GPS Mobile Phone Tracking For Home Heathcare Article

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GPS Mobile Phone Tracking for Home Heathcare

Author: Richard Ward

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In recent legislated Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) tests in various states across the US, aimed at improving efficiencies and compliance for Home Healthcare reimbursement, "reality" has come crashing in on these critical tests. The discovery that not every Home Healthcare patient has a land line telephone! Recent reports show that in some cases "Exceptions" for these EVV visits exceed 70%. Not very efficient we think.

I bet if you have been in Homecare for very long this discovery seems like trite information to you. The land line is required when a standard telephone call is made to log nurse location, time and activities. We have found, through experience, that when Caregivers arrive they either find no phone at all or a cell phone. When faced with the choice to spend the elderly person phone minutes or their own, the Caregiver will generally use their own phone. Does this sound familiar to you? And if there even is a telephony system being used to track that Caregiver mobile phone, is it economical? Can the service be changed easily if you are dissatisfied?

We have seen agencies provide cell phones to Patients who do not have phones in order to ensure they can track the necessary visit data. Vendors involved with the EVV State run tests have implemented a cumbersome data collection device on site for those people with no phones. This certainly is a creative solution but faces resistance. Not only from the Caregiver's willingness to learn yet another technology, but also from obvious strong market trends.

The following Bureau of Labor Statistics Chart shows a shift in expenditures towards cellular phone service by age group. You will see that the larger shift was for all age groups under 55. This changed from 2001 when the majority of total telephone expenditures for all age groups were residential telephone/pay phone service expenditures. You can see the gradual shift in this chart in cell phone use up until 2007. The group no one seems to be focused on is the 65 and older crowd - our customers! From 2001 to 2007 people 65 years and older spent 13.1% of telephone expenses on cell phones to 32.8% in 2007. A huge increase in adoption of technology. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics).

We contend that this trend shows that more and more elderly are either not going to have a phone (for economical reasons) or they will have a cell phone or VOIP phone of some nature. Combine the obvious shift to cellular - but not total abandonment of land line technology - it makes total sense to us that it is critical that Agencies deploy a solution that can do both land line and GPS mobile phone tracking collection of location data. The rule should be to simplify the visit for the Caregiver. So an integrated GPS and land line solution would be preferable.

In making a decision what system to deploy for visit verification, which includes tracking nurse location, work time, attendance and activities we highly recommend a solution that offers both GPS Mobile Phone Tracking and Standard Caller ID location services obtained by using a land line. There are vendors out there that seem to concentrate on one of the other. We recommend to find ones who have integrated both.

About Author

I am CEO of Caretime, LLC which provides employee management solutions for Medical, Home Care, Healthcare, Staffing, Healthcare at Home (consumers) and other medical or healthcare related services . These solutions enable our customers to accurately track time, attendance, and activities of its remote workers.

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GPS Mobile Phone Tracking for Home Heathcare