Four EVV Challenges and How Addressing Them Can Improve Care and Operations

With the dust settling on electronic visit verification (EVV) compliance, it’s time to evaluate the main challenges payers and providers face in the EVV space. It’s also important to consider how to look beyond minimum compliance and consider turning those challenges into strategies that can help improve operations, enhance outcomes and ensure access to care is not disrupted.

1. Staying ahead of the curve

The landscape of healthcare can shift at the drop of a hat. The pandemic proved that. But we also know it doesn’t take a world-wide health crisis to spur changes in healthcare. Payment models will continue to evolve, and more and more services will continue to be pushed to the home and community-based communities, keeping patients in their homes. The increased demand for providers to provide service in the home will continue to be present in our communities.

EVV is just one aspect of the ever-changing regulations and rules with which providers and payers must comply. The best way to ensure long-term success is to choose a technology partner with the experience and resources to develop innovative technology that can evolve and grow as healthcare evolves. With an integrated solution to allow easy access to care at the forefront of our development, Netsmart is able to offer multiple solution sets to meet the emerging needs for your agency.

2. Effective reporting

Compliance with EVV emphasizes providers are collecting data on the individuals they serve and submitting it to a secure online portal. By optimizing care based on that information, providers and payers can get more out of EVV than simply verifying that care took place. But very few vendors can take a deep dive into what that data represents and turn it into insights that can support an extremely vulnerable population.

Netsmart continuously refines reporting capabilities to help streamline operational efficiencies of EVV for both providers and payers. As a result, we can help act on data with proactive measures that improve outcomes for your members, enhancing overall quality and provider adoption.  Having real-time data gives care coordinators at the payer level access to clinical decisions. This is an important aspect of operationalizing EVV.

3. Workforce Retention

The programs affected by EVV have been facing staffing shortages for years due to reimbursement rates, burnout and regulatory changes. How do you improve retention? With innovative, user-friendly technology that increases efficiency in daily workflows.

The Netsmart EVV solution automates billing practices, simplifies visibility into employees’ day-to-day activities, ensures employees are paid correctly and on time, and ultimately can increase workplace satisfaction. Easing the administrative burden also can help agencies and caregivers provide quality, consistent care to keep individuals in the comfort of their homes long term. Caregivers want a simple, light-weight solution that is easy to learn and can help them complete their day-to-day work and get paid. A simple app can help members get the care they need, and providers deliver the services expected.

4. Compliance

The first crucial step in EVV compliance is an adequately trained and informed provider network. Both payers and providers can be challenged to share information whether it’s a payer announcing a policy change or an agency keeping their staff trained on a new workflow. Open communication and forums are the keys to success for program integrity.

We’ve seen that markets with the greatest success in compliance have robust communication plans. At the payer level, having one public-facing site for the provider network to access updated information and FAQ documents is key. Ongoing town hall sessions with your EVV partner have proven to be valuable resources for payers and providers to share pain points and successes. Stakeholder meetings driven by provider associations are invaluable to vendors to keep up to date with where the providers are.

Providers: Standardizing your training plan for your staff to help bridge gaps that may occur with consistent turnover in these areas. Training effectively and often is the best practice. Netsmart offers an abundance of training materials, training manuals, click-through tutorials and videos for users to access any time and can prevent losing the momentum for direct care access. Take advantage!

As we continuously work with our clients to help operationalize EVV excellence, we understand that it's a tool to support caregiver workflow efficiencies, staff retention, improve patient outcomes and drive a streamlined healthcare delivery. Having a fully integrated EVV technology with claims processing, social determinants of health observations, and real-time data collection and sharing will help shift EVV from a matter of compliance to a tool for productivity, driving health-related metrics at the aggregated level. We continue to advance the visit verification solution, anticipating advancement in the industry for value-based care to manage the high-risk cohorts and population levels.