Chronic care management (CCM) software can be a valuable tool for healthcare providers who want to improve the efficiency and quality of their remote care management services for patients with chronic conditions while increasing their revenue. Below are ways care management software can help your practice:
- Improve patient engagement and care: CCM software can provide patients with tools and resources to help them better manage their chronic conditions, such as comprehensive patient-centered care plans with patient preferences, prevention reminders, medication reconciliation, medication reminders, and access to educational materials.
- Improving care coordination: CCM software can streamline and automate many of the tasks associated with care coordination, such as scheduling appointments, reviewing patient information, and sharing information among providers.
- Enhance communication: CCM software can facilitate communication between patients, healthcare providers, and the care team by video calls, encrypted messaging and telephone calls. This can help ensure that everyone is in collaboration and working towards common goals.
- Increase efficiency: CCM software can help healthcare providers work more efficiently by helping eliminate care gaps, automating routine tasks associated with care management and billing for the practice to protect the practice in case there is an audit.
- Ensure compliance: Specific CCM software can ensure that your clinic is in compliance with the health plan requirements and regulations surrounding chronic care management services, such as the billing rules and documentation requirements by having mandatory documentation requirements to meet all the required scope of services prior to automatically sending the claims to be billed.
- Improve patient outcomes: By providing more comprehensive and coordinated care to patients with chronic conditions, CCM software can help improve health outcomes and quality of life.
- Increase revenue: Specific ccm platforms can make sure all time spent for ccm services is accounted for that you are not underbilling for patients and can notify you when additional patients can benefit from additional care management activities in a given month.
- Increase ways to provide to provide care management: Specific software platforms, such as CareVitaity’s care management software, can allow for a variety of ways chronic care management can be provided by providing the following chronic care management activities: Chronic care management, principal care management for specialists, transitional care management, remote physiologic monitoring, behavioral health integration, and general care management.
Overall, chronic care management software can be a valuable investment for healthcare providers who want to enhance their care management services, improve patient outcomes for those with chronic conditions and increase revenue while cutting down the overall cost a patient will cost the health care system. CCM software can help your practice provide more effective and high-quality care to your patients by improving care coordination, enhancing communication, improving patient engagement and care, increasing efficiency, ensuring compliance, improving patient outcomes, and increasing revenue.
What Does Chronic Care Management Software Do?
Chronic care management (CCM) software is created to help healthcare providers manage and coordinate care of their patients with chronic conditions more efficiently and effectively Below are examples of key features and functions of CCM software:
- Patient Identification: CCM software can identify which patients are eligible to receive CCM services.
- Patient consent: Some CCM platforms allow you to document verbal and written consent within the platform.
- Comprehensive patient-centered care planning: Robust CCM software have the ability to allow you to document among a robust library of chronic conditions as well as prompt you with answering questions specific to helping you put a comprehensive care plan together. Then, when it is time to do conditions specific portion of the care plan to document the action plan/ goals, interventions, instructions the system is tailored to questions specific to each chronic condition along with allowing for patient preferences and care team assignment. Once their care plan is created, if not done by the provider, it is sent to the provider for review, revision if needed and sign off.
- Care coordination: CCM software can help providers and their clinical staff coordinate care across different settings and among different members of the care team. This may include scheduling appointments, requesting information from other providers, medication reconciliation, medication refill requests, and tracking patient progress.
- Improving Patient engagement: CCM software can note patient preferences and provide patients with tools and resources to help them be more engaged in their care and manage their chronic conditions more effectively, such as access to their comprehensive care plans, educational materials, preventative measures, and medication reminders.
- Enhancing Communication: CCM software can facilitate various types of collaborative communication between patients, providers, and care team members to include encrypted messaging, video conferencing, and telephone calls.
- Documentation and Billing: CCM software can help providers comply with documentation requirements to fulfill the scope of services to bill for the appropriate chronic care management services correctly. This may include requiring certain elements to be documented regardless if time is met before billing for ccm, generating reports, tracking time spent along with billing codes, and maintaining accurate patient records to be placed back into the provider’s EHR/ EMR system.
- Health analytics and reporting: CCM software can provide health data and analytics to the providers and their care team to help them monitor patient progress, identify trends, and measure outcomes.
- Integration with other healthcare software systems: CCM software can integrate with other healthcare systems, such as electronic health records (EHRs/ EMRs), to provide more comprehensive patient health information for improved care management and care coordination. Some CCM software can even integrate with your billing system and automatically drop the proper codes to your practice management system to bill for CCM seamlessly.
Overall, CCM software is designed to help healthcare providers deliver more effective and coordinated care to patients with chronic conditions. By identifying eligible patients, streamlining the patient consent process, providing the ability for comprehensive patient-centered care planning, facilitating care coordination, improving patient engagement, enhancing communication, facilitating documentation and accurate billing, providing health data analytics and reporting, and integrating with other healthcare software. CCM software can help providers optimize their care management services, improve patient outcomes, decrease the total cost of care and increase their revenue.
Improve Patient Outcomes With Chronic Care Management
Chronic care management (CCM) is a healthcare service used to help patients with chronic disease management to help them manage their health more effectively, potentially reverse certain chronic conditions, and help improve their quality of life. CCM involves a collaborative approach to care that engages patients in their own care and helps them connect with support and resources they need to manage their health over the long term. Below are some examples how CCM can improve patient outcomes:
- Better management of chronic conditions: Patients receive with ongoing CCM support and resources to help better manage their chronic conditions including regular check-ins with care teams and healthcare providers, medication management support, nutrition and exercise counseling, and additional healthcare coaching.
- Improved medication adherence: Patients with chronic conditions often need to take multiple medications, which can be difficult to manage and keep track of the frequency with which their medication they should be taking. CCM can help patients stay on track with their medications, understand if the patient is experiencing side effects, check for medication interactions, identify if the patient has any new allergies.
- Patient engagement increased: CCM helps patients to become more involved in their own care by providing them with the knowledge they need to effectively help manage their health. This can help patients be more invested in their health outcomes and feel more in control of their health,
- Improved care coordination and communication: CCM involves multiple healthcare providers and clinical staff collaborating together and working towards the same goals to manage a patients’ health
- Reduced ER visits, hospital admissions and readmissions: Chronic condition patients are at increased risk for ER visits, hospital admissions and readmissions. CCM can help to decrease these risks by providing patients with ongoing support and monitoring to help prevent a crisis situation.
Overall, chronic care management can help improve patient outcomes by providing patients with continuous resources and support to better manage their chronic conditions more effectively and efficiently. By improving medication adherence, increasing patient engagement, collaborative communication and care coordination, and reducing ER visits, hospital admissions and readmissions allow CCM patients to live happier and healthier lives with fewer health complications.
Streamline Chronic Care Management for your Practice
Chronic care management (CCM) helps healthcare providers and their care team manage patients with chronic conditions more effectively and efficiently remotely. Managing CCM services can be challenging since it involves additional resources and an auditor for their care team. Below are ways to streamline CCM for your practice:
- Invest in a robust CCM software: CCM software can help automate many of the tasks associated with chronic care management, such as patient outreach, care coordination, and documentation. This can help streamline your workflow and free up staff time for other tasks as well as depending on the software chosen can have auditing capabilities for scope of services being met before billing is completed. Additionally, a robust CCM platform will have comprehensive disease specific care planning built in that can be modified for a particular patient for their action plans/ goals and interventions/ instructions.
- Train clinical staff workflows and requirements for CCM: It’s important that all staff members are fully trained on CCM workflows, documentation requirements, and processes you put in place for your practice to provide these services. This can help ensure that everyone understands the tasks are completed in a timely, compliant and efficient manner.
- Identify high-risk patients: Identifying high-risk patients can allow you to focus your resources on those patients initially if you would like since they may have the greatest impact.
- Use remote patient monitoring and telehealth: Remote patient monitoring and telehealth technologies are used to provide CCM services when patients are remote allowing you to help a wider range of patients and improve the efficiency of your CCM services.
- Improve coordination with other providers: CCM involves a coordinated approach to care collaboration among different providers in different care settings to help ensure patients receive the most comprehensive and coordinated care possible.
In summary, streamlining chronic care management (CCM) for your practice requires careful planning, investment in the right tools and technologies, and a commitment to collaboration and communication. By taking these steps, you can help ensure that your CCM services are effective, efficient and deliver the best possible outcomes for your patients.
Ensure Compliance with Medicare and Insurance Company CCM Regulations
Chronic care management (CCM) services are subject to a variety of regulations, guidelines, and audits from Medicare and health plans. Ensuring compliance with these regulations is critical for healthcare providers who offer CCM services. Below are ways to stay compliant with CCM regulations:
- Understand the regulations: It’s important to not only read the CCM regulations and guidelines but have thorough understanding of them before providing CCM services. This includes understanding the eligibility requirements, documentation requirements in case of an audit, and billing codes.
- Train staff on regulations and guidelines: Ensure that all staff members involved in gaining consent, providing CCM services and/or billing for CCM services are properly trained on the regulations and guidelines to make sure everyone is following the same processes and the services are delivered consistently.
- Full scope of service documentation is required: Comprehensive documentation for the full scope of services along with the time requirements is required prior to billing for CCM per the regulations. Make sure to document all CCM services accurately, thoroughly, and cover all of the patient’s chronic conditions.
- Select a CCM software that makes sure the compliance requirements are met as well as the time requirements to bill for CCM. Since there are many CCM solutions that are triggered to bill for CCM based on time when the full scope of services to bill CCM are not met which has caused clinics to fail an audit.
- Audit, monitor, and track compliance: Have an auditor as part of your team, monitor, audit, and track your team’s compliance with CCM regulations to ensure that you are meeting all requirements to bill for the scope of services along with the time requirements. This audit can include reviewing CCM documentation, billing, and reimbursement.
Overall, ensuring compliance with CCM regulations requires a thorough understanding of the regulations, a compliant ccm software solution, thorough documentation, staff training, and ongoing auditing to monitor compliance. By following these guidelines and performing audits, you will provide high-quality, cost-effective care to your patients and pass any audits that may come your way.
Create Care Plans with Ease
Creating care plans for patients with chronic conditions can be a time-consuming task for healthcare providers and many times prefer to hand this work to their RN Care Manager to complete and then send it back for their review, make any changes, and sign off. Below are some ways to make the comprehensive care planning process easier and more efficient:
- Use CCM software: CCM software can help automate the care planning process by providing templates can provide templates, prompts and reminders to make documentation quicker since it can allow for common action plans/ goals and interventions/ instructions automatically suggested for you to include for the specific chronic conditions and revise if needed instead of typing everything out which takes much more time. This can help ensure that all necessary elements are in the care plan and it is consistent with regulatory requirements.
- Create your own care planning templates if needed: Creating care plan templates can help you save time and ensure that all necessary elements are included in the plan which are usually provided in CCM software. However, you can create your own templates for different conditions or patient populations to streamline the process if the templates you would like are different from your care planning planning templates in your CCM software or choose not to use a CCM software for care planning and create all the chronic condition care planning templates on your own.
- Patient Collaboration: Involving patients in the care planning process can help with meeting the preferences and needs of patients and have them more engaged in the care management process to help with better patient outcomes. Involving patients in the care planning process allows them to discuss their preferences, goals and concerns which allows the care plan to be developed in a way that is more meaningful for them.
- Goal Focused: Care plans should be focused on goals and outcomes to help ensure the plan is patient-centered and that progress is measurable and followed over time.
- Process in place for care plan revisions: Care plans should be revised when a new problem is added to ensure that they remain relevant and effective. There needs to be a process in place to notify an RN care manager when a new chronic problem is to be revised if the provider is not doing the care plan revision. Also, there are care planning programs that can notify when a new chronic problem has been added so a care plan revision is not missed and templates designed for revisions in certain CCM softwares that can make revisions much faster.
In summary, creating care plans more efficiently to ensure the best outcomes requires a patient-centered approach, the use of CCM software and templates, a focus on goals, and regular notification of new chronic problems and care plan revisions. By following these guidelines, you can create care plans that are effective, efficient, and tailored to the needs and preferences of your patients.
CCM Software Can Maximize Reimbursements and Minimize Hassle for Chronic Disease Management
Chronic care management (CCM) software can be a valuable tool for healthcare providers who offer CCM services. There are different levels of CCM software and the higher level tools are more efficient, enforce compliance in the way they are built and can help maximize care and revenue per patient. Below is a list of ways CCM software can help maximize reimbursements and minimize hassle for chronic care management:
- Comprehensive Documentation: CCM software can help the documentation process by providing prompts, templates and reminders to include required items for recording patient information and services provided to make sure the scope of services is completed in documentation prior to billing based on time alone. This type of comprehensive CCM software will help make sure regulatory requirements are met to ensure a practice passes any CCM audits.
- Ensure billable time is not missed: Many times when reviewing patients charts the time is not documented if the patient does not answer the phone but later calls back or when a provider reviews a care plan for sign off. Having a CCM software to catch missed times like these and others helps you to maximize on your billable time.
- Automate Coding and billing: CCM software can make the billing process easy by automating the coding and billing process. This can help ensure that billing codes are correct and insurance reimbursements are maximized.
- Improve patient engagement: CCM software can help improve patient engagement by communicating with their care team through encrypted messaging or apps, receive reminders and education to help patients be more engaged in their care and improve their outcomes.
- Monitor patient progress: CCM software can help monitor patient progress by providing real-time data on patient health status, see graphical physiologic data from remote patient monitoring and adherence to the care plan. This can help find potential issues early on and allow for timely interventions.
- Ensure compliance: Specific CCM software can help ensure compliance with regulatory requirements by providing templates , required fields, and prompts for documentation, billing, and reporting. However, not all CCM software is built in this fashion. Therefore, for the small increase in price you may pay for a software that can help ensure compliance and avoid potential penalties. However, it is still helpful to have auditors on hand to audit the care team to keep them on their toes.
CCM software can help maximize reimbursements and minimize hassle for chronic disease management by automating documentation and billing, ensuring billable time is not missed, improving patient engagement, monitoring a patient’s progress, and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements. By using CCM software, healthcare providers can provide high-quality, time-efficient, and cost-effective care to their patients with chronic diseases.
What to look for in a Chronic Care Management Platform
When deciding on which Chronic Care Management (CCM) platform to select, there are several factors to review. Here are some things to look for in a CCM platform:
- Compliance: Make sure the platform is compliant with Medicare and other insurance company regulatory requirements for CCM services. There are many CCM software platforms that will accidentally have a provider bill for time but not scope of service requirements being met which can cause issues if faced with an audit. Additionally, there are platforms that may not capture all the time being spent doing CCM services in a given month. Therefore, before selecting a CCM platform, understand the way a CCM platform is billed that prior to sending a claim for billing that both the time and scope of services required to bill for CCM services is met.
- Easy to use: The CCM platform should be easy to use for both healthcare providers, clinical staff and patients if they need access. The platform should have a seamless interface to other healthcare IT systems that need to transmit data, give easy functionality to move from screen to screen when needed and be detailed enough to capture the data needed to have detailed documentation and clear instructions or training on how to use it.
- Customization: The platform should allow for customization of care plans to meet the needs of patients and providers.
- EHR Integration: The CCM platform should integrate seamlessly with Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to create time efficiencies by reducing duplicate efforts and, streamline documentation and seamlessly put documentation in the correct place in a patient’s chart once completed.
- Patient engagement features: The platform should include features such as messaging, reminders, and educational resources to encourage patient engagement and improve outcomes.
- Health analytics and reporting: The platform should provide health data analytics and reporting to help healthcare providers monitor patient progress, identify trends, and help a patient improve their health outcomes.
- Coding and Billing capabilities: The platform should have coding and billing capabilities to CCM services to automatically send the claims to the billing system if requested to be time efficient. IF you wish not to have claims automatically drop it at least be able to have detailed reporting per patient
- Privacy and Security: The platform should have strong security and privacy measures in place such as bifactor authentication to protect patient information and comply with HIPAA regulations.
In summary, when selecting a CCM platform, it is important to consider these items: compliance, usability, customization, integration, patient engagement, analytics and reporting, coding and billing, and privacy and security. By selecting a platform to meet your needs, healthcare providers can effectively manage chronic conditions remotely to help improve patient outcomes.
What Makes CareVitality’s Care Management Software Unique
CareVitality’s Care Management Software has several unique features that set it apart from other Chronic Care Management (CCM) platforms. Here are some of the key features that make it unique:
- CareVitality’s Care Management Platform gives the ability allows an organization to choose from a myriad of chronic care services such as:
- Chronic Care Management
- Principal Care Management
- Remote Patient Monitoring
- Transitional Care Management
- Behavioral Health Integration
- Annual Wellness Exams/ Health Risk Assessments
Therefore, the CareVitality Care Management application provides one place where you can pick from a variety of care management services to provide with only one point of EHR and PM (billing) integration. Additionally, if you need additional resources to help supplement your existing care team we can provide the virtual RN care managers and clinical staff to help you maximize your care and revenue for providing these services.
- Customizable care plans: The platform allows healthcare providers and their RN care Managers to create customized care plans for each patient based on their specific goals, preferences, and needs.
- Privacy and Security: The platform should have strong privacy and security measures in place such as bifactor authentication to protect patient information, your practice, and comply with HIPAA regulations.
- Integration with multiple EHRs and Practice Management systems: The platform seamlessly integrates with multiple Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to streamline documentation and reduce duplication of effort.
- Patient engagement tools: The platform includes the ability to do encrypted messaging and reminders to encourage patient engagement and improve outcomes.
- Advanced healthcare analytics and reporting: The platform provides robust health data analytics and reporting tools to help healthcare providers monitor patient progress, improve care quality, and identify trends.
- Integration with multiple Practice Management systems: CareVitaity’s care management platform automatically codes the claim and drops the claim for each patient directly into your Practice Management systems (PMs) to make billing for care management codes such as CCM, BHI, PCM, GCM and RPM easy. Therefore, CareVitality’s Care Management platform automates billing and coding for Care Management services, ensuring hassle free, accurate and timely reimbursement.
- Expert support: CareVitality provides expert support to healthcare providers and their staff throughout the CCM, BHI, RPM, GCM and/ or PCM process, including training, implementation, and ongoing support.
- Regulatory compliance: The platform is fully compliant with Medicare and other insurance company regulations for CCM, BHI, RPM, GCM and/ or PCM services, ensuring that healthcare providers can maximize reimbursement while minimizing risk.
Overall, CareVitality’s Care Management Software provides a multitude of benefits from customizable care plans, patient engagement tools, EHR integration, PM integration, advanced analytics and reporting, expert support, and regulatory compliance. By leveraging these features, healthcare providers can effectively manage chronic conditions and provide high-quality care to their patients. Additionally, there are many other features that sent CareVtality’s Chronic Care Management software apart from others and we would be happy to discuss with you further at 800-376-0212 or email us to set up a meeting at contact@carevitality.com.
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- Chronic Care Staffing: How to Manage Care Staffing in the New Healthcare Environment
- What is Chronic Care Management? Best Practices for CCM
- CMS Chronic Care Management Services and Your Practice
- Principal Care Management Guidelines
- Transitional Health Services and Your Practice
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- How to Incorporate a Behavioral Health Integration Program
- What are the benefits of integrated behavioral health care
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- CMS Medicare Fact Sheets