CellTrak Blog

Employees are the single biggest asset most home care agencies have, and managing those employees is one of the biggest challenges agencies face. This not only means keeping employees happy – but also finding ways to manage labor costs. Given that most home care workers are not salaried employees and not exempt, keeping tabs on overtime laws is critical.

It’s important to note that overtime laws frequently treat home care workers as a special category, and eligibility requirements for overtime differ compared to most other industries. The changing regulatory landscape doesn’t help, either, making it extremely difficult for agency management to keep up with developments.

As the cost of health care and personal services continue to escalate and the concern of fraud in the home health industry continues to grow, agencies are under increasing pressure from payers to provide proof that the in-home services they bill were in fact delivered.

A driving factor in this growing demand for Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) is the 21^st Century Cures Act – which requires states to establish EVV requirements for Medicaid-funded personal care and home care services.

Agencies naturally are concerned. With budgets already stretched thin, there is worry that meeting the EVV mandate will simply add yet another cost that further eats away at profits. And yet, EVV can bring a level of visibility to the delivery and management of care. This visibility may in turn yield unexpected – and potentially significant – gains in productivity, communication, cost, and care outcomes.

Today’s home health agencies are constantly challenged to provide better quality care at lower overall cost. Achieving this goal isn’t easy, and agency leaders often grapple with finding the right balance administratively while maintaining financial margins in the face of shifting reimbursement levels.  

The environment is not unlike the automotive industry in the late 1980s, where U.S. manufacturers struggled to build cars that could compete with Japanese imports on quality and price without sacrificing profitability or productivity.

When you’re managing care and service delivery, there are endless metrics you could evaluate to optimize care. From tracking the number of visits a care provider makes daily to the percentage of visits that start and end on time, it’s tough to know where to focus your attention.

It’s a critical decision nonetheless. If you select the wrong metrics, you risk chasing improvements that would only minimally benefit your organization. But monitoring too many at one time can overwhelm your staff.

By focusing on the right key performance indicators (KPIs), you can improve your agency’s service quality and outcomes for your clients, your own agency, and your payers. So, how do you determine what those KPIs are?

As more and more of our personal life becomes digitized, it’s no surprise that businesses – including home care and home hospice agencies – are closely following suit. Paper-based inefficiencies waste time and money; implementing paperless clinical documentation is an effective way to improve patient care.

But before you say goodbye to paper for good, understand what going paperless means to your processes and procedures and be prepared to help your staff make the transition.

As hospice agency management teams face the daunting challenges of falling Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, rising labor costs, and an uncertain regulatory environment, it’s important to remember who’s at the center of it all: the patient. The need for high quality, empathetic, compassionate end-of-life care is stronger today than ever.

April 1, 2017, is rapidly approaching, which means home health agencies in Florida are gearing up to implement the new CMS mandate for Pre-Claim Review Demonstration (PCRD). If you’re like most agencies, you’re probably nervous about how this change will impact your organization and how to ensure a smooth transition for everyone involved.

Every home health agency and hospice agency that receives reimbursement from Medicare and Medicaid understands the anguish a CMS survey can cause. There’s a lot on the line; if you can’t prove you meet each of your Conditions of Participation (CoPs), you risk losing CMS certification altogether.

Fortunately, with the right strategy in place, you can not only survive the survey process, you can come out shining.

Have you ever contemplated the risks your remote workers face when they provide home health services? In 2010, the health care and social assistance industry reported 653,900 cases of injuries and illnesses — more than any other private industry sector reported. Can your employees avoid being the next case?

The Home Health Value-Based Purchasing (HHVBP) model launched as a pilot program in nine states on Jan. 1, 2016. The model, which ties payment to performance, represents a major shift in payment structure for home health agencies.