“Just one missed signature can cost thousands in lost revenue!”
Are you ready for your next compliance inspection?
Ask yourself these 2 questions:
“Are your admissions move-in documents legally defensible?”
And “Would they stand up to an audit?”
There are a number of ways your documents may lead to a deficiency citation
- Out-of-date documents
- Incomplete documents, and
- Missing signatures
- Mistakes & Inconsistencies
- Document Version Control
These can totally derail a move-in process. But they can also cause major legal headaches from auditors, as well as cost thousands of dollars per month in lost revenues, after you discover your less-than-tidy document management.
Think this isn’t serious stuff? Spend a few minutes with Darren Mathis, owner and CEO of LincWare, who knows how critical this can be. “To be honest, these are some of the reasons we developed AdmitPlus,” he tells me. AdmitPlus is LincWare’s digital admissions platform. “Senior living community operators often don’t even know they have a document problem until an auditor comes around and tells them that they do.” That’s a bad way to find out.
I spoke with Darren recently about some of the problems associated with admissions document issues. When you think of the sheer number of documents involved in the admissions process, it isn’t hard to see all the potential points of failure.
Here are a few of weak points in your admissions process
- Outdated documents: There is a good reason legal documents go through version changes. Because legislation and requirements go through changes. Just try to justify an outdated document to an auditor. You’ll get nailed every time. And yet it happens. All the time. “This is especially an issue when communities get into the habit of emailing new documents back and forth,” Darren tells me. “We recently did a document review for a prospect and found that 30% of their locations were using the wrong version of the move-in documents. Corporate had no idea,” Darren adds.
- Version Control: You have to have a set of documents per location when dealing with paper. When you have multiple locations, admissions management teams continually struggle to stay on top of document management. Plus, with paper, you have no way of being 100% sure the correct versions are being used. If you have 20 locations, you have 20 sets of documents times the number of care levels to manage.
- Unsigned and/or missing documents: When there is a dispute about a document and it turns out the document was never signed, it becomes a moot point. The resident has the advantage. “This cost one of our clients over $3,000 in lost revenue, because a resident didn’t sign the document that stated they would be charged for a full month if they moved out mid-month,” Darren explains. The same is true if a document is missing.
