, their relatives and field professionals.

It is important to emphasize that the information services developed to address summer-related challenges meet a broader expectation among patients and families toward home healthcare providers.

For this reason, these services should be maintained and developed in the long term to provide better support to patients throughout the year.

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