5 Steps to Achieving Perpetual Survey Readiness: Efficient Data Collection and Reporting

With CMS intensifying its oversight on hospice and home health organizations, adapting to a proactive compliance posture is essential. There are no more prior notification of surveys, no more block out days, CMS will take over validation surveys by sending in a CMS contracted agent with the Accrediting Organization simultaneously to co-conduct the survey, and state complaint surveys may turn into full validation surveys.  The only way to be ready for surprise surveys is to stay survey ready at all times.  This blog series lays out the Five Most Important Steps to achieve Perpetual Survey Readiness.

Step 1: Efficient Data Collection and Reporting

Achieving survey preparedness and a state of continuous compliance is directly related to the quality of data collected and how that data is used to improve organizational performance. 

For home health and hospice organizations this data can be divided into three district parts.

• Clinical Data
• Human Resource Data
• Administrative Data

Data can be from many sources including external and internal sources. Two of the major sources of data required to have successful surveys include: 

• Incident report data such as falls, infections, patient complaints, adverse events, medication errors, hospitalizations, etc.
• Audit data including clinical records, HR records, focus audits, hand hygiene tracers, and perception of care.

To become more efficient in your data collection and reporting you need to start with an audit of your current strategies. Answer these eight questions:

1. Who is collecting data and how?
2. How efficient is the data collection?
3. Are you collecting all the data you need?
4. How much time is this taking?
5. How much double work is there?
6. How are reports built today and how much manual work is done?
7. Is your organization constantly waiting to the last minute?
8. If we could streamline data collection, how could my resources be better deployed?

Then look at your answers and determine where the streamlining opportunities lie. Stop spending hours manually collecting and aggregating data from your audits and incident reports. Start automating as much as possible especially when it comes to quality and compliance data collection and aggregation. We find these are the most common, and best places to start:

1. Standardize data collection templates and systems. This is particularly important for quality leaders at multi-site agencies, to make it easier to automate data aggregation and reporting, and compare locations apples-to-apples.
2. Automate data aggregation and reporting templates. If you are doing any aggregation, calculations, report creation manually, stop now and find a more automated approach.
3. Enable real-time analytics.  If your quality and compliance data is updated in real time, you can more quickly react to performance opportunities and make a difference.

QAPIplus digitizes and automates data aggregation so you don’t spend time manually collecting, calculating and reporting your quality and compliance data and see your performance in real time. This enables home health and hospice leaders to make better use of your valuable resources and drive performance improvement more efficiently.

To learn more about how QAPIplus can streamline your data collection and reporting, request a demo today.

Read more blog posts about survey readiness, quality and compliance management.