As you get your agency on board with Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) you'll find that for most caregivers that it's easier than you thought. Some of your caregivers will be tech savvy and will love the fact that this is the end of signed off time sheets and trips to delivery them to the office in order to get paid. Others will not be as enthusiastic, but they'll understand it, try it and get it. Ultimately 70 to 80 percent of your team will pick it up just fine. Unfortunately, the last group of "stragglers" will be slow to adopt EVV.
Reasons for EVV Resistance
We've experienced the following reasons that some caregivers resist EVV:
- Fear of Technology: Some caregivers are "tech-phobic" and will be afraid of the technology. In this case, we recommend that your scheduling staff be well-trained on EVV and able to walk them through it.
- Fear of Change: Some caregivers will simply fear change. They've likely been using paper time sheets for a long time and feel comfortable with the process.
- Protesting the Need for EVV: Some caregivers will not like the basic idea of EVV. It might be personal, along the lines of "you should trust me," or it might be that they feel that EVV is some type of invasion of privacy.
- Short-Cutters Will be Exposed: A final category of people who will resist EVV are caregivers who have gotten comfortable with their clients and gotten away with arriving late, leaving early, or asking their client if they can leave and then taking credit for their full shift.
Best Practices for converting EVV stragglers:
Below are several techniques for getting the stragglers in your home care agency on board with EVV:
- Walk Them Through It: Your schedulers will ultimately need to get your caregivers on board with EVV. Since several of the reasons for resistance are fear-based, having the caregiver walk them through it can help. If you're using telephony, one technique is for the scheduler to say "let's go through it together," then pick up their cell phone and go through the telephony call with the caregiver.
- Be Proactive When Caregivers Don't Clock In: In many EVV systems like Ankota's, you can see when a caregiver hasn't clocked in on time. This can be a text message warning or visible at a glance on the schedule board. If schedulers call out to caregivers who haven't clocked in, they'll see that EVV is serious and that it's known they're not compliant.
- Remind Caregivers That EVV is Necessary for Reimbursement: For caregivers who don't like the idea of EVV, start with a gentle reminder that EVV is necessary for home care reimbursement.
- Be Persistent: Once you start tracking down the stragglers, ask your schedulers to stay on top of them. After one call, some caregivers might think that they don't really have to do it, but if your schedulers call them every day, then they'll get the message.
- Institute the "One-Day Time Sheet": Prior to EVV most agencies have a weekly time sheet. In order to drive compliance, you can remove the weekly time sheet and replace it with a one-day time sheet. Tell caregivers that they'll need to submit a signed time sheet for each day that they don't properly use EVV. There's another article on this here.
- Process Paper Time Sheets After the Rest of Payroll is Done: When you send a letter without a ZIP code, someone at the post office will need to look up the ZIP code in order to get the letter sent. Given the many letters that they process, they put the ones missing a ZIP code off to the side and deal with them "later." This might mean that the letter gets through days later. You can employ a similar technique and tell caregivers that the paper time sheets will be dealt with after the EVV payroll is processed. This might mean that non-compliant caregivers will be paid in the next pay cycle and this can be a strong motivator for the stragglers to get on board.
A key to remember is that most caregivers will get on board with no trouble and that even most of the stragglers will get on board with a little bit of extra training and encouragement from the schedulers.
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital, focusing on efficiency and care coordination. Ankota's primary focus is on Care Transitions for Readmission avoidance and on management of Private Duty non-medical home care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact us.
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