Explore the advantages of documenting care at patients' homes for home health care agencies. Enhance efficiency, accuracy, and patient outcomes with comprehensive documentation.
This blog will discuss the benefits and advantages of documenting at the patient's home.
Overview
The quote "If it is not written down, it did not happen" applies to medical records and clinical documentation. If caregivers do not complete the documentation when they deliver care at the patient's home, the accuracy and completeness of the documentation can decline significantly due to the decrease in the ability of the brain to retain memory over time.
According to Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, humans retain 58% of what they learned after 20 minutes and only 33% after 24 hours. With the demands put on the clinicians and caregivers, it becomes imperative to document the care at the patient's home and complete the documentation before leaving the patient's home. Accurate, complete, and timely documentation will help home care agencies to meet regulatory compliance, optimize reimbursement, and improve quality of care, patient safety, patient satisfaction, and employee satisfaction.
Home Health Care Agencies should provide easy-to-use and intuitive tools to clinicians and caregivers to enable them to complete the documentation at the point of care. Effective clinical documentation improves the agency's operational efficiency while enhancing the quality of care, patient safety, patient satisfaction, and employee satisfaction.
Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve
Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve describes the decrease in the ability of the brain to retain memory over time. German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus hypothesized the issue in 1885 when he sought to understand why we forget things and how to improve retention. His research produced the Forgetting Curve – a visual representation of how learned information fades over time (see the figure below).
Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve
According to the Forgetting Curve, the most significant drop in retention happens soon after learning. One retains only 33% of what one learns after a day. Hermann Ebbinghaus's research still holds.
Benefits of Documenting Care at Patients' Home
Documenting care from memory or using the notes taken at the patient's home even after a few hours may lead to incomplete documentation. With all the responsibilities put on clinicians and caregivers – Multiple Patient Visits, Communication with physicians and other team members, etc. – retention of learned information will decline during the first 24 hours. Home Health Care Agencies should strongly encourage clinicians to document at the patient's home and provide the tools necessary to make it easy and intuitive.
The following are some of the advantages and benefits of documenting at the patient's home that will help Home Health Care Agencies to improve their overall operational efficiencies:
ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, AND TIMELINESS
Documenting at the patient's home while providing care is the most effective way to ensure accurate and complete documentation. Timeliness will also make the documentation available to other care providers and the quality assurance team after completing the visit/shift. Even with the most detailed notes, documenting after the fact will not be as accurate as completing the documentation at the patient's home.
COMPLIANCE AND SURVEY
Timely, accurate, and complete clinical documentation significantly improve compliance and the readiness of Home Health Care Agencies for surveys. Irrespective of the timing of the surveys, clinical documentation is always ready for survey. Keeping paper notes of patient clinical information might lead to potential HIPAA issues.
QUALITY AND CONTINUITY OF CARE
Continuity of Care is critical to improving quality of care and the patient's prognosis. One way to accomplish continuity of care is to maintain continuity of the caregiver/employee. Since it is almost impossible for a home care agency to maintain continuity of caregiver, agencies should strive to accomplish continuity of care through documentation. Completing the documentation at the patient's home and adding a plan for the next visit/shift to the documentation will assist the next clinician in providing care for the patient.
PATIENT SAFETY AND SATISFACTION
Documenting at the patient's home will enable clinicians to record medication, treatment, and care plan changes during the visit/shift. These changes will immediately be available for the next visit for the next clinician to administer the right medication and treatment. This will reduce medication errors, lead to high-quality care, and improve the prognosis for the patient, thus improving patient safety and satisfaction.
EMPLOYEE SATISFACTION
Clinicians do not look forward to taking work home to complete the documentation for the visits they made during the day. Providing the tools to document care at a patient's home will help restore work-life balance for clinicians and improve their satisfaction.
CARE COORDINATION
Documenting care at the patient's home will help clinicians review past documents, assess the plan for the current visit, and adjust the care based on the patient's current condition. Agencies can also share the clinical documents with other care providers throughout the continuum of care.
REIMBURSEMENT
Timely, accurate, and complete documentation at the patient's home will improve reimbursement and reduce claims denials.
Conclusion
Home Health Care Agencies should provide the appropriate, intuitive, and easy-to-use clinical documentation tools that help clinicians and care providers to complete documentation at the patient's home. The tools should enable clinicians to get a holistic view of the patient and provide proactive alerts and configurable validations to improve the quality and consistency of clinical documentation. CareVoyant Home Care software platform offers many tools home agencies need to document care at a patient's home.
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.
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