Home Care Software Glossary

ADLs are the basic self-care tasks agencies assess and document when determining how much support a client needs: bathing, dressing, eating, toileting, transferring (moving in and out of a bed or chair), and continence. A client's ADL score — how much assistance they need with each task — usually drives the level of care, the staffing plan, and in many states, the Medicaid or insurance reimbursement rate.

ADLs are distinct from IADLs (Instrumental Activities of Daily Living) — the more complex tasks like managing medication, preparing meals, handling finances, and using transportation — which are typically assessed separately and weighted differently in a care plan.

Person-centered planning builds a client's plan of care around their own goals, preferences, and daily rhythm, rather than fitting them into a standardized template. Instead of starting from "what services does this diagnosis typically require," it starts from "what does this person's good day look like, and what support do they need to have more of them."

In practice, that means the plan documents things a purely clinical assessment might miss — preferred meal times, favorite activities, which family members should be kept informed, cultural or religious preferences around care — alongside the clinical tasks. Agencies that document care this way tend to see better satisfaction scores from both clients and families, because the plan reflects a person, not just a diagnosis.

A point of care is a specific task or check-in a caregiver documents during a visit — a medication reminder, a blood pressure check, a completed ADL, a safety observation. Where a "visit" is the overall session, points of care are the individual, timestamped data points that make up the visit record.

Point-of-care documentation (recording each task as it happens, from a mobile device, rather than reconstructing notes after the shift ends) is generally more accurate and more defensible in an audit than end-of-shift summaries, because it's tied to the moment the task actually occurred.

A clearinghouse is a third-party service that sits between a home care agency and its insurance or Medicaid payers. It takes an agency's outgoing claim, checks it for formatting and coding errors, translates it into the standardized EDI format each payer requires, and routes it to the right destination — then returns the payer's response (paid, denied, or rejected) back to the agency.

Using a clearinghouse instead of billing payers directly cuts down on claim rejections caused by simple formatting mistakes, and gives an agency one place to track the status of every claim across every payer, instead of logging into a different portal for each one.

EVV is a federally mandated system (under the 21st Century Cures Act) that electronically verifies six data points for every Medicaid-funded personal care and home health visit: the type of service performed, the individual receiving the service, the date of the service, the location of the service, the individual providing the service, and the time the service begins and ends.

EVV data is what a clearinghouse and payer check a claim against — a claim without matching, on-time EVV data is one of the fastest ways to get a claim denied. Most agencies capture EVV automatically through a caregiver's mobile app rather than manual check-ins.