We recently created a series of tutorials intended for home care agencies in Virginia but that also serve as a useful tutorial for folks outside of Virginia as well. With that in mind, I'm sharing it here for our Ankota blog readers. 

In order to make this blog post applicable and useful to folks outside of the state of Virginia, I wanted to share a guide from Caregiverresources.net that provides the basics, a deep-dive, checklists, and a variety of tips for those exploring respite care, or who are currently involved in respite care.

You can check out the guide by clicking here.

While the following is geared toward folks in Virginia, I feel though it may not be entirely applicable to all our readers, it may be of interest to folks regardless.  Take a look: 

On a respite visit, the main role of the caregiver is to give the family members a break, but it's likely that the caregiver will also be asked to perform tasks on behalf of the client. Here are a few questions and answers we've been hearing from Virginia agencies on this topic:

Q:  What tasks can the caregiver report?

A:  The caregiver should be able to report any of the 25 tasks on the DMAS-90

Q:  How are they reported? Does the caregiver need to answer "Yes" or "No" to each of the DMAS 90 tasks?

A:  No: The best practice is for the caregiver to be able to report only the tasks that they needed to do. On our mobile app we set it up so that the caregiver can choose the tasks from a dropdown that has the 25 DMAS-90 tasks. In the example below, the caregiver added "Assist with Toileting" and "Complete/Partial Bath." When they're dong they leave the screen (as shown) with "nothing to add" and save their task list.

With telephony, it's a bit trickier because you don't want the caregiver to have to listen through all 25 items to find the right task, so we assigned codes and most agencies put the codes on the back of a wallet card). For example. Since "Assist with toileting" is the 3rd item on the DMAS-90, you can set its code to 3.

As always, my hope is that this tip is useful to you. If you have any questions, or tricky billing scenarios that you'd like us to discuss, or other tips to share please comment on this post or reach out to us.

For help with your EVV implementation, please feel free to click here!