If you are planning to acquire an established hospice program, clinical and operational due diligence is an important step in protecting your investment and helping you to make informed business decisions. Due diligence is used to evaluate a business opportunity by investigation into all relevant aspects of the past, present, and predictable future of the business. Clinical and operational due diligence evaluates regulatory compliance, census viability, interdisciplinary processes, clinical competence and overall strengths and weaknesses of the program. It evaluates the coordination of the multiple moving parts of a hospice agency, establishing a historical and factual foundation for your decision making process.

 

Our clinical and operational hospice due diligence services may include and are customized to your needs:

 

• Identifying compliance risk areas in policies, procedures and processes

• Auditing random patient and personnel files to ensure compliance with multiple regulatory oversight bodies and to assess the quality of quality of interdisciplinary documentation

• Auditing random contracts to identify potential risk areas

• Reviewing satisfaction surveys, on-call records, complaint and incident reports to identify trends and evaluate the response process and the quality of patient care

• Analyzing census data to determine case mix, service utilization and length of stay

• Reviewing history and outcomes of payment-related scrutiny

• Reviewing survey and/or accreditation results, statements of deficiency and compliance with submitted Plans of Correction

• Direct observation of interdisciplinary meetings and operations from the point of intake through discharge and billing

• Conducting leadership and staff interviews to evaluate competency, identify knowledge gaps and other areas of potential concern

• Assessing the compliance of the Quality Assessment Performance Improvement, Infection Control and Disaster Preparedness programs

• Reviewing staff orientation and education programs to evaluate compliance

• Identifying top referral sources to evaluate external perceptions of care and strength of relationships