Maxwell TEC & QAPIplus Announce Partnership [Press Release]
Home health and hospice agencies aim to improve the quality of life for their patients through compassionate care. While delivering this care, CMS guidelines require agencies to have thorough patient documentation practices, safety and quality standards, and overall efficient practices in place for when problems arise.
In recent years, CMS increased their standards of care and level of analysis within agency practices to better prevent fraud, waste, or abuse from occurring within the post-acute care industry. To reinforce this, CMS created QAPI (Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement)— a systematic, comprehensive, and data-driven approach to maintain and improve safety and quality in home health and hospice care.
While these changes in protocols are necessary for improving patient outcomes and standards of care, they increase the pressure on agencies and caregivers to formulate the best practices and operate with minimal margin of error. Despite this, QAPI doesn’t have to be overwhelming.
At Maxwell, we aim to help agencies to achieve their highest performance amid the intense QAPI protocols. Having a sound QAPI program in place can minimize the chances for errors in standards, improve patients’ quality of life, and enhance care outcomes. Additionally, a strong QAPI program helps future-proof agencies and protect operations from unnecessary OIG scrutiny.
In this blog, we’ll discuss why the implementation and adherence to a comprehensive QAPI plan is essential for agencies to excel in the modern day—and how Maxwell and QAPIplus support this critical industry need.
Making Compliance Simpler with Maxwell & QAPIplus
To ensure home health and hospice agencies can easily navigate the complexities of quality and compliance, Maxwell recently partnered with QAPIplus—the only CHAP Verified and ACHC Certified digital and automated quality management software.
This partnership aligns with our goals of streamlining operations and ensuring agencies have the tools necessary to deliver optimal care and meet operational standards. The QAPIplus platform is specifically equipped to boost agency’s quality and compliance strategies, ensuring they can perform their care with the utmost confidence.
“We are excited to partner with the technology experts at Maxwell TEC. Together, we are committed to transforming the landscape of home health and hospice care, making it easier for agencies to navigate the complexities of quality and compliance.” - Armine Khudanyan, CEO & Co-Founder, QAPIplus
Through this strategic partnership, we strive to help agencies optimize their levels of care delivery and operational performance while exceeding CMS standards through robust solutions and implementation support.
Data Collection: The Key to a Successful QAPI Program
To improve quality and performance, agencies must start by collecting their data. Thorough data collection and analysis enables agencies to monitor, adjust, and/or pinpoint areas for optimization and care enhancement. Comprehensive data is crucial to identify areas for improvement and inform strategies that boost agency performance ratings. Some of the most important metrics for CMS’s QAPI include:
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Clinical Data: Health and medication records, documentation, HIPAA adherence, and progress notes assist clinicians in enhancing the value of patient care.
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Outcome Measures: Overall patient outcomes, readmission rates, and satisfaction scores provide a comprehensive overview of current care quality.
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Staff Performance: Overall staff feedback provides a window into competency and satisfaction. This metric is instrumental in crafting a future-focused training plan.
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Process Measures: Data related to care processes and control protocols provide unparalleled insight into proper best practices for increased satisfaction and success.
Without comprehensive data and the right experts to interpret it, agency decisions would be based on guesswork instead of solid evidence—that’s where Maxwell steps in. Our expert data analysts and QAPIplus’s software help break down the numbers and point out actionable insights and root causes of problem areas within agencies. Our team offers agencies a full diagnosis of compliance performance, and with the help of our partner, a streamlined approach to QAPI programs.
Continuous Improvement with QAPIplus
Once our team has shared our strategic insights and the structural groundwork for improvement has been laid out, it’s critical for agencies to maintain the momentum and aim for continuous improvement in their new QAPI programs. Often, agencies can arrive at new plans to address specific problems but get stuck in an endless cycle of solving issues as they arise, instead of having consistent visual analysis into what might need to be done in a timely manner.
QAPIplus provides a streamlined approach to QAPI programs for agencies, helping agencies to avoid a vicious cycle of addressing issues as they arise. The QAPIplus software continuously understands agency’s quality performance in real time, analyzes trends as they occur, and allows for quick actions to take place to enhance performance ratings.
Because compliance standards are always evolving, agencies are often under pressure to constantly, manually adjust their compliance programs to meet these standards. QAPIplus’s software automatically stays up to date and informs agencies of changing CMS protocols as they occur. Our solution partner makes it easier for home health and hospice organizations to consistently evaluate their compliance programs against these changing standards, offer actionable changes as they might need to occur, and give agencies confidence in their standards of care.
This blog was originally published as The Key Requirements of a Successful QAPI Program by Maxwell Healthcare Associates on 10/17/23, for Maxwell Healthcare Associates. The Maxwell TEC editorial team has since updated this article to ensure accuracy and relevance.
