Log Every Visit!
Posted by Mike Ferris on Friday, October 24, 2008 and posted in HospiceWe hear it from “liaisons” all the time: “Well, I just stopped by to say hello and see if the family had any more questions. I was in the hospital anyway, so I thought I’d check with them. It really wasn’t a visit, so I didn’t write it down.”
It really was a visit: Every face-to-face contact with a patient or family is a visit, period. You need to increase admissions, and if the program rep or nurse is going back multiple times to get (or not get) the consent signed, then you need to know that. Multiple visits represent a performance problem that needs to be addressed.
And what was the outcome? So if your staff is making multiple visits, are they then documenting the outcome? If there’s no documentation, you can’t help them. And if they’re not reporting multiple visits because they know it’s a performance problem, what are they doing all day?
Make sure that every visit has a coded result and check the reason codes if nothing happened!