Patient safety and regulatory compliance start with delivering the care promised to patients. Discover how electronic visit verification (EVV) solutions help home health providers comply with a crucial provision of the 21st Century Cures Act.
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Home health represents the future of healthcare; however, it can lack the transparency of inpatient care delivered in controlled, physical locations. This gap opens the door to fraudulent visits, inadequate care, and unqualified caregivers. The FDA and NIH implemented the 21st Century Cures Act to ensure consistent, necessary, and high-quality patient care.
A key provision of the 21st Century Cures Act requires Medicaid-funded personal care and home health services to use electronic visit verification (EVV) after every visit. EVV can lead to administrative errors that jeopardize compliance without the right systems.
Complying with the electronic visit verification (EVV) provision of the 21st Century Cures Act
Salesforce Mobile
Consistent Verification, Minimal Administrative Work, and Regulatory Compliance
At the federal level, home health EVV requires six sets of criteria to meet the 21st Century Cures Act standards. These include:
Caregivers typically excel at providing care – however, administrative tasks can get in the way. As a result, consistently documenting the above criteria isn't as straightforward as it might seem. Here are some issues we've seen home health companies face with EVV solutions.
Caregivers often view administrative tasks as distractions to what they do best – providing care. Without enablement and process-driven workflows, caregivers might neglect to collect all six criteria or verify a visit. Even if the visit was productive, this could lead to significant compliance issues.
Some patients reside in rural areas with limited internet access. Furthermore, the 21st Century Cures Act does not mandate that Medicaid beneficiaries have an internet connection, cell phone, or landline to assist with the verification process. If the electronic visit verification (EVV) solution selected by a home health provider relies on an internet connection for verification, that will probably result in compliance challenges.
EVV solutions that depend on manually entered data are susceptible to errors. Such inaccuracies can result in compliance issues with the 21st Century Cures Act and undermine the services' legitimacy.
At Penrod, we implement Salesforce Mobile in our home health platforms for electronic visit verification. Salesforce Mobile is a HIPAA-compliant solution that automatically populates data for the six verification criteria.
For instance, the patient management platform populates patient details, service type, location, and caregiver info. In the case of our home health platform, we use Salesforce Health Cloud as the patient management platform, which connects healthcare data from ERPs, clinical systems, and marketing tools.
Additionally, visit duration and calendar date are automated based on when the caregiver started and ended a visit. These automations reduce administrative burden, ensure consistency, and enforce compliant verification at every visit.
Here's a look at how it all comes together:
Here are some additional features of Salesforce Mobile:
Electronic visit verification with Salesforce Mobile addresses the consistency, connectivity, and administrative challenges often associated with EVV systems.
Automated data population and guided workflows help caregivers focus more on delivering high-quality patient care, and less on administrative tasks. Using a scalable platform like Salesforce Mobile ensures the future of home healthcare is accessible, compliant, and patient-centric.