What is EVV?

The world of caretaking technology can be pretty complicated. Both technology and the law is changing all the time, which can make it even harder to try and stay on top of if you want to make sure that you’re on the cutting edge of this kind of technology.

Because of the nature of caretaking, it’s only natural that things would be a little complicated. The caretaking industry is highly regulated by the government to ensure that clients aren’t being taken advantage of by the faceless corporations that they require to continue having a decent level of quality of life.

Many of the new regulations that are put on the books come with a whole new market filled with a lot of different pieces of software that can help make sure that the company is following the regulations to a T with incredible ease, sometimes without even adding additional effort.

The specific piece of software that we’ve going to be looking at today is commonly referred to as an EVV system for home care. If you work in the caretaking industry, there’s a good chance that you know all about it. If you don’t, we wrote this article just for you so you could have a better understanding of this topic.

So, What Exactly is EVV?

There are a lot of pieces of software and hardware in the caretaking industry. It’s not uncommon even for people that operate in that industry to not be aware of every single piece of software. So, what exactly is EVV?

It’s actually short for electronic visit verification. It tracks the visits of caretakers electronically so that visits can be verified at a later date. Having a paper trail in the care industry is usually a good idea to keep everyone involved safe.

It is required for IHSS and WPCS workers to electronically check in and out when they get to and leave their client’s homes. In case you didn’t know, IHSS is short for in-home supportive services and WPCS is short for waiver of personal care services. These are two types of care services that people can get for themselves.

We’d cover them in more detail but we won’t have the time in today’s article. Fortunately, this is a topic that the internet has a plethora of information on so you can definitely find resources to learn more about them if you were so inclined.

Moving on, the information that is collected by EVV is stored on a secure website and is accessible through said secure website or through an app on your phone or tablet. This is to make transparency incredibly easy for people that are looking in on their loved ones.

As a side effect, it also makes payroll for the caretakers a lot simpler. These records aren’t for the public to see, but the families of the clients and the caretakers can both access the records with ease through the methods that we mentioned earlier in this article.

Because of this, many agencies will use this information as a part of their payroll software. It only makes sense. This software is already tracking hours, why not use it to make sure that the caretakers are also being paid properly. It’s convenient and simplicity at its best, all rolled into one.

There are a lot of laws that surround the use of EVV, but each state does a lot of the specific details for these laws. The federal law that requires the use of EVV is called the CURES Act, and the EVV mandate is just a part of it.

What is the CURES Act?

As we mentioned, there are a lot of laws that are passed in the United States, especially when it comes to the caretaking profession. The CURES Act is just one of those laws. It was passed in 2016 and is also known as the 21st-Century Cures Act.

There is a lot of information available about this act online, but we’re going to be looking at what the FDA, or Food and Drug Administration, has to say about the Cures Act, considering it’s something that would fall mostly under their jurisdiction. They’d likely have the most to say about it.

The Cures Act is said to have been designed specifically to help accelerate the development of new medical devices and create a more efficient way to get the new innovations in the medical field into the hands of the patients that need them the most as efficiently as possible.

This was one of a whole slew of laws that were passed in hopes of helping to make things run a lot more smoothly so that patients can benefit from them. The CURES Act helped out a lot with the transparency of caretaking so that patients can always see what’s going on.

But, it also helped to make sure that the patient and their care providers are able to see all of the medical care that they’re receiving in one easy place. That makes it easier for everyone involved in keeping the patient healthy, which is a great thing.

This means that the doctor can take a look at the patient’s care history and not only see what they’ve done but also anyone else that’s providing any sort of care to the patient that is required to use EVV. The added convenience makes taking care of patients that much easier.

This also helps further innovation in care methods because doctors are able to look at a wider range of notes about the patient, making it easier to diagnose major issues without ever having the leave the EVV portal to find all of the information that they’re looking for.

How Does EVV Benefit Businesses?

We’ve covered a lot of the ways that EVV benefits the patient, and that was definitely a good place to start. The patient is the most important part of this system, without them everything else that we’re talking about would be entirely pointless.

In fact, all of this innovation has been done with the patient in mind. Putting the patient first almost always ensures that they’re getting the best possible quality of care, and that’s what really matters here. They come to people to help take care of them, so they get taken care of.

That being said, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to make something mandatory that only helped the patient while hurting every other entity that’s required to make it work. That would only end up cutting down on the quality of care that the patients are receiving significantly.

So, how does using EVV help the businesses, nurses, doctors, caretakers, and other entities that have to interact with it? There are a lot of ways, some of which we’ve already gone over briefly. Let’s take a look at a few of the benefits of this system for you now:

• An easier time for doctors looking through records.
  • Medical records can be a complicated thing, even for those that are authorized to look at them. Keeping them all in one place makes things a lot easier for the healthcare practitioners that need to use them the most.
• Higher visibility for certain types of caretakers.
  • Because certain types of caretakers need to use EVV, they’re able to see more clearly what hours they worked while also allowing the patient and their families an easier time making sure that services were actually rendered.
• Lowering payroll expenses.
  • Some companies use software that uses EVV as a primary tool for payroll, which cuts back on how much they need to spend on payroll by a lot.
• An easier time scheduling.
  • This mostly applies to certain kinds of caretakers, but there are pieces of software that do EVV and scheduling, which makes both of these tasks that much more convenient.

This kind of software has revolutionized the way that whole parts of both the healthcare and caretaking industries work for the better in a lot of ways. So many ways, in fact, that it would be hard to cover each and every one of them in this article.

Fortunately, the CURES Act and EVV software are both incredibly easy to learn more about if you know where you’re looking for it. The internet makes this task incredibly easy, and the government has done a pretty good job making sure that this information can be found.

Learning More About Medical Industry Software

If you or one of your loved ones are being taken care of by someone in either the medical industry or the caretaking industry, knowing a bit about the software that they use can make your life a whole lot easier in the long run.

Whether you’re learning about EVV and the CURES Act or something else entirely, this information is available online and can be found with ease. It just takes a bit of time to find it, but before long you can learn about the benefits of all sorts of different kinds of technology in these fields.