Key components of the home care and hospice health record database
Home and community-based long-term care and support services inclusive of home health and hospice care have been growing as cost-effective substitutes of institutionalization. Home health and hospice care normally extends in the following palliative care fields: physician care, nursing care, psychological care, medication management and caregiver support. To accommodate these services, there is a need to have databases that serve the following obligations.
They store patient records like diagnoses, medications, and progress notes that are of great help to nurses, billers, schedulers and management. Secondly, scheduling, recurring visits are scheduled depending on the physicians’ orders and it helps in identifying unfulfilled orders. The database enables patient needs to be matched to staff qualifications (Vincent, 96). Thirdly, hospice, the databases give the history of a patient’s status or billing reasons and track bereavement actions for hospice patients and their families. Fourthly, billing and receivables, the patients’ bills and negotiated contracts can easily be found here. The home-based and hospice care databases give addresses, administrator names, phone numbers, and state recordkeeping status for health care providers.
Federal certification classifications are included. Provider types in the directory are home health agencies, boarding care homes, hospices, home-care providers, supervised living facilities, housing with services, hospitals and non-long term care providers. Regulatory EnvironmentIn cases of creating record retention schedule, home-based and hospice care providers are required to use national record retention that is normally established within the Federal Register and other acts such as the Higher Education Act of 1965 requirements for information disclosure. However, individual states have different retention requirements. In case certain state requirements are absent, the providers are supposed to maintain health information in the database for not less than a period specified by the state’s statute of limitations or for a length of time sufficient for compliance with laws and regulations. When a patient is a minor, the providers should always try to keep important information in the federal databases until the patient undergoing treatment attains the age of an adult plus which is in accordance to the duration allowed by the statute of limitations (Tavana, 237).
Unique Requirements
Maintenance of health databases is essential in tracking the health records of an individual. The databases have to meet the following requirements:- Make sure that the patient’s health information and data is available to meet the requirements of continued patient care, research, education, legal necessities, and other legitimates applications of the organization.- Comprise procedures and rules that dictate what kind of information is stored, the duration for which it is stored, and the medium of storage on which it will be sustained.- Give a clear destruction policy and procedure that involve appropriate mechanisms of destruction for every medium that information is properly preserved all the time.Importance of continually reviewing documentation
Reviewing documentation allows the evaluated material to be entered directly in the patient’s electronic medical record. The information is hence accessible to all team members implying that the …
