Telephony: What can it do for your agency?
Telephony: What can it do for your agency?
Could be a boon, could be a bust
While not all state Medicaid programs will accept telephony, reports show that in those states that do, it’s a major boon to the home health industry.
Mark Baff, vice president of sales for Sandata Inc. in Port Washington, NY, says that he and his company have been hard at work trying to gain nationwide acceptance for the program. He says telephony is the way to go when it comes to documentation.
Meri Shaffer, a program manager with Fairfax, VA-based HomeAdvantage, which also offers telephonic services to home care agencies, agrees. Even those who don’t work for telephonic service providers see it as a win.
Elisa Hinken, a nurse consultant and president and CEO of MedMal Nursing Consultant Services in Lawrence, NY, says that as a home care consultant, she is very familiar with telephony. Hinken says the agencies she works with are very happy with the telephonic service programs they use.
So what can it do for you? Here’s a starting point:
• Accurate records. Home health aides and nurses don’t have to rely on memory or scribbled notes to fill out a patient record. When aides arrive at a patient’s house, they call to check in and again when they are getting ready to leave. Upon departure, the system will take the aides through a series of basic questions regarding the type of care that was provided. "If you’re depending on your memory and you have a lot of patients, things can get muddled," says Schaffer.
Interactive systems code responses
Some systems, explains Baff, use an interactive voice response system. It means the system, much like the phone system you might find at your local bank, will ask a simple question such as, "Did you bathe the patient?" The nurse or aide can then answer yes or no, accordingly. Others, like Sandata, have each task coded so that workers are asked to punch in the codes that correspond to a particular task. For example, "23" would be the code for bathing.
"If you ask whether the patient was bathed," he says, "everyone will say yes. Smart technology asks what you did and then takes in the information that way." Home health aides have a set of codes that are specific to their agency, usually no more than 150 possible tasks but, he notes, aides tend to use only about 20 on a regular basis.
• Little to no upfront investment. "We’re web-based, so agencies don’t have to spend $25,000 on software or hardware," Baff notes. "They don’t need to create a mini-, automated call center in their agency. All they need to get going is a Pentium-class computer and a web browser and you pay as you go. Home care has a tough enough time to expect agencies to run call centers. We give our customer toll-free numbers so there’s no cost to the patient either." HomeAdvantage is also web-based.
• User-friendly technology. "Training is a piece of cake," he says, "and just about everyone has a telephone."
• Lower demands on supervisors. With a telephonic system supervisors don’t have to spend nearly as much time badgering employees to complete their paperwork.
• Easier payroll. Both Santrax and HomeAdvantage are web-based programs, which allows them to interface with an agency’s outside payroll company, if needed.
• Real-time collection and quicker billing time. Rather than waiting to collect paperwork from a week’s worth of work, with a web-based telephony system, agencies can bill Medicare even a day after a visit was made. "If it takes two weeks to get the paperwork processed and edited, it may be three weeks before a capitated payment shows up," says Baff.
"It provides, with PPS collection, actual arrival and departure times so in that in a capitated agency, where you pay only for the service time used, you get to keep the rest of the money. These systems can really work toward mitigating the cash-flow pressures inherent in an agency. If an agency is using the system properly, it has a cost cutting impact and a positive revenue impact."
• Matching plan of care. Some telephony programs, such as Santrax, also offer care plan match programs, "so when we collect the data that include the tasks they [home health aides] did, we are matching [the data] to the care plan to see if it was followed and if it was underserved or overserved," Baff says.
For every positive there is a negative, and there are to be sure a few downsides to telephony. As Shaffer points out, one is certainly its lack of widespread acceptance. "Wisconsin has the most sophisticated web pages for health and human services for the state and yet won’t accept a caller ID as proof that aide was in the home," she says. Nor is it the best for taking in OASIS data. That aside, telephony seems to be where the industry is headed. To be sure, there will be bumps on the road, but maybe the ride will be smoother.
[For more information, contact:
• Mark Baff, Vice President, Sales, Sandata Inc., 26 Harbor Park Drive, Port Washington, NY 11050. Telephone: (516) 484-4400. Web: www.sandata.com.
• Elisa B. Hinken, Nurse-Consultant, President and CEO, MedMal Nursing Consultant Services (a division of MedMal Consultants, Inc.), P.O. Box 302, Lawrence, NY 11559. E-mail: [email protected].
• Meri Shaffer, RN, Program Manager, HomeAdvantage, 10875 Main St., Suite 212, Fairfax, VA, 22030. Telephone: (703) 352-1830, ext. 8213. Web site: www.loginsoft.com.]
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