Home care organizations went through a significant transition this year, with the 21st Century Cures Act requiring electronic visit verification (EVV) for all Medicaid personal care visits.

Change inevitably brings growing pains, so it is important for organizations to remain flexible while their staff adjusts to the new system. Take advantage of the valuable features offered in your EVV-capable home care software that help ease your staff into this new requirement for visits.

Manually Adjusting the EVV Visit Time

A caregiver arrived at the client’s house late after getting caught in traffic and dove right in to providing care, or perhaps the caregiver’s phone died so EVV could not be captured.

These are realistic scenarios that may cause EVV to be incorrectly captured.

As convenient as it was, caregivers can no longer write time in and out on a paper visit note and expect the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to accept it as verified visit documentation. However, there are features within a home care software that enable organizations to manually edit the caregiver’s visit time when applicable with state-specific reason codes.

A special icon will appear next to visits that have been adjusted manually for quality assurance purposes. It is best practice to avoid manually adjusting EVV times frequently, as this is a red flag in claims. However, because EVV is still dependent on a caregiver who likely isn’t accustomed to getting a signature at the exact moment the visit begins and ends, organizations should use this feature when necessary.

To help caregivers remember the importance of accurate EVV, some organizations recommend requiring the caregiver to come into the office the day of the visit that EVV wasn’t captured to witness the manual adjustment. It may not seem like much, but after visiting the office several times, the caregiver will learn to prioritize timely EVV.

EVV Time Management Alerts

Client visits can run longer than expected. When this happens, it affects the timeline of other visits in the caregiver’s schedule.

Axxess Home Care offers time alerts for when a visit starts or ends later than scheduled, alerting a designated person within the home care organization. This serves many valuable purposes:

• Client Communication: Two of the top problems clients have with home care organizations are a lack of communication and late caregivers. By using these alerts, organizations will know to reach out to the next client as soon as the alert is sent, communicating the schedule change and rescheduling the visit if necessary. Keeping clients happy is the goal.
• Re-Examining the Client’s Schedule: Perhaps a recurring visit with a client goes consistently over the scheduled time. Since the staff is alerted each time this happens, it’s easier to recognize the pattern. This might be a great opportunity to re-examine the client’s care schedule and adjust.
• Implement More Caregiver Training: If a caregiver is consistently ending visits later than scheduled, this may be a training issue. Empower your caregivers by offering consistent training so they feel more comfortable providing care. Remember, investing in your caregivers leads to retention and improved client outcomes.

Using these built-in EVV features will help your home care organization transition away from capturing visit information by hand and ensure compliance is met. It also offers identifiable data trends for organizations, promoting better client care and happier caregivers.

Axxess Home Care, a cloud-based home care software, offers intuitive EVV capabilities to keep home care organizations compliant. Find your state’s EVV requirements to begin the transition.