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Optimizing Your New Progress to Goals Feature

    To support compliance with Medicare’s new Conditions of Participation (CoPs), Kinnser’s new Progress to Goals feature was introduced to promote patient-specific and measurable goal tracking. While it purportedly offers more efficient documentation, it has also presented challenges for some agencies adjusting to the new functionality.

    This new feature is currently optional, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see it eventually mandated for all users. We have listed down some helpful tips to ease your team’s migration to KInnser’s new Progress to Goals feature:

     

    1. Standardize your interventions per goal. Kinnser has a pre-built library of interventions for Progress to Goals, but it would help to integrate agency-specific interventions for your clinicians to choose from. This will not only save your clinicians time and effort but will also keep the flow of information consistent and smooth for the succeeding episodes following your migration. Don’t have standardized interventions yet for your agency? Qavalo can help you utilize this feature—contact us to learn more.

     

    1. Timely submission of notes. This is an ongoing challenge for agencies, but the automated ‘lock’ once goals are met can wreak havoc on documentation flow if not submitted in sequence. Not only will timely submission make charting more accurate, but it will also make notes available for reference on the next visit.

     

    1. Train clinicians to refer to the prior visit note. Reviewing notes from the previous visit will keep the narrative cohesive over the course of the episode and most importantly, will encourage progressive tracking of goals.

     

    1. Update the Plan of Care (POC) as new goals are added mid-episode. It is critical to update the Plan of Care if new patient goals are added so that the goals are appropriately reflected in the discharge summary by the end of the episode. This will also be necessary for justifying recertifications as needed.

     

    We see benefits to being an early adopter of the new Progress to Goals feature (particularly before the OASIS-D updates come out), and we hope that our tips will ease the transition for you and your team.  Message us for more best practices on this and other documentation challenges. We can also help you customize your library of agency-specific interventions or let you know about Qavalo’s other services.