CMS’s patient event notification Condition of Participation (CoP), which goes into effect May 1, 2021, requires all hospitals with an EHR to send electronic patient notifications for patient admissions, discharges and transfers to post-acute providers and suppliers, primary care providers and physicians.
While hospitals often rely on their EHR to support regulatory updates, reaching post-acute providers is a significant gap for EHRs and can prevent organizations from achieving compliance for this particular requirement. Many EHRs have a solution to address physician notifications, but do not offer a comprehensive patient event notification solution for post-acute providers – and a critical component of the CoP is the ability to identify and notify a patient’s established post-acute provider – whether SNF, home health, LTACH, IRF or hospice of an admit, discharge or transfer. Transfers also present an obstacle for hospital EHRs; though a hospital may be able to manually identify admitted patients, transfers are more complex.
It is critical that hospitals have the ability to track and manage patient transitions to and from post-acute care not only to comply with CMS’s patient even notification requirement, but also to streamline care transitions and to achieve better coordinated care. Beyond the regulatory requirements, it has becoming increasingly critical for acute providers to have visibility into home health. The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on post-acute care delivery, and has resulted in a marked shift in patients opting for home health care rather than care in a skilled nursing facility. Though there has historically been a fifty-fifty split in referrals to SNFs and home health, the pandemic has, at times, shifted these referral ratios to favor home health. This trend likely won’t end anytime soon, and as we look beyond the pandemic we can expect that patients will continue to opt for home-based services over institutional settings of care.
CarePort Interop can help
An intermediary for CMS’s patient event notification CoP, CarePort Interop reaches more than 110,000 post-acute providers within CarePort’s expansive network and can be integrated with any acute. The solution is also now available within the Epic App Orchard marketplace, ensuring Epic users never have to leave their own workflows. Through the Epic EHR, CarePort Interop can be embedded directly within the patient record to record the established care provider for notification purposes, and information can be transferred directly from CarePort Interop to Epic via FHIR APIs. With little time remaining until the April 30, 2021 compliance deadline, it is essential that hospitals and health systems identify and implement a solution that meets CMS’s new requirement. Hospitals that do not comply risk future Medicare funding.
Contact CarePort to learn how CarePort Interop can fill gaps in your EHR’s post-acute network.
