Home healthcare services are sometimes needed to completely treat a patient. These services include things like physical and occupational therapy, special nursing, among other things.

Administering healthcare at home poses a number of problems. For one, it’s more difficult to track fraudulent behavior of home healthcare agencies. Back in the 1990s, some home healthcare agencies would visit patients who were not homebound or didn’t meet the criteria for home healthcare. And some would even bill for visits they didn’t make.

Because of these things, the OASIS assessment was implemented.

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OASIS (Outcome and Assessment Information Set) is a data collection tool used in the United States by Medicare to ensure that home healthcare agencies are providing standard quality care to patients.

According to the home healthcare initiative, standard quality care should include the below requirements:

• Effectiveness. This simply means that quality care is provided to patients.
• Efficiency. Ensuring the best quality and health benefit is achieved for health resources used.
• Equity. Ensuring all patients receive the same quality of care.
• Patient-focused. Making sure the needs of the patient are met in terms of care, education, and support.
• Safety. Preventing bodily harm to everyone.
• Timeliness. Care to be provided with as little delay as possible.

OASIS Data Collection Tool

The OASIS tool can be very time consuming and difficult to use for the collection of data. However, it is a necessary step in ensuring patients are being treated properly and to reduce fraud in home healthcare.

The OASIS tool is focused mostly on the outcome of patients’ treatment from home healthcare agencies. Having this tool in place forces these healthcare providers to ensure they are being as effective as possible when treating patients.

Despite its usefulness, many home healthcare agencies dread the process because it’s so cumbersome. Not only that, but making incorrect records, or not recording important details could result in lack of payment from insurance companies.

This is especially the case since the move to a value-based payment system in the healthcare sector. Fortunately for you as a home healthcare provider, there are things that can be done to make this process much better.

Read More: 3 Problems Outsourced Medical Coders Can Solve

Outsourcing OASIS Processes

One thing that can reduce errors and the likelihood of non-payment with the OASIS tool is regular OASIS assessments. And to reduce the burden of the entire OASIS process, you may consider outsourcing to specialists.

But should your home healthcare agency outsource OASIS assessments?

Benefits of Outsourcing Home Health Coding and OASIS Reviews

There are several benefits to doing this.

• Outsourcing to specialists means the OASIS assessments will go much faster and they are much more thorough and accurate.
• These outsourcing companies generally hire well-trained experts to handle home health coding. So your home health care agency is benefiting from top-notch expertise.
• These specialists are focused on a single task: being as thorough as possible with coding and assessments. This ensures that no critical data is left out, and your agency gets paid fully for the services provided.

The OASIS tool can be very challenging to use and takes a lot of time away from other duties in home healthcare agencies. However, agency owners have the option to outsource these activities to specialist companies, like Infinit-O.

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