For PCA, CFSS and home care

Home care where the visit and the claim agree

For Minnesota agencies providing PCA, CFSS and home health. Caregivers check in and out on the AraSync mobile app, visits go to HHAeXchange, and care plans, supervision and authorizations sit on the same client file as the claim. In personal care, the state checks the visit itself, not only the paperwork about it.

A PCA visit, start to finish

Visits that verify themselves.

Field staff check in at the door and check out with the client’s signature. The office sees the units and the HHAeXchange acceptance without anyone typing them in.

  • Check-in location compared with the client’s home address
  • Client signature captured on the phone at check-out
  • Units counted and sent to HHAeXchange
Illustrative example: a PCA visit checked in, signed and accepted by HHAeXchange.

EVV is a condition of payment

Minn. Stat. § 256B.073 implements the federal 21st Century Cures Act requirement for electronic visit verification. Six elements have to be captured for every visit.

What gets captured

The type of service, the person receiving it, the date, the location, the person providing it, and the time the service starts and ends. Times, not a duration entered afterwards.

Submitted, not just captured

Capturing a visit is half the obligation. The record also has to reach the state’s aggregator, and AraSync submits visits to HHAeXchange directly.

One visit record

A caregiver checks in and out on the mobile app, and the same visit record feeds EVV and billing. Nobody re-keys the visit into a second system, so there are fewer mismatches between two vendors to reconcile.

The six EVV elements
  • The service Type of service delivered
  • The client Who received it
  • The date Date of service
  • The location Where it happened
  • The worker Who provided it
  • Start and end When it began and ended
Minn. Stat. 256B.073

Care plans and qualified professional supervision

Each client’s care plan lists the duties the caregiver is there to perform. In AraSync the care plan lives on the client file and is available in the mobile app as well as on the web.

Minn. Stat. § 256B.0659 requires qualified professional supervision of PCA services. In the first year of service the interval is tighter, and the visit has to be documented, not only performed.

AraSync tracks the initial supervision visit for each client and records the next date due on every supervision form. Clients who have opted in to text messages get a reminder the day before and the morning of the initial visit. The QP supervision record sits on the client file, where a reviewer will look for it.

The usual problem is not a missed visit. It is a visit that happened and was never written down, which in an audit amounts to the same thing.

Qualified professional supervision
  1. Care delivered PCA visits under the care plan
  2. QP supervises The supervision visit
  3. Documented On the supervision form
  4. Next due recorded Set on every form

Authorizations lapse quietly

PCA and home health run on authorized units. Service often continues after an authorization lapses, because nobody sees the lapse until the denial arrives.

Units against what is left

Units are counted against the authorization as visits are delivered, not reconstructed at month end.

Expiry surfaced early

An authorization nearing its end date, or running short on units, is flagged while there is still time to request more.

Service outside a window

A visit delivered before the effective date or after the expiration is flagged and held back from billing for review.

CFSS transition

Minn. Stat. § 256B.85 moves work off the PCA program. PCA and CFSS can run side by side in AraSync during the change.

Where agencies get caught

Time entered later, from memory

A visit reconstructed at the end of the week is not verified, however honest the reconstruction. It is also the pattern that produces overlapping visits for one caregiver.

Timesheets signed in bulk

A responsible party signature applied to two weeks of visits at once carries little weight if the visits were never attested one by one.

The second system nobody reconciles

An agency capturing EVV in one place and billing from another eventually discovers the two disagree, usually when a payer asks.

Supervision that lapsed quietly

Nothing stops service when a QP visit is overdue. The consequence arrives much later, applied to every visit in between.

Shared care that reads as duplicate billing

One caregiver serving two clients in the same session under § 256B.0659 is lawful and is billed as its own arrangement. Systems not built for it either block the second visit or make it look like a duplicate. AraSync links the two visits to one shared session with a single check-in and check-out, and bills each client at their own rate.

A worker not yet affiliated with the MCO

In Minnesota, a PCA worker needs an affiliation with each managed care organization the agency bills, not only with MHCP. Securing those affiliations is the agency’s work. AraSync records each worker’s affiliation status by payer and holds that payer’s lines until the affiliation is active.

See it with your own caseload

A walkthrough built around your service codes, your authorizations and the way your caregivers work in the field.

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