Home Health Agency Records
Delivered April 15, 2020. Contributor: Megan B.
Goals
To find case studies on how home health care agencies store patient records and disseminate them.
Early Findings
- The required retention period for home health agencies is five years from the month the cost report is filed with the intermediary, unless local regulations stipulate longer.
- Patient records should "contain
documentation needed to properly identify the patient and verify appropriate care rendered."
- Furthermore, patients who are transferred must have their records supplied within 2 working days.
- Patient records must be kept confidential, only accessible by authorized persons.
- Electronic signatures must be authenticated and secure.
- Patient records should be destroyed after 10 years.
- Several platforms offer medical and non-medical options for patient record-keeping for home health agencies. MatrixCare fully manages patient records between carers and clinicians. AxisCare and AlayaCare help manage non-medical care given to home-based patients.
- AlayaCare offers some case studies on its website, here.
Proposed next steps:
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We recommend building on these Early Findings to detail 2-3 case studies of home health agencies managing patient records. These case studies will discuss how a patient record is created, how it receives data from outside sources, how it is stored and how dissemination is controlled. These will be US-based case studies.
Alternatively, we could look at 2-3 vendors of home health agency software that also maintain patient records. For each, we will give a brief overview of the company, describe their main product features, including things like access control, receiving information from outside sources, storage and