The home health and hospice industry is currently undergoing a technology evolution – driven by new regulations, lower reimbursement rates, more care options and tough competition.
One of the trickiest challenges for these agencies is tracking caregiver activity. Up until recently, it has been a time-consuming process prone to errors, fraud and miscalculations. Enter, the 21st Century Cures Act.
The Act sets new mandates for states to establish policies for Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) of Medicaid-funded home care. As the name suggests, EVV electronically captures the precise beginning and end of a visit, detailed information about the patient receiving the service, the exact date and location of the service as well as verification that an agency employee did in fact provide the agreed-upon point-of-care service. The EVV mandate’s main purpose is for compliance and quality assurance – to verify employee’s locations, hours of work for payroll and billing, that visits being reported are actually taking place, and that patients are getting the care they require.
While the basic purpose of EVV is to mitigate fraud, implementing more robust solutions will help bring other important benefits that shouldn’t be overlooked. There are a lot of benefits to real-time capture of service delivery information, and they go well beyond just avoidance of risk and abuse. With the right technology vendor, EVV can siginifcantly improve a home health or hospice agency’s operations. And yes, it facilitates compliance, but it also adds efficiency, provides quicker payments, allows for better coordination of care, easier scheduling, and more.
Here are the main ways using EVV benefits home health and hospice agencies – beyond just compliance.
1. Optimize Care Delivery – Perhaps the least expected benefit of an EVV system is how it can improve the quality of care being delivered. With EVV, caregiver activity is transparent and measurable. The agency can see every missed visit or scheduled visit, and clients can then approve or deny hours and/or services entered by the caregiver at the point of service. This electronic system allows clinicians to log the specific in and out times, ensuring patients are receiving the full value of their authorized hours. Clinicians can spend less time on paperwork and more time on patient care, which means better business for home health and hospice agencies.
2. Increase Communication – By implementing EVV technology, your entire team will benefit from a tool that can help secure broadcast messaging from the office and secure communication among care team members. Additionally, EVV can provide real-time availability of current client demographic information, notes to care team members, care and service plans, care and service history as well as care team information. Having all staff and clinicians on the same page with up-to-date, readily available information will make for improved patient care as well as caregiver and employment relationships.
3. Improve Productivity and Efficiency - Because tracking is automated, that means less paperwork and administrative work, which results in faster billing and payments. The speed at which payments are processed and paid is accelerated with EVV. Speedier payments improve an agency’s revenue cycle and allow for faster business growth. In addition to the decrease in administrative expenses required, other ROI opportunities are generated from the decreased paper costs (printing, mailing, scanning, storing, etc.) as well as reduced mileage costs. EVV provides accurate GPS-based mileage with support for both simple and complex mileage policies and optimizes driving directions between visits and other points of interest.
Home health and hospice agencies are managing a complex web of employees, payers, clients and more; and in the next several months, providers across the country will be rolling out these EVV systems. These implementations must go beyond the minimum requirements. And with the right EVV vendor, you’ll find you can do so much more than just avoid fraud and abuse. Go beyond simple proof-of-visit compliance and implement a solution that will not only help your caregivers accurately document visits, but improve your agency’s quality of care and client outcomes.
###