Hospices need a fast, streamlined, and effective intake process, the ability to capture more referrals with the staff they already have, and a compassionate, low-friction experience for patients and families while reducing administrative burden and firefighting, to address key drivers of staff burnout.
Critical Challenges in Hospice Intake
Hospice admissions must be completed within 48 hours to meet CMS eligibility timelines. This can be challenging given the manual nature of the intake process and staffing shortages. The 2025 Hospice News Outlook Survey eBook shows that staffing is the number one concern of Hospice leaders, with 35% citing it as their top concern and a key barrier to achieving organizational growth targets.
With average hospice staff vacancy rates of 14%, staff retention is becoming a growing focus. What causes staff to leave? It is largely not the demands of caring for dying patients, but instead burnout. Per an Intellatriage report, "nurses actually report that workload and administrative demands contributed more to their burnout than witnessing death and dying. Staffing ratios and workload are among the top reasons that nurses choose to leave organizations."
The current administrative burden is heavy. Intake teams lose significant amounts of time to high-volume phone tag, chasing patients, and incomplete referrals that lack physician orders, histories, and labs essential for confirming the prognosis.
A recent survey revealed that 42% of people do not answer calls from numbers they do not recognize. It is time to consider alternatives to phone-based outreach.
Manual, nonstandard workflows compound issues. Staff manually capture data during calls, leading to errors and incomplete records. Scheduling remains fragmented, with staff spending significant time calling field staff to determine who is near the new patient and has the capacity to see them. Even today, staff are sent to a patient's home solely to obtain a signature on PDFs, such as a hospice election form.
Compound this with no-shows delaying assessments and meeting the 48-hour requirement becomes an enormous challenge.
These bottlenecks strain clinical leaders and staff, diverting focus from patient care to administrative drudgery amid workforce shortages.
What Staff Value
Hospice employees value efficiency and the ability to concentrate on what matters most. "In a nutshell, hospice workers want more time to focus on their patients and spend less on administrative tasks." Leadership are hearing the message and investing in technology to deliver operational process improvement.
Five Steps to Solve the Intake Challenge
1. Streamlining Intake Management Across Patients
QliqSOFT provides patient tagging (labels) and task management, enabling intake staff to assign tasks and track the individual patient's progress throughout the onboarding process. For example, teams can convert standard onboarding processes into a task list and then assign it to specific resources by sending the task list to the person(s) responsible for completing the task. Having this integrated into the care team collaboration platform enables the entire team, or a subset, if needed, to easily see what tasks have been completed and what tasks are outstanding.
Task lists integrate with tagging to flag missing information, such as labs or orders, for immediate action. Tagging a patient as 'Needs Orders', 'Needs Eligibility', or 'Ready for Scheduling' enables team members with specific roles to easily identify their cohort of patients who need specific action now.
This promotes the quick identification and management of needs and highlights patients ready to move to the next step, streamlining collaboration across intake roles and speeding processing.
The QliqSOFT onboarding capabilities do not lock organizations into a vendor-specific workflow. QliqSOFT works with clients to convert their current workflow into the tags and tasks that accelerate it. If the organization decides to modify its workflow at some point, its administrator can easily make the change using QliqSOFT's no-code tools. This provides both the flexibility to speed up existing workflows and the agility to modify workflows as lessons are learned.
2. Automating Initial Patient Outreach for Efficiency
Automated initial patient outreach using QliqSOFT slashes staff effort by sending welcome digital communications to patients and caregivers. These HIPAA-compliant messages introduce hospice services, capture initial information and e-signatures, and then route the data and patient to intake staff via secure text messaging or a virtual visit. Forms are automatically uploaded into the EMR as either discrete data or PDFs, saving staff time. This reduces phone tag and cuts staff manual entry, freeing 30%+ of staff time for higher-value tasks.
Clinical leaders benefit from predictable processes, enhancing compliance and audit readiness. Patients benefit from having clear expectations.
3. Minimizing No-Shows Through Digital Communication
No-shows plague hospice, delaying care and eligibility. QliqSOFT sends pre-visit automated communications: reminders, confirmations, and prep instructions to help the patient and caregiver prepare for a productive visit.
Field staff securely message patients/families via HIPAA channels to share ETAs and address last-minute changes. This two-way loop builds trust and reduces no-shows and cancellations by up to 40%.
Operational gains include optimized schedules and higher census utilization. Staff paid on a per-visit basis appreciate both the increased income from reduced no-shows and the increased patient preparedness.
Patients appreciate the proactive communication and guidance, which can improve satisfaction survey results.
4. Reducing Avoidable Trips with Secure Digital Data Capture
Hospice election forms are typically standard forms that must be used. QliqSOFT can consume these forms and support three types of data entry:
- Standard data that is the same on each form that can be added before the form is uploaded – e.g., the Hospice name and address.
- Known patient-specific data – patient name, address, phone number, provider, and similar data can be automatically incorporated into the form when sent to a specific patient. This dramatically reduces the patient's data entry requirements, increasing the likelihood of completion.
- Data the patient must provide – this could be a signature or completion of specific fields that must be decided by the patient.
Patients receive mobile-friendly and/or email links to enter a HIPAA-secure channel to complete the form. Encryption and audit logs ensure compliance. Staff can monitor the form's status from submission to completion. Forms can be automatically uploaded into the EMR, reducing staff workload and speeding billing.
5. Expediting Physician Orders, Signatures, and Treatment
Delays in physician signatures halt admissions; QliqSOFT sends digital forms directly to physicians or providers for e-sign via secure portals. Pre-filled with referral data, orders sign in minutes, not days, expediting treatment.
Clinical leaders oversee smoother handoffs, from intake to IDG teams.
Implementation Roadmap for Leaders
During the sales cycle, QliqSOFT works with organizations to identify their top pain points and needs. During implementation, QliqSOFT converts these pain points into organization-specific workflows and communications and converts client paper forms into digital forms.
Typically, organizations start with 1-2 workflows, in which leadership and staff define their future-state workflows. QuickStart content can be used to speed implementation time, or organizations can choose fully custom workflow definitions. Improvements are seen in several weeks to a month. QliqSOFT no-code tools enable organizations to monitor and agilely refine workflows, messaging, and data capture. Expect ROI in months through efficiency and reduced compliance risks. Then rinse and repeat with the next workflow.
Looking Ahead
As CMS tightens 2026 rules and limits payment increases, agile platforms like QliqSOFT future-proof hospices so they can do more with the teams they have. Invest now to reclaim time, elevate care, reduce staff burnout, and strengthen long-term staff retention while leading resilient operational teams.
FAQs
Can QliqSOFT work with our existing intake workflow, or do we have to change it?
QliqSOFT mirrors your current intake process using configurable tags and task lists, then enables you to optimize it over time; you don't have to abandon existing workflows to see benefits, and leaders can adjust steps with no-code tools as you refine processes.
How does QliqSOFT reduce phone tag and time spent chasing incomplete referrals?
Automated, secure digital outreach collects missing information, signatures, and documents upfront and routes them to the right staff, significantly cutting back-and-forth calling and manual follow-up.
How does QliqSOFT help us capture more referrals without adding staff?
By freeing intake and clinical staff from low-value administrative tasks and automating repeatable steps, the same team can process more referrals in less time, improving conversion and census without increasing headcount.
How does QliqSOFT reduce administrative burden for intake and field nurses?
QliqSOFT automates outreach, pre-fills forms, centralizes tasks, and pushes completed data into the EMR, freeing up a significant portion of staff time that would otherwise be spent on calls, data entry, and chasing paperwork.
