Since 1984 CHS been successfully selling home health care solutions while advocating that the full clinical record should be electronically maintained and using tools in the home, at the point-of-care, as care is delivered as the foundation for substantial improvement in home care. Our UFO®. field solution is built on this principle. Studies has shown it to be the best way to assure accurate, efficient charting. Now, through our CHS UFO initiative, the UFO has become a good clinical PPS solution available to home care agencies.

Pathways: PPS requires more than accuracy and efficiency. Your clinicians must deliver consistent care according to the "best practices" available to you for each patient. the UFO provides the ultimate vehicle for implementing your agency's standards of care through Pathways -- the industry's only system of clinical pathways fully integrated with the charting process.

Integrated OASIS Collection and Validation: The UFO now has full PPS capabilities. The entire OASIS data set is integrated into the care-giving process at the point-of-care. Each OASIS item is collected as its appropriate clinical area is being documented. The unique point-of-care OASIS validation checker ensures that clinicians always capture required OASIS data --correctly. It is run automatically at the conclusion of each charting session in the home.

UFO-Point-of-Care HHRG Grouping: Accurate OASIS data is imperative under PPS! The HHRG's that determine your revenue for each episode are calculated directly from OASIS data. Moreover, OASIS data is highly clinical in nature. As such, it can only be accurately QA'd in the home by the clinician who saw the patient. Our UFO's point-of-care HHRG Grouper, the industry's finest, provides the results of the HHRG calculation with a "drill down" capability that allows the clinician to see precisely how the clinical OASIS data they recorded resulted in the grouper calculation. Mistakes can be spotted where and when they are best corrected - in the home. The HIPPS is then created along with the claim tracker number right from the grouper.

PPS Revenue Forecasting: Agencies using either Haven or the UFO can run our new pms5 PPS Retrospective Report and determine, from a historical prospective, how much they would have been paid for each sixty-day episode under the PPS proposal. The revenue is even compared to the actual cost per episode of care to show the predicted "profit and loss" under PPS for each case. This entire process is automatic and is based entirely on the charting done at the point-of-care.

Concurrent Review: Moving forward, the existing PPS report becomes a vital tool for concurrent case management. Among its features are automatic flagging of Low Utilization Patients (LUPA) patients. Another important feature in the UFO is an alert to the clinician or case manager that a new time point assessment is needed based on a change in the patient's condition (a Significant Change in Clinical Status or CIC).

PPS is truly a defining change for home care. Good management of your clinical processes can literally become the difference between profitability and loss. Agencies need to start automating at the point of care with UFO.