Electronic visit verification (EVV) is a federal requirement from the 21st Century Cures Act, passed by Congress in 2016 to cut down on fraud and make sure people receive the care they need. See Section 12006 of the 21st Century Cures Act.
The short version of the law, as it applies to home care, is that home care providers are required to electronically record their start time and end times. Electronic visit verification is required for Home Care Agencies contracted to provide Medicaid services.
EVV requires that the following information be captured electronically for personal care services:
For a couple of decades, most home care agencies used software systems to manage their schedules, and most of those systems included a telephony system whereby the caregiver would call a toll free number and clock in at the start of their shift and then clock out at the end of their shift. The telephony system is a fantastic solution because it recorded the phone number they called from, the time of the call, and the employee's identification number.
The telephony system could compare the phone number the caregiver called from confirming that they used a care recipients phone and know they were with the care recipient. Caregivers who used their own phone, or a phone not owned by the care recipient could be identified.
The majority of telephony systems will continue to comply with the EVV requirements, so long as the phone used is a landline. EVV requires that the location be verifiable, and a landline is identified by a physical residence and thus verifiable.
Cell phones, on the other hand, are not verifiable. Although the telephony system can verify the cell phone belongs to the care recipient, it is not able to know its location because, by definition, it is mobile. This would eliminate the use of cell phones for telephony purposes without another way to verify the employee's location at the time of the call.
In order to bridge the gap and to enable the continued use of cell phones with the CareComplete telephony system, we have created an app that will provide a six digit code that the caregiver will use when clocking in and clocking out. The app works by anonymously capturing the phones GPS location and returning a six digit location code that the caregiver can use to identify their location. The only information stored is the caregiver's employee identification number and their latitude and longitude number. Nothing about the care recipient, nor the devices information is stored with the location code.
When the caregiver is ready to clock in they will use the app to generate the location code by entering their employee identification number, which is the same number they use with the telephony system. The app will return the six digit location code. The caregiver can then call the CareComplete telephony system. When they are prompted they will enter the location code into the system.