How to Automate PointClickCare

A nursing home never closes and neither does its record

PointClickCare is the clinical and business platform for long-term and post-acute care: skilled nursing facilities and senior living communities, where the patient is a resident and the building is where they live.

That changes what the software has to be. There is no closing time and no end of the day. Every shift hands over to the next, every medication pass is documented as it happens, every fall and every change of condition goes on the record within hours, and the record is continuous rather than a series of visits.

It is also read by people the facility did not invite. State surveyors read it. Payers read it. The Minimum Data Set assessment coded from it decides what the facility is paid for a resident's stay. So the record is simultaneously the care plan, the compliance file and the revenue.

The admissions coordinator works out of somebody else's inbox

The building is full or it is not, and that gets decided almost entirely outside PointClickCare.

A hospital discharge planner posts a referral to a placement platform and sends it to nine facilities at once. Whoever answers first with a bed and a yes usually gets the resident, and referrals do not arrive politely at ten on a Tuesday. They arrive at five on a Friday.

Meanwhile the business office is watching a Medicaid application that has sat pending on a state site since March while the resident has been in the building since March. Somebody is uploading clinical documentation every few days for a managed care plan's concurrent review, because the plan will only authorise a few more days at a time. Somebody else is working denials on a payer portal.

None of those screens belong to the facility, and all of them decide whether it gets paid.

PointClickCare

Referrals seen the hour they land Hospital discharge platforms checked through the evening, so a bed is offered before the coordinator is back at their desk on Monday.

The next review has a date on it Every managed care stay listed with the date of its next review and what the plan last asked for, read on the plan's own site.

Nothing sits pending unnoticed Submissions tracked on the state portal, with anything unchanged for weeks raised while the resident is still in the building.

The resident's own record is the part PointClickCare has solved

Inside the building the platform is thorough, and it is worth being fair about how thorough.

Point of Care puts documentation in front of the care staff on a mobile device, capturing weights, vitals and care plan tasks at the moment they happen, and that flows straight through to MDS assessments and to eMAR rather than being copied. eMAR and QuickMAR handle the medication pass. MDS submission to iQIES is automated, and PDPM Coach exists to make the assessment coordination itself more accurate. Revenue cycle management covers billing, accounts receivable, collections and claims across the facility.

Every one of those acts on the facility's own record, which is the right place for it to act.

The referral sitting on a hospital's placement platform is not in that record yet. The authorisation for the next five days is on the plan's portal. The Medicaid application is on a state website that will not tell anyone when its status changes. The bed that was lost on Friday evening was lost on somebody else's screen.

A bed filled on Friday is worth more than one filled on Monday

An empty bed does not catch up. The revenue for those three days is simply gone, and once something can watch the outside systems continuously, fewer of them go.

Referral platforms checked through the evening and into the night, with new discharges brought to whoever is on call and the clinical summary already pulled out, so a Friday referral gets an answer on Friday.

Every resident on a managed care stay listed with the date their authorisation runs out and what the plan asked for last time, checked on the plan's own portal rather than remembered. Pending applications watched on the state site, with anything that has not moved in three weeks raised. Assessment due dates set against what has actually been completed, so a window is met rather than noticed afterwards. Denials gathered with their appeal deadlines. Resident and responsible party balances aged into one list. In senior living, the tour enquiry that came in over the weekend and was never answered.

Care work has a hard stop. Gathering and comparing can run unattended. Nothing is coded, nothing is written into a resident's record, and anything reaching a family is drafted for a person in the building to read and send.

The logins get worked and the care plan is never touched

The people doing this are nurses, an admissions coordinator and a business office of two or three. Their attention is the scarcest thing the building has, and a large share of it goes on other organisations' login screens.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as your staff are. It opens the referral platform, the payer portal or the state site, reads what is on the screen, and brings back a list with the dates and the residents attached.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, sessions are not shared between tools, and a workflow can be locked to a named list of domains. You can watch a run and stop it.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.