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An estimated 14 million children or roughly a fifth of children in the United States have special healthcare needs. They require more care for their physical, developmental, behavioral, or emotional differences than their typically developing peers. Most of this care will be provided at patients’ home through Pediatric Private Duty Nursing Home Care agencies.

Providing care for these children at home poses unique challenges in terms of billing to various funding sources, scheduling, and clinical documentation. Adding to this challenge is the need to recruit, train and retaining clinicians.

Right software that addresses these unique needs of Pediatric Home Care Agencies will assist the agencies to build and manage successful pediatric care service line.

Billing for Pediatric Private Duty Nursing

Funding for Pediatric Home Care can come from Medicaid, Medicaid Managed Care, Private Insurance and Private Pay. These funding sources have disparate authorization, reimbursement rates and documentation requirements. Managing revenue for Pediatric Home Care agencies is like navigating a complex maze.

Software with the following core features will be very helpful to effectively manage revenue.

Medicaid and Medicaid Managed Care: Understanding and the ability to handle states’ Medicaid programs, compliance requirements, authorization processes, and reimbursement rates.
Private Insurance: Options to meet various formatting and documentation requirements for commercial insurances.
Prior authorization: Ability to manage authorization processes and link authorization to scheduling. This will significantly reduce missed authorizations and unbillable shifts.
Fee Schedules: Ability to maintain and fee schedules for the funding sources. This will help agencies to know and manage true accounts receivable for payers.
Collection Tools: Ability to set up collection rules by payers will help agencies to manage and follow through unpaid claims for various payers.

Scheduling is probably half of your profitability problems!

If you are in the business of home healthcare, you already know and value the importance of effective scheduling. By utilizing clinicians time efficiently, you can improve your financial performance and employee satisfaction dramatically.

Scheduling Pediatric Private Duty Nurses has another layer of complexity, i.e. longer shifts and the insistence by family members for a particular clinician on account of the relationship the clinician may have with the child. These factors besides the usual complexities of travel time, costs, skills, etc. can make scheduling for Skilled Pediatric care more complex and demanding.

Software with the following core features will be very helpful to effectively manage schedules.

Ease of Use: Manage complex and ever-changing scheduling requirements with integrated and easy to navigate scheduling functions.
Intelligent Matching: Match employees and patients based on skills, travel time, availability and other key factors. This will help schedulers to quickly find right clinicians to fill shifts.
Publish Shift Offers and Available Shifts: Publish shift offers and available shifts to employees. This will provide a pool of employees willing to take the shift.
Overtime Management: Ability to identify and mange overtime for employees during scheduling. This will help agencies to significantly reduce overtime expenses.
Patient and Employee Satisfaction: Improve patient and employee satisfaction by minimizing duplicate and uncovered shifts.

CareVoyant’s scheduling capabilities with built-in functionality to manage schedules in one screen make it a perfect choice for Pediatric Private Duty Nursing .

Clinical Documentation

Clinical documentation requirements for Pediatric Nursing Home Care is different from visit based documentation. Pediatric Home Care shifts are longer and require collecting clinical data, such as vitals and measurements, multiple times during the shift. Medication Administration and Treatment Administration needs pose unique challenges to clinicians.

Software with the following core features will be very helpful for Pediatric Nursing Clinical documentation.

Ease of Use: Clinicians should be able to stay in one screen and complete different aspects of care during the shift – Vitals, Measurements, eMAR, eTAR etc.
Electronic Care Flow Sheet: Ability to personalize and capture care flow sheet – Vent, Seizure Log, Cough Log etc.
Electronic Medication and Treatment Administration (eMAR, eTAR): Ability to document Medication Administration and Treatment Administration during the shift.
Real Time Update to POC: Availability of medication, treatment and care plan changes at Point of Care in real time.
Real Time Alerts: Provide real time alerts during the shift for missed medications, treatments, vitals or measurements.

CareVoyant’s clinical functions are designed to meet unique requirements for Private Duty Nursing clinical documentation.

Recruiting and Training the Right Talent

Care requirements of pediatric home care are very different from visit based home health care. Finding the right employees, training and retaining them will be a challenge. Providing the right tools to clinicians will help improve employee satisfaction.

A Software that is easy to use and assist with shift based skilled documentation will be very helpful.

Ease of Use: Simple and easy to use communication and documentation tools will be essential to improve employee satisfaction.
Communication: Messaging function within the software that is easily accessible from the documentation screen will improve inter office communication.
Alerts: Alerts for new messages and upcoming clinical tasks during the shift will assist clinicians with their care for the patient.

Conclusion

Recognize that the needs of Private Duty Nursing for pediatric care are very unique and specific. While this could be a profitable service line, the requirements such as round-the-clock nursing, ability to connect with children, more complex scheduling, and most importantly, the right nursing talent, make this a very challenging area. Over time, this service line is likely to grow due to cost considerations vs. care in the hospital and the obvious advantages for families when the child is receiving high-quality care in their own homes.

CareVoyant for Private Duty Nursing for Pediatric Care provides the agencies comprehensive clinical, administrative, and financial tools that will bring operational efficiencies to home care agencies to achieve their goals.

ABOUT CAREVOYANT

CareVoyant is a leading provider of cloud-based integrated enterprise-scale home health care software that can support all home-based services under ONE Software, ONE Patient, and ONE Employee, making it a Single System of Record. We support all home based services, including Home Care, Private Duty Nursing, Private Duty Non-Medical, Home and Community Based Services (HCBS), Home Health, Pediatric Home Care, and Outpatient Therapy at Home.

CareVoyant functions – Intake, Authorization Management, Scheduling, Clinical with Mobile options, eMAR/eTAR, Electronic Visit Verification (EVV), Billing/AR, Secure Messaging, Notification, Reporting, and Dashboards – streamline workflow, meet regulatory requirements, improve quality of care, optimize reimbursement, improve operational efficiency and agency bottom line.

For more information, please visit CareVoyant.com or call us at 1-888-463-6797.