Charting Tips for Home Health Agencies
Caregiver Charting Compliance Tips for Home Health Care Agencies
One of the biggest parts of running a home health agency is ensuring your patient care staff nurses and clinicians are providing accurate home health documentation for the care and condition of clients.
Ensuring solid charting is achieved and that your staff is compliant with charting requirements should be top of mind. In this blog, we'll cover some tips for charting compliance among staff, and discuss the role of having good home health software in that process plays.
Why is charting important for home health agencies?
If an employee is more aware of why charting is important, they will be more likely to take it seriously and do it correctly. There are many reasons for charting - legal reasons and liability, billing and getting paid by insurance, and tracking the patient’s condition. For instance, if your company bills for treatment or care but there isn’t proper documentation of that treatment or care, there could be issues with billing, and that money could be in jeopardy. Solid documentation protects the company and providers from liability issues. With EVV mandates spanning the country as well, various providers offer a significant amount of home health technology designed for compliance, that puts charting with and without internet in a patient's home at the forefront of agency workflow.
Charting isn’t just important from a business perspective, as it also plays a critical role in good patient care. Having an accurate chart for a patient is the best way to see how their condition has changed, and to be able to look at what has helped or hindered their progress. It’s important to have a record of what treatments they’ve had and what education has been given.
How does Home Health Software help with Charting?
Not all software for homecare is created equally. If your software's internal charting functionality is user-friendly, you will be much more successful with how well your nurses and caregivers chart. If it is confusing and difficult to use, they may become frustrated and cut corners. Healthcare workers have a lot of responsibilities on their plates, so making their workflow easier is critical to agency success.
These tips will help your agency's staff get the win in charting:
1. Provide good training - Help each new staff member by having really great training regarding charting. Starting a new patient care job can be overwhelming, as it comes with many new responsibilities. Be sure that your charting orientation is helpful by making it efficient and understandable.
2. Make requirements known - Make your requirements for charting clear and concise. It’s possible that your staff doesn’t need to chart more, but that it would be useful for them to chart more efficiently. Be clear on what information needs to be documented for each patient.
3. Give them time to learn - Be sure that during training and orientation, each new employee has ample time to learn the charting system and company requirements for documentation, and has time to practice and get used to charting.
4. Offer continual education - Once your staff is initially trained, ensure they have resources available to help them chart successfully. Some may find a physical list of charting requirements for certain scenarios helpful. For example, a list of what needs to be charted for a patient upon admission, a list for discharge, a list for routine visits, lists for different diseases or conditions, and lists for different procedures. Having a collection of guidelines to refer to for multiple scenarios gives employees some helpful and concrete assistance
5. Have routine auditing - It’s possible that having employees audit one another’s charts could increase charting compliance. One study found that nurses who both received charting education and were assigned to audit other people’s charting had better charting compliance for pain, homebound status, and skilled nursing notes.
6. Incentivize - Help your staff set goals to achieve charting requirements. Goals could be set with individuals or in a group. Consider ways you can incentivize your staff to achieve goals and chart correctly. One fun idea is to have a monthly prize. Each person who achieved all charting requirements or goals for the month is put in a drawing to win the prize. You could also reward each person individually with a prize or bonus.
7. Communication is key - Communicate with staff optimistically and give positive feedback. Let them know when they’re doing a good job. They will feel rewarded when you express appreciation for their efforts to do their jobs well. Let them know that their hard work doesn’t go unnoticed.
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