Home Health Employee Monitoring Update

Effective July 2, 2015, the State of Ohio adopted rule 5160-1-39 which provides that a home care service provider is now required to have an employee monitoring system in place. The system must include:

(a) A mechanism to verify whether their employees are present at the location and time where services are to be provided for home care dependent adults who have a mental impairment or life-threatening condition;

(b) Verification of whether the provider's employees have provided the services at the proper location and time at the end of each working day for all other home care dependents such as adults age sixty or older, or adults that are at least twenty-one years of age but less than sixty years of age and have a physical disability; and,

(c) Protocol for scheduling substitute employees when the monitoring system identifies that an employee has failed to provide home care services at the proper location and time. The protocol must include a standard for determining the length of time that may elapse without jeopardizing the health and safety of the home care dependent adult.

The home care service provider must have procedures in place to:

(a) Maintain records of the monitoring system;

(b) Compile annual reports which must include the rate at which home care services were provided at the proper location and time;

(c) Conduct random checks of the accuracy of the monitoring system. For purposes of conducting these checks, a random check is considered to be a check of not more than five percent or less than one percent of the home care visits the provider's employees make to different home care dependent adults within a particular work shift; and,

(d) Retain the records for a period of six years from the date of receipt of payment based upon those records or until any audit initiated within the six year period is completed.