The Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) has been vital to helping home health agencies plan healthcare and receive reimbursements since 1999. You and your care team know you need to provide OASIS documentation for home health compliance, but it also helps you offer quality care and potentially deliver higher-quality outcomes to your patients. Its most recent iteration, OASIS-E, went into effect on January 1, 2023.
OASIS documentation is a standardized data set required by Medicare and Medicaid for any adult receiving skilled services. Skilled services means any care service that requires a skilled professional, including nurses, physical therapists, or occupational therapists.
OASIS is part of Medicare documentation for home health and other care services in the healthcare industry. OASIS also benefits your care team because it allows them to assess a patient’s progress over time. Using an electronic document-sharing platform, members of your care team can access the patient’s initial plan of care and start preparing as necessary.
You can also understand a patient’s medical history and medication profile as soon as you get the referral.
OASIS allows for effective care team communication since each member of the team has access to intake documents regardless of which care providers conducted the interview. Your whole team can monitor a patient’s progress and access notes when there are changes.
Your patient may progress more quickly than you anticipated. In this case, you may choose to reduce their physical therapy sessions before you would normally do so. Or you might notice that a patient is progressing slowly. In this case, you might consider supplementing their health services with other beneficial services. Using OASIS in home health lets you store these changes in a single location and share it with the OASIS administrator when they need to do another interview.
In some cases, your patients might be receiving multiple healthcare services. OASIS allows you and your patient’s other care teams to share files and communicate updates on their health status. For example, your home health care team might make notes on the patient’s medication profile so a caregiver in another discipline doesn’t accidentally prescribe them more of the same medication or prescribe something that may interfere with current medications.
To ensure that information contributes effectively to patient care, it's imperative that your team can access it easily. Choosing the right technology is crucial, and interoperability takes precedence. Seek a solution that enables your team to share their notes securely with all individuals involved in the patient's care plan while adhering to HIPAA regulations.
Manage struggles with OASIS-E by having a system in place to validate your data. Accurate information and an understanding of home health documentation helps you provide optimal care to all your patients and stay in compliance with regulations to be paid more quickly.