When it comes to your EMR, hospice-specific matters.
Amid the rapidly changing circumstances being faced by the hospice industry, it matters more than ever. Before you commit to an unfamiliar EMR, it’s important to verify that it has all of the tools you and your clinicians need to care for patients. Below we list 3 important features that every hospice EMR should have including intuitive hospice-specific workflows, compliance with all of Medicare’s top 10 deficiencies, and features to streamline IDG meetings.
Individual Patient and Family Care Plans
Hospice specific workflows start with the patient and family care plan. For clinicians to work effectively, care plans need to be programmed from the ground up to be interdisciplinary for the hospice team, individualized for each patient and family and contain quantifiable and measurable goals for treatment.
While this may seem intuitive when the software is built off of home health or hospital care plan, essential items can be missed. This can cause hospice to fall out of compliance as was seen in last July’s OIG Report. Clinicians may also have to work around inefficient or inapplicable questions in order to chart correctly. This causes frustration on the part of hospice staff and lost time on the part of the hospice.
Medicare Top 10 Deficiencies
Every year, Medicare puts out its list of top 10 hospice deficiencies from the prior year. Hospice EMRs should not only be aware of the most common deficiencies but also should have proactive tools to make compliance second nature. Healthcare compliance is complex. When you look at hospice specifically, it’s important fr a company to have experience in the industry. This allows compliance teams to know where to go for answers, anticipate challenges, and implement solutions.
You can review Medicare’s most recent list of deficiencies here and see examples of how software can help you comply with those deficiencies here.
Streamlined IDG Meetings
IDG meetings are at the heart of hospice care. Not only are these meetings crucial to patient care, they are required by CMS and heavily regulated. Furthermore, they involve a hospices highest paid and often most over-worked employees.
Preparing for, conducting, and updating notes from the IDG meeting can take hospice staff hours or even days. Hospice EMRs should have tools to help you streamline the paperwork and get the most out of these meetings. See tips on how to get the most out of your IDG Meetings here.
Finding the Solution
We’ve compiled a guide on clinical software essentials in hospice. It includes common features that are overlooked, questions you should ask every software vendor, and a checklist for what you should look for from your EMR.