Understand how to prepare your home care agency for a successful survey, ensuring compliance and readiness with essential tips and practices.

Overview

Home care agencies play a crucial role in providing essential services to individuals in need, particularly our aging senior population, people with chronic illnesses, and those with disabilities. To ensure that these agencies maintain high standards of care, they are often subject to surveys and audits by federal and state regulatory bodies. Preparing for and passing these surveys is essential not only for compliance but also for the continued trust and satisfaction of clients and their families.

Home care employees spend a lot of time on manual preparations to provide the correct documentation for surveyors. An Integrated Home Care Management Software can automate this process, saving employees hours of manual effort and making survey preparation easy every time. The right Home Care Management Software understands that survey preparedness begins at intake and authorization, then continues through scheduling and clinical documentation to culminate in a clean report that home care administrators can print and send on survey day.

Understanding the Survey Process

Before diving into preparations, it’s crucial to understand what the survey process entails. Surveys typically assess compliance with federal, state, and local regulations. They focus on quality of care, patient rights, and agency operations. Familiarizing yourself with the specific standards your agency will be evaluated against gives your agency a leg up in preparing for surveys.

The Right Home Care Software for Survey Preparedness

As survey day approaches, home care agencies should ensure that their staff is informed, the necessary documentation is ready, and staff are following safety regulations. This can be achieved by training staff on compliance measures during the onboarding process. Encouraging a culture that prioritizes care quality and operational efficiency can significantly impact your agency’s readiness for surveys.

It is best to remember that surveys are about compliance with regulatory requirements. Regular internal audits can help identify areas of non-compliance before a formal survey occurs. Review your policies and procedures against current regulations and conduct spot checks on documentation, staff practices, and patient care. This proactive approach can reveal gaps that need addressing.

Home Care Software that has configurable validations and consistency checks will help home care agencies to create consistent, accurate, and compliant clinical documentation that will meet survey requirements.

Plan of Care and Authorization

Plan of Care and Authorization play a vital role in the survey process. A signed Plan of Care (POC) details the scope of services to be provided for the patient. The POC defines the number of visits and hours of service that can be provided within authorization.

Home Care Software should integrate authorization with scheduling and clinical documentation to ensure visits are scheduled and completed as per the POC. It should integrate the care plan with clinical documentation to make sure that services are provided and documented as per the POC.

An Integrated Home Care Software will:

Make sure visits are scheduled and completed as per the POC.
Validate that services are documented as per the POC.
Provide reports and alerts to manage exceptions to the POC and authorization.

Proactively ensuring that the right services are provided within the authorized limits will help home care agencies’ survey readiness.

Clinical Documentation and Validations

Having a high-quality, integrated clinical documentation process will reduce compliance issues during surveys. To ensure timely, accurate, and complete documentation, Home Care Software should utilize built-in, customizable validations to:

Alert field staff of missed tasks, treatments, or interventions.
Trigger warnings when problem areas are detected within the documentation.
Ensure consistency, completeness, and accuracy of the clinical documentation.
Check for consistency with the physician’s POC and other areas of documentation.

Rather than stressing over having clinical documentation ready at the time of the survey, Home Care Software can help caregivers and clinicians complete consistent and accurate documentation at the point of care. Overcoming documentation challenges can reduce survey deficiencies and ensure timely and full reimbursement.

Billing and Claims

Surveys look for inconsistencies with POC, authorizations, and billing. Home Care Software should have features to ensure that services are provided and documented before sending out claims. Depending on state requirements, Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) records should also be submitted and accepted before the claims are sent.

The right Home Care Software will ensure clean claim submission by:

Holding the claims if the Plan of Care is not signed and approved.
Ensuring documentation for services provided are completed before claims are sent.
Verifying EVV records are submitted and accepted before claims are sent.

Just beyond survey preparedness lies the ultimate goal for any home care agency: revenue efficiency. An efficient revenue cycle is the result of a home care agency that is operationally efficient, compliant, and survey ready.

Conclusion

After the surveys are complete, review the findings with your team. If deficiencies are identified, develop an action plan that addresses these issues promptly. Reach out to the right Home Care Software partner to incorporate some of the deficiencies as validations to avoid future deficiencies. Use the survey results as an opportunity for growth, ensuring that your agency continually improves its services.

Preparing for surveys can seem daunting, but with proactive planning and a commitment to quality care, home care agencies can navigate this process successfully. By understanding the survey requirements, maintaining accurate documentation, training staff, and investing in Integrated Home Care Software, agencies can not only meet compliance standards but also enhance the overall quality of care they provide. Having the right Home Care Software will help home care agencies to be survey-ready at a moment’s notice.

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.