Quality documentation. Quality care.

Abstract

Providing home care services is becoming a greater challenge as the resources of professional staffing, time, and money become more scarce. However, simultaneously, the need for quality services is increasing as the numbers and needs of people requiring these services increase. Since home care services are essentially "invisible" because they are rendered behind the closed doors of the patient's house, assuring quality becomes dependent on the documentation. This article has presented a framework for organizing care and the documentation of care which provides both a comprehensive assessment and systematic process for uniformly managing that assessment. Us of this framework provides one way to define home health services for both home health personnel and others. Having such a definition focuses everyone's efforts and moves the industry toward quality care and quality documentation.