The Future Is Now!
We all knew it was coming. Most of us just nodded our heads and returned to whatever we were doing when we heard the news. Some of us applauded and volunteered to start now. And, then there were those few, stiff necked, “I’ll never change…” types. They took an oath to fight the future and live in the past. If your employer is the latter type, it might be time to check out Care Team.
EVV is now live! Full implementation for all Medicaid and Medicare home health care services is here. Next the private-pay payor sources will lock in and demand the same for their patients.
For those not familiar with Electronic Visit Verification (EVV), this is the future and the future is NOW. A good percentage of the home healthcare agencies are now switching over to the new system or will be doing so long before the compliance date.
This is not a joking matter because non-compliance means one cold, hard, fact: the agency will not get paid for any service without the EVV data.
As the name suggest, EVV electronically captures:
- That a home care agency employee provided the agreed-upon point-of-care service, and;
- The time that the visit began and ended, and;
- The individual who received the service, and;
- The date, and location of the provided service.
Most EVV systems rely on GPS to accurately pinpoint when a caregiver arrives at the patient’s home and when they leave. (More primitive systems, called Interactive Voice Response, or IVR, use voice communications via telephone lines rather than a cell phone’s GPS).
The purpose behind the EVV mandate is to track home health providers and ensure the visits they’re reporting are actually taking place, that patients are getting the care they require, and that Medicaid and Medicare (and in the future; private-pay payors) are being billed accurately.
Most of the industry EVV support providers have established the EVV data collection sources to be run through the caregiver’s cell phone, which in today’s world are commonly referred to as “smart phones”. Todays’ smart phones are mobile mini computers that have built-in GPS tracking, have cameras (still & video), have internet access for tapping into cloud-based data bases and have application software that links the caregiver to the agency’s operating software.
Caregivers can not only comply with the minimal capture criteria specified above, but can also allow the employee on-site access to the patient’s medical history and allow the caregiver to fill out and upload the nurses’ notes while attending to the patient.
While Care Team is not a Medicaid certified agency, we have fully incorporated the implementation of these new technologies.
The future starts now!