Home Health & Hospice Week

Here's how to coordinate your nurses' and therapists' assessments. Question: Our clinicians often input the start of care (SOC) on a patient who will need physical therapy before the physical therapist does an evaluation to determine how many PT visits will be needed. However, this requires us to revise the SOC to reflect the number of anticipated visits. Could our clinicians delay inputting the SOC until our therapists can evaluate the patient? If so, do we need to revise the SOC to reflect the date of the therapist's evaluation? Confused Subscriber Answer: You can absolutely "hold your assessment open until after the therapy evaluation," says consultant Judy Adams with LarsonAllen in Charlotte, N.C. That's because "the home health conditions of participation allow five days from the SOC date to complete the comprehensive assessment, which includes the current version of OASIS," she explains. Tricky: Your SOC date should be the date [...]