If you are in the home healthcare business, chances are you’ve at least heard of EVV (or electronic visit verification). So, what is it and why should you care? EVV stands for Electronic Visit Verification. Essentially, it is a technology that verifies where and when a caregiver begins services for a client and when they clock out. This provides a breadcrumb trail that provides the basis for billing and ensuring the client or consumer received care. The need arose from abuse from some providers and/or their caregivers inflating and making up timesheets. It became too easy for an unethical agency owner to pencil in false service times and then bill Medicaid / Medicare for the services. The result was that billions of dollars were being fraudulently or inappropriately collected by agencies. Now with EVV technology, there is no disputing that a caregiver is in the location they checked in from (via GPS or registered landlines). You can imagine the millions of dollars this has already saved the healthcare system.
Many states have already begun requiring electronic visit verification for registered agencies, but the EVV requirement is about to become a national mandate. In the last couple of months of President Obama’s time in office, he signed the 21st Century Cures Act, which contained a lot of legislation. Pertaining to home health, the Cures Act will require that all home health agencies and personal care services that accept government reimbursements will have to have an EVV solution in place by the end of 2019 (then moved to 2020 due to the delay signed by Congress) for personal care and 2023 for home health agencies. The regulation allowed for a 1-year “good-faith exemption” if the state was not ready to go live, but made “reasonable good faith” efforts to move the EVV implementation plan forward. Not that reading legislation is especially fun, but I am providing you with a link to the legislation if you’d like to do more research, here is the Cures Act and EVV legislation from the U.S. Congress website in relation to the Cures Act.
Some states like Texas and South Carolina had mandated EVV long before this issue was ever a part of federal home care legislation. Missouri is another state that had EVV in place for several years already. Most states did not even have it on the radar. Now that there is a national mandate in the near future, many states are in the process of creating EVV policies right now.
We’ll discuss some of the warnings and successes of different state EVV mandates.
In contrast, other states such as Missouri allowed providers to choose an EVV vendor that worked best for them as long as the vendor complied with Medicaid regulations. Well over 600 providers have implemented EVV in that state. We believe the risks of litigation, one company's reliability and uptime, vendor business continuity, and the satisfaction of stakeholders outweigh any benefits gained from having a single vendor system that does not allow competition in the marketplace. A multiple-vendor solution is simpler, easier, and more cost-effective for all parties involved. Finally, there are three potential ways that a state can implement a multiple-vendor approach.
In the Cures Act legislation, the electronic visit verification mandate requires that states consult providers on a solution and that the solution is “minimally burdensome”. Let’s say that you’ve already spent the time, money, and energy on creating a software solution for your company, including EVV. It works for you, and now you don’t even have to think about it. What if all a sudden, you had to switch EVV vendors? You have to now get all of the data out of your current EVV system and migrate it over to the new EVV! What if the newly mandated EVV is not reliable and breaks frequently (a common complaint from many providers in one-vendor-mandated states)? Not to mention, this will cause many wasted hours of training time for your staff to learn a new system. You are called to have a say in this matter in your state. Reach out to your associations and legislators to let them know that a provider choice solution is best for everyone involved.
Some home care providers have been resistant to the idea of EVV, and like it or not, it’s coming. However, it’s not a bad thing, and it can actually make your business more profitable and efficient. EVV allows you to automatically eliminate paper time sheets, record visits, and create billing/payroll data at the push of a button. Additionally, if an audit comes your way, you won’t have to worry about digging out stacks of paper, you can just download your data in minutes. Most providers that use EVV find ways to save hours of admin time, cut overpayments, and find ways to increase revenue. So embrace the technology, it’s good for you.
The bottom line is: EVV will save your home care company money.
Originally, EVV started out as a landline telephony technology that recorded the time called in and out at the client’s home. That method is still widely used today. However, with the advent of smartphones, more and more visits are being verified through smartphones using GPS location. This is by far the fastest-growing method. Also, computers and tablets can be used for verified visits. Additional technologies include non-smartphone cell service triangulation, fixed-device check-ins, and now voice-bot check-ins. The non-smartphone method occurs when a caregiver calls through a non-smartphone, and then the cell carriers use the towers to locate where the caregiver is. With a fixed device, some areas don’t have cell service or landlines, so caregivers will scan a barcode, record a number or scan an RFID card to clock in/out.
While you may not need all of these technologies, some states are requiring multiple technologies in an EVV solution. Make sure that at the very least there is both telephony and mobile visit verification in your EVV solution.
CareTime offers one of the best home care software solutions in the marketplace with a built-in EVV system. We also can provide customized software and integrations for large organizations. Talk to us about how we can help you get ahead of the compliance requirement for EVV. Find out more about CareTime’s Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) software solution.