EVV - The Electronic Visit Verification Essential Guide

Managing a home care business with paper time sheets is hard. If you do it right, caregivers need to record arrival and departure times and care tasks, then get signatures, and bring the time sheets to the office. Next, the office needs to review them and key them in so that billable and payable time can be computed.

In the early days of home care, people didn’t have smart phones or ubiquitous Internet access, but a technology solution emerged. Systems were built where caregivers could make a phone call from the client’s home phone to report their arrival and departure. This technology is generally called telephony (pronounced teh – leh – fun – knee). Since the calls are made from the client’s home phone, “caller ID” can be used to verify that the caregiver is there. Telephony was the beginning of EVV and continues to be the most prevalent EVV method. Over time caregivers got smart phones and mobile apps emerged for recording arrivals and departures. These mobile apps use GPS location services to verify the location of the clock-in and clock-out.

The required data collection for EVV (from the 21st Century Cures Act) is spelled out below, but keep reading after the list:

A lot of US health care legislation and other matters are discussed on a national level, but EVV is often discussed on a state-by-state basis. The reason for this is that most government-paid home care is covered by Medicaid, which is administered by each state. As a quick background, there is a federal government organization called the Committee for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). CMS oversees Medicare which is a national program providing healthcare for the elderly (65 and over) and the disabled. Medicaid provides benefits for healthcare and other social care services to the poor. As mentioned earlier, Medicaid is administered on a state by state basis.

The regulation offered four (4) different models for the states to implement EVV. The models are described here:

The home care agency chooses the software that they wish to use (or stay with their current vendor) but the software provider needs to submit EVV information and claims in accordance with the state’s rules. Sometimes the state offers a sponsored solution as shown below:

The state chooses what system providers need to use (either a state-provided system or an external vendor) and in many cases they offer it for free to the providers.

Whereas the information above is all fact-based. The rest earns credibility based on our observations of the thousands of daily users of Ankota’s EVV software and prospects that we’re speaking to on a regular basis.

Hopefully, you’re all set with EVV in your agency or will get their soon. That’s great, but no agency is perfect. Here are some best practices for managing the EVV errors that your agency will experience: