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ALTOONA, PA  – Delta Health Technologies (“Delta”) continues to transform Care-at-Home with the release of CrescendoConnect. Available for iOS and Android devices, CrescendoConnect is designed to help Care-at-Home providers facilitate communications between caregivers, physicians, patients, and families; leading to better patient outcomes, improved quality of care, and cost reduction.

Features include Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) through GPS-based visit verification; secure communications for better coordination of care and communication between healthcare professionals, patients, and families; and collaborative care with physicians, caregivers, families, and others.

“Delta prides itself on continually improving its products and solutions. We believe CrescendoConnect continues that legacy and enhances the collaboration of care and communications between caregivers, physicians, and patients,” said Keith Crownover, President of Delta Health Technologies. “We are proud to offer CrescendoConnect, which is at the cutting edge of care coordination and communication.”

Compliant with Federal and State EVV requirements, CrescendoConnect allows caregivers to clock in/out and document tasks from their smartphone/mobile device. Caregivers can view and document care plan tasks assigned to appointments, easily access upcoming schedules, and review important appointment information in advance.  CrescendoConnect verifies caregiver location and can improve care plan compliance when used for task documentation throughout each visit.

CrescendoConnect users can easily, and securely, communicate with multiple disciplines, agency personnel, and the patient (or designated patient representative) and share photos and files related to the patient.  Patient-related communications may then be included as part of the clinical record in Delta’s Crescendo EMR.  All communications are compliant with Home Health Conditions of Participation and HIPAA regulations.

CrescendoConnect removes the barriers that prevent physicians from signing orders.  With CrescendoConnect, physicians can easily view and sign orders via an email containing a secure link and pin.  No portal or application for them to access.

Patients, and/or their designated family members, can view the patient’s schedule, medications, nursing documentation, and physician orders using CrescendoConnect via their smartphone/mobile device.

CrescendoConnect integrates with Delta’s Crescendo EMR, which is a single solution for home health, hospice, and private duty home care service lines that are integrated at the patient level across an agency.

Acquisition Expands Reach and Capabilities in Home Healthcare Technology Services

COLUMBUS, OH – Salo Solutions, Inc. (Salo), a Columbus-based, healthcare-focused IT consultancy and systems integrator, today announced their purchase of Delta Health Technologies (Delta), an Altoona-based leading software provider for home health, hospice and private duty agencies. This acquisition will unite Delta’s software expertise with Salo’s business intelligence capabilities to provide business-driven solutions for care-at-home organizations.

Salo CEO Tony Ott will serve as CEO of Delta, and Keith Crownover will remain at Delta as President.

“We are honored and excited to unite Delta’s strong team with our experts in home health analysis, accounting, process improvement, and technology,” said Tony Ott, CEO, Delta. “Combining Delta’s advanced care-at-home software with our technical and operational consulting team will allow us to make an even greater positive impact on home health, hospice, and home care operations and assure continued access to their strong proprietary software.”

Salo will continue to be headquartered in Columbus and Delta will remain in Altoona, Pennsylvania. The company anticipates a largely seamless transition for customers and employees.

“Salo’s business expertise and extensive care-at-home connections fit perfectly with Delta’s customer base, strong brand equity and a half-century of industry experience,” said Keith Crownover, President of Delta. “We look forward to joining our strong companies for future growth as we help customers maximize efficiency, productivity, and profitability so that our customers can focus on delivering the best possible patient care.”

July 1, 2017 will arrive before you know it. On that date, Healthcare at Home organizations that participate in the Medicare program will be under new Conditions of Participation. According to the rules, the new CoPs become law six months after they were published in the Federal Register, which happened on January 13.

Between now and July, providers need to prepare operational adaptations with two central goals: interdisciplinary cooperation and patient independence. Software systems must evolve as well but protocols and practices must change more. We spoke with some software developers to learn the extent of the required changes. The consensus is that provider adjustments are the more extensive but that EMR vendors will help where they are able.

Easier for accredited agencies
Many of the new conditions will be familiar to agencies that are accredited by the Joint Commission, CHAP or ACHC, we were told. New forms to track infection surveillance, completing discharge documents in seven days and transfer documents in two days, emergency disaster plans and new documents to show that patients with Low English Proficiency were adequately informed of certain rights are already in place in accredited agencies. “The new conditions emphasize interdisciplinary cooperation and will call for changes in operational practices more than software adaptations,” explained Bonnie Yingling, a Senior Product Manager for Delta Health Technologies. “Other changes are already in place in other software, such as hospice QAPI, and easily added to home health software.”

As an example of an operational change, she described how the new CoPs encourage therapists to speak with patients about wounds and medications and nurses to talk with patients about the importance of the exercises the physical therapist gave them. In other words, all disciplines are being asked to more often say, “How can we support each other?” rather than, “That’s not my job.”

Care planning as well will have to be more patient-centered and interdisciplinary. These requirements will not require developers to reformat plan of care screens in your EMR. They will have more of an impact on how providers manage planning for patient care, with an emphasis on interdisciplinary cooperation aimed at teaching self-care to encourage patient ownership over their chronic conditions.

Supervisory visits
You may see revisions in your software in the way it formats home health aide assessments. CMS wants to see nurses comment about quality of care more than about whether specific tasks were completed. “A patient may be served by different individual aides during an episode of care,” we were told by Donna Baldwin, Delta’s Hospice Product Manager and Compliance Consultant. “CMS is interested in how the patient was taken care of, not in how an individual caregiver behaved.”

One of the elements will be a standardized format for recording aide assessments, another relatively easy requirement for software developers to meet, though perhaps a little more work for supervisors. “They can no longer just click the box for ‘supervision done,'” Ms. Baldwin added.

“The 5-star agencies are already doing most of this,” Ms. Yingling concluded, “either at the behest of accrediting agencies or contracts with Medicare Advantage firms. Adapting EMR software systems for OASIS updates is much more complex than this will be.”

©2017 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Tim Rowan’s Home Care Technology Report. homecaretechreport.com One copy may be printed for personal use; further reproduction by permission only. editor@homecaretechreport.com

ALTOONA, PA – Delta Health Technologies® continues to modernize Care-at-Home with the release of Crescendo 2.0. This release builds upon the software solutions’ great success with new features that provide even more accuracy and enhanced simplicity to the clinical documentation process. Clinicians are able to leverage their expertise in combination with intuitive guidance, regulatory compliant workflows, automated process prompts and alerts, patient education, and other time-saving tools improving the pace of documentation. Using Crescendo 2.0, clinical staff satisfaction is greatly improved by increasing the amount of documentation completed in the patient’s home and allowing clinicians to provide more attention to patient care.

“Crescendo 2.0 greatly improves the ability for accurate clinical documentation to be completed at a faster rate. The software includes several new features that improve clinical guidance while helping clinicians tap into their wealth of experience,” stated, Keith Crownover, President & CEO, Delta Health Technologies. “Clinical staff are empowered with Crescendo 2.0 to improve the speed and accuracy of their documentation, helping them focus on delivering patient care in the manner they prefer. Recently, we heard from a clinician who said they have never liked their job more than they do now since using our software. This clinician said now they didn’t have to chart late into the night and their family life has greatly improved as well.”

Crescendo 2.0 continues to be the best software solution for those agencies that manage multiple service lines, or are looking to expand in the future, and want a single solution to simplify their processes. Coordinated, value-based, IDT, private, and emerging care models are supported with consistent, accurate patient documentation. The patient information is accessible real-time in the financial, billing and scheduling modules of Crescendo 2 – facilitating back office operations, financial throughput, and the interoperability needs of payers and partners.”

“The product design philosophy in Crescendo 2.0 empowers the agency and the clinical staff to excel at providing great patient care in the world of ever-changing regulations and compliance concerns. The new functions reduce the redundant busy work found in all other software tools,” said Bill Bassett, VP Product Management and Marketing at Delta Health Technologies.  “Crescendo 2.0 removes the barriers that prevent clinicians from spending more time with patients. The software supports their ability to confidently produce complete and accurate documentation that supports the care being provided for each service line an agency provides.”

Delta has led the development of solutions that ensure agencies are able to deliver outstanding care for 42 years. Crescendo 2.0 continues that legacy and bridges the gap between the need to support proper documentation processes with a solution that improves the experience and speed of the process. As has been shown many times, there is a very high correlation between the level of documentation completed in-home and the accuracy of the patient information. With Crescendo 2.0 making the proper processes easier to accomplish, agencies will dramatically improve the quality of care, leading to faster claims submission and revenue while reducing audits.