Emergency Disaster Plan Software Enhancements

New Home Health and Hospice Agency regulations and requirements for Emergency Disaster planning will be implemented November 16, 2017. Agencies updating and/or establishing Emergency Disaster Plan policies and procedures will now have additional software enhancements for identifying high risk patient characteristics that may be needed during an emergency when identifying patients and the type of assistance required during a disaster or emergency will be required.
Agencies utilizing the Clinical Point of Care software and completing Comprehensive assessments will have Emergency/disaster alerts automatically populate based upon responses entered into the documentation screens of the assessments. The Emergency risks will populate in the new Risk/Alerts tab in the Case Management section of the Comprehensive assessments. Additional fields are also available to indicate if a patient lives in a disaster prone area, evacuation transportation available and any other concerns. Clinicians can then assign an Emergency Risk level based upon clinical judgement upon review of identified risks. To maintain consistent data between comprehensive assessments and the Alerts/Precautions and ADL/IADl assistance fields found in each patient medical information screen, a new button “Updates from assessments” will check items based upon the data entry in the comprehensive assessment.
Medical Information screens in the Main office software have been enhanced. The Emergency button will now include fields for the patient’s Emergency plan. The Therapies button/ Home Management tab contain the ADL/IADL assistance fields.
Agencies now have the ability to generate an Emergency Report for each patient. Agencies that would like clinicians to be able to print an Emergency Report for all active patients from the Clinical Point of care software in the event that the Main office software is not accessible due to utility disruption (electric, internet, etc.) can initiate and override by specific Employee in the Clinical Workstation Setting area in the MISC tab in the Employee database. Agencies will need to mark the new check box “Display ‘Print All’ check box (emergency Info) in Clinical notebooks. The Print All check box can be found on the Main Patient listing screen in the Point of Care Software next to the Emergency Info button.
Main Office Emergency reports and updated Emergency Information are available in the Control Board/ PT Status/ Risk Triage Alerts Emergency tab. Patients may be filtered by Location, Priority/Triage rating and by type of assistance based upon the location of an emergency or disaster. Emergency Reports are available for viewing and printing from this Control Board screen. Emergency Reports will contain patient demographics, Emergency Contacts, Emergency Risks, Medications, Alerts/Precautions, Assistance needed for ADL/IADL and a list of employees scheduled to see the patient in the next 7 days.