The new Frequency Scheduling feature allows you to select the appropriate visit type and optionally the employee and simply click on the calendar to setup the patient visits as you would like them for the certification period. When you are done click activate and patient frequencies are created automatically from the calendar. How awesome is that!
Improved sync resiliency when dealing with unreliable or intermittent network connections. Now HealthWare will automatically retry the connection whenever there is a transient failure. This is extremely useful in areas where there is poor data connectivity. With HealthWare’s offline capabilities you can sync from home, office, or other location with good connectivity, but when that is not an option this new feature helps to make sure you can still stay productive.
A new Quick Referral feature is now part of the HealthWare Dashboard and provides the fastest possible way to enter a new referral. There is also a new My Patient feature that allows you to “lock in” a specific patient so that all additional actions will default to that patient. This makes it faster and easier to move throughout the entire HealthWare system with the focus on a single patient.
HealthWare has added even more PDGM related information to the Episode View so you can now more quickly review the primary influencing factors such as admission source, hospital or institution discharge date, diagnosis code and more. We also added additional warnings if you are dealing with non-billable primary diagnosis codes and added billable and co-morbidity information to diagnosis code selection. We also added additional features to help with recode scenarios.
After waiting months for the final documentation and specifications to be released, we are proud to say that we are confident that all our clients are ready for those big changes coming 1/1/2020. With PDGM and OASIS D1 there are a lot of changes that agencies must be ready for and have the tools and processes in place that can handle these changes. At HealthWare, we have worked hard to make sure that you will not only endure PDGM, but prosper with PDGM.
We started out with a simple premise: make it easier for agencies to handle the changes related to PDGM. There are a lot of moving parts and they affect several different areas of the agency’s operations, and HealthWare has worked to provide tools to help with these various areas.
We had a big head start, because HealthWare is already a very mature platform with many great features that will be tremendously useful under PDGM. We also wrote our own PDGM grouper early in 2019 and started integrating it soon thereafter, and then updated it to comply with the final specifications. This was a big help in making sure we had this major capability ready; CMS did not release their grouper until the end of October, not leaving much time for integration and testing. Writing our own grouper also made sure we knew what data was needed and how to handle it to determine the all-important HIPPS code and pricing.
We looked at patient intake/referral and ways we could speed up that process. After analyzing this information, we made various improvements, such as making even fewer fields required initially, which reduced referral input time. We then tied the appropriate data directly to the information needed to get the PDGM episode started, so you can accomplish both with no additional steps. This process can also create any workflow you desire, meaning all departments and/or staff involved can start the next steps in the process.
At the point of care, you can auto-fill more data taken from the referral, with the clinician’s review and approval, thereby speeding data entry and helping to get documentation completed more quickly. This includes things such as: diagnosis codes, certification dates, physician, etc. More validation related to PDGM is also done at the point of care helping to make sure your data is ready to bill faster than ever before.
Of course, we also put in a lot of PDGM-specific validation at various points along the process. Things like checking to make sure the primary diagnosis is eligible for billing, making sure users know if there are one or more co-morbidity diagnosis codes, validating the OASIS to make sure it is properly scored, and more.
Overall process flow for each patient and episode is critical to thrive under PDGM, so we have improved our workflow capabilities to help agencies be successful with PDGM. New patient tracking features, event triggers, and alerts are all part of HealthWare’s PDGM capabilities. This helps you move the patient from intake to RAP as smoothly and quickly as possible.
Of course, there are also powerful features for billing PDGM. With 30-day payment periods, the efficient handling of billing and claims is even more vital than it was under PPS.
HealthWare’s PDGM Insights tool gives you extremely powerful information about the episode, payment, costs, and more. Get details on the eligibility of the primary diagnosis and any co-morbidities of the secondaries. See the effects of all episode timings, admission sources, comorbidities, and impairment levels. It also shows you the effects of secondary diagnoses becoming primary. More importantly, it shows—based on visits, both completed and scheduled—what the projected profit or loss is for each payment episode.
HealthWare also provides billing services for their clients, so it was important not just for our clients, but also for our own in-house services, that using HealthWare with PDGM be as efficient as possible and enable scenarios not possible with other solutions.
