To Lisa Selman-Holman, clinical education is the core component of success for all organizations that provide healthcare at home services. From her unique perspective as both attorney and nurse, documentation accuracy is critical to both quality patient care and to keeping agency owners out of prison. For that reason, she has built her consultation and training practice around OASIS education for Medicare-certified agencies.
OASIS has been around for over 15 years, so one might imagine that its nuances are well-known to field clinicians and supervisory RNs alike. Not so, Ms. Selman-Holman asserts. OASIS training is much more like exercise than it is like a vaccination. It is a daily event, not once or twice in a lifetime. "Agency management deals with staff turnover, with changes to the OASIS system itself, and, most of all, with the frailties of human memory," she told us. "I would add to that the tendency of all of us, in all walks of life, to fall into habitual behavior, which interferes with thoughtful behavior at every turn."
Much of Ms. Selman-Holman's educational efforts are carried out through online video courses offered through Med-Pass. Company founder Lisa Hanauer agrees with her star educator. "Other training organizations offer a broad scope of courses but we focus on OASIS," she told us. "Med-Pass is known as a provider of clinical documentation forms and systems, so we know the challenges presented by assessment documentation."
Home Health and Hospice Product Development Leader Maria Suglio agrees with her CEO. "A typical Med-Pass training customer is a multi-site home health agency but we have been seeing an increase lately in the number of individual users purchasing our OASIS courses. They are people moving from Long Term Care to Healthcare at Home, moving from full time to assignments as a part-time contract nurse, or sometimes nurses unfamiliar with OASIS but looking for a position with a Medicare in-home provider. In addition, our clients still experience a high turnover volume so they will purchase the same intro course and make it part of their orientation program for all new hires, some of whom come from other healthcare at home providers who may not have trained so well. And then, of course, current staff constantly need refreshers.
Course organization, structure, and pricing
Med-Pass breaks its online courses into 12 parts and 17 segments, covering everything from introduction to OASIS to C and C1 updates. All courses offer accredited CEs. "Lisa Selman-Holman teaches the entire how, who, what, and where of OASIS, from general conventions to patient history. She goes through the entire document, item by item. Her courses include 58 quizzes, which are linked to points on the timeline in each segment, so that individuals and their supervisors can track progress. The quizzes are randomized, selecting a few question from the 300 available in each part. There is a final exam at the end with a score of at least 80% considered passing. "If they complete the entire regimen," Ms. Suglio explained, "the are awarded 15.7 CEs."
As with all online courses, the advantages both Med-Pass executives and their expert trainer described include 24/7 availability, which means nurses do not have to be pulled out of the field for training, thus negatively impacting productivity, and that nurses can retake courses from time to time, reviewing the material over and over until it is completely mastered.
Med-Pass offers six and twelve-month subscriptions, which can be renewed. Quarterly updates keep the courses current with CMS changes. An administrator dashboard allows supervisors to watch employee progress, including which modules have been viewed and test results.
"We have also addressed the one common complaint about online, recorded trainings," Ms. Hanauer concluded, "that they cannot ask questions like they can at a live seminar. Our arrangement with Lisa Selman-Holman is that she is available to answer those questions at any time, normally via email but she will get on the phone with them when necessary."
©2015 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