Your Challenges

The use of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) in hospice and home health has become increasingly common and even mandatory as per statutory requirements. The reason for EHR adoption in hospice and home health was mainly to improve care coordination and improve communication between professionals, patients, and families by streamlining documentation via EHRs.

However, despite such technology, hospice and home health facilities due to lack of interoperability find it difficult to document visits with multiple patients at different sites. Additionally, the interdisciplinary teams in hospice and home health organizations may need information from different departments, leading to increased complexity in the documentation and retrieval of data from unsupported EHRs. This may cause missing, incomplete, and inaccurate data, which could impact the staff, patients, and the business operation negatively.

Despite the issues with the usage of the EHRs, the hospice and home health staff still end up spending a large quantity of time documenting patient care information in them to meet statutory retention requirements. This may not seem like a major problem until the staff is confronted with challenges such as:

  • Searching records in various historical systems – especially due to incomplete data.
  • Remembering the passwords and menu configuration for those systems.
  • Accessing and processing the data while maintaining the current operational data in the new systems.

These challenges contribute to staff burnout, which may cause negative consequences for patient care, and destruct operational workflows. Data in multiple legacy systems can also affect data security and integrity, and create vulnerabilities in the organization’s systems.

Even if the hospice and home health organization decide to address such challenges by converting and migrating their historical records into the new system, the go-forward system might not be completely compatible with the data format of the data in legacy systems and cause other challenges. This could require the retention of some of the legacy systems with incompatible data at additional costs. Such a situation is terrible for a hospice or home health, as the organizations would be forced to retain data in legacy systems and miss out on acquiring valuable insights in the patient’s data.

Also, organizations must ensure that their healthcare data is retained in compliance with HIPAA and other legal requirements.

  • Federal laws such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) require that any records associated with HIPAA be retained for a minimum of six years starting from when the HIPAA-compliant policies were first implemented.
  • The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services cites 42 Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) to establish the minimum of a 7-year retention period for medical records following the Date of Service (DoS).
  • Each state in the US also has its own set of retention laws to be followed by healthcare facilities. Such state laws usually mandate that legacy data be retained between the duration of five to twenty-five or more years, depending on the state the organization is in, and the patient’s age.

Our Solution

Triyam helps hospice and home health extract, convert, and migrate some data to the new EHR or archive their legacy data from multiple systems to the new system or to Triyam’s recommended archival solution, ‘Fovea EHR Archive ®.’ If the historic data is archived to Fovea, the archive can be integrated with the new system for quick access to both historical and operational data that can be provided for future information requests.

Fovea can be the one-stop solution for all the problems faced by hospice and home health.

  • Data from multiple systems can be archived into Fovea, thus providing a single unified platform and excellent interoperability for accessing historical data. This would help the hospice and home health team improve patient-provider interaction with real-time data access. Moreover, Fovea’s intuitive design would make communication more seamless and error-free.
  • As our solution is vendor-agnostic, any type of data can be archived in it. This eliminates the maintenance of legacy systems, which can then be decommissioned, resulting in significant cost savings for the organizations.
  • Through Fovea, the hospice and home health organizations would be able to provide up-to-date, comprehensive patient records, in a timely manner and ensure better care coordination across departments and between healthcare organizations. For instance, the hospice staff would be able to deliver patient-specific data and help inform treatment decisions.
  • Financial balances can be kept track of and managed in Fovea by actions such as winding down AR, posting payments, editing, and reprinting claims for resubmission, bulk upload collections and remittances, printing patient statements, etc. This feature is useful to track and manage hospice finances, and other finances such as skilled nursing facility (SNF) payables if Medicaid is the payer source, manage revenue cycles for home health organizations, and handle payroll, amongst others.
  • Fovea is HIPAA-compliant and SOC2-certified, and helps retain data as per statutory retention requirements.
  • Fovea has extensive capability to connect to external systems via API interfaces; whether it is connecting to the new EHR/ERP or for Single Sign-On.

The Single Sign-On (SSO) feature in Fovea can help the hospice and home health staff reduce time on their EHRs, as the functionality provides them with the ability to acquire historical data from multiple systems instantly by simply logging into Fovea from their current EHR. This makes a very easy Release of Information and downloading workflow for the users. Thus, through SSO, the hospice and home health staff can save time searching through multiple EHRs and enjoy the seamless interoperability between the go-forward EHR, Fovea, and the legacy systems, thereby improving patient continuity of care.

Fovea’s model supports creating statistical reports, dashboards, and graphical analysis tools, with the ability to drill down into the data. This feature would help the hospice and home health staff improve population and public health through more advanced reporting and disease surveillance.

As Fovea is a cloud-based solution, it allows hospice and home health organizations to securely access data anytime and anywhere on a PC, iPad, or mobile device and share information with other healthcare providers, patients, insurance companies, regulators, and auditors as needed.

Thus, Fovea can help hospice and home health facilities to facilitate improved data accessibility, enable interoperability for care coordination and provide analytics data capabilities that would help hospitals the ability to leverage the data in EHRs for quality improvement and patient research.

Related: About Fovea EHR Archive

How Triyam helps Hospice and Home Health Organizations

Triyam has provided such data management solutions for various hospice and home health organizations. Choosing Triyam’s team of experts as your partner provides the extensive experience needed to help your hospice or home health facility meet its data management requirements.

Our team performs data extraction, conversion, migration and archival, based on retention guidelines and organizational needs, with collaboration with the facility at every step of the project. We ensure that our customer’s data is managed in a way that would provide their hospice or home health organization with a higher return on investment, improve their workflow, and help them manage their data in the long run with an optimal data management strategy.

Interested in Triyam’s data management solution for your hospice or home health organization?

Reach out to our team at Info@triyam.com or give us a call at 855-663-2684.