by Tim Rowan, Editor

Home Health owners are used to walking tightropes. Indeed, there are many they are forced to walk every year, if not more often. One tightrope is a daily one. It delineates the fine line between regulatory compliance and risking being accused of non-compliance — and Home Health has a lot of regulations.

Owners, CEOs, CFOs, and boards struggle with a policy of spending money to ensure compliance with regulations or risking the expense of fines and payment denials for being found to be out of compliance.  

There may be a way to widen that tightrope to make it easier to walk. We participated in a product demonstration last week, courtesy of Armine Khudanyan, CEO/Founder, and Lara Koraian, Lead Software Developer, of QAPIPlus. In our view, automating the many processes involved in ensuring compliance should save many times the cost of a product such as this one. To date, however, we are not sure there is another product like this one.

Discussions of strategies to improve compliance occur during team and board meetings. Someone must know all the suspected deficiencies and assemble a meeting agenda. This is the first, and perhaps most important, piece that QAPIPlus automates. By drawing data from nearly every Electronic Medical Records product an HHA might be using, the tool identifies problem areas and creates a complete Quality Improvement meeting agenda, saving hours of work.

Management benefits from a clear, well-organized dashboard that can be customized to display the daily data each person in a position to monitor, flag, or improve compliance needs.

In addition to automating the assembly of meeting agenda items, QAPIPlus also builds in-service curricula. Recommendations for supplemental training can be used by the HHA or Hospice for individual or group training. The company, however, also offers online lessons, enough to cover most educational needs, from OASIS documentation to wound care.

We were shown examples of 5-minute trainings — perhaps better described as reminders — that nurses like to use immediately before a visit. “For example,” CEO Armine Khudanyan offered, “a nurse knows a particular procedure will be required in the next patient home. He or she knows the procedure but has not done it in a long time. Our 5-minute “brush-up” can be viewed after parking in front of the patient’s home, and the nurse feels more confident going in.”

These lessons can also be given by Directors of Nursing or QA nurses to individuals who have an issue with some one regulation, perhaps a Condition of Participation about patient instructions, or about one OASIS item. Instead of dragging the entire clinical staff to one of those dreaded Saturday classes, the needed lesson is delivered to one person about one problem area.

QAPIPlus is the only quality management software solution to earn CHAP Verification and ACHC Certification for home health and hospice organizations. (The Joint Commission does not have a certification service.)

As is our custom, we rarely ask readers to take our word for it. The QAPIPlus leadership let us share a few quotes:

This last comment brings up one final point that the QAPIPlus team said was important to make. “We have heard two types of comments from surveyors,” CEO Khudanyan added. “One is from surveyors who see the dashboard we customized just for them. They call it unique, easy to use, and comment on how much time it saves them to have everything in one place that they usually have to find by searching several applications on the screen and hundreds of papers in drawers. The second comment is from surveyors who walk into an HHA or Hospice after having used QAPIPlus at other agencies. They use words like ‘thank heavens’ when they see that this agency uses it too, knowing how easy their audit is going to be.” She added that it is hard to estimate the value of hosting a happy surveyor.

The Rowan Report rates QAPIPlus “worth serious consideration” for Home Health agencies and Hospices.

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Tim Rowan is a 30-year home care technology consultant who co-founded and served as Editor and principal writer of this publication for 25 years. He continues to occasionally contribute news and analysis articles under The Rowan Report’s new ownership. He also continues to work part-time as a Home Care recruiting and retention consultant. More information: RowanResources.com
Tim@RowanResources.com

©2023 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Home Care Technology: The Rowan Report. homecaretechreport.com One copy may be printed for personal use; further reproduction by permission only. editor@homecaretechreport.com