EVV software is the one purchase in this trade where the buyer is not really the buyer. Your state picked an aggregator, the aggregator decides which records it will accept, and your agency lives with whatever falls between the two. This page is written for the owner or administrator of a US home care or home health agency choosing what to run visits on, and it starts where the sales deck stops: with the record the state will reject.
The four data points, and why they are all that matter
Every compliant visit record answers the same six questions the Cures Act named: the type of service, who received it, who delivered it, where it happened, when it began and when it ended. Everything else a vendor shows you is workflow around those. When you compare EVV systems, ask each one to produce a rejected visit and the exact reason the aggregator gave, because that is the only screen your scheduler will look at every morning.
The state aggregator is the real integration
An open model lets you bring your own vendor and file to the state; a closed model gives you the state's system and no choice. Most agencies sit somewhere between, running their own EVV solutions and transmitting to an aggregator like Sandata, HHAeXchange or Netsmart. Ask a vendor which aggregators they are live with in your state, when they were last certified against it, and who fixes the file when the format changes. A vendor with no answer is proposing that you become their integration team.
What it should cost
Electronic visit verification software is usually priced per carer or per visit, and the number that matters is not the licence but the exception rate. A system that fails one visit in twenty adds an administrator's afternoon to every week, and that cost never appears in a quote. Work it from your own roster: your carers, your visits per week, and the minutes your office already spends chasing missed clock-outs. Then ask each vendor to beat that figure rather than to describe their features.
The deadline everyone is already past
States were required to implement EVV for Medicaid-funded personal care services by January 1, 2020, and for Medicaid-funded home health services by January 1, 2023. That means no agency is choosing whether to run EVV, only what to run it on. If a vendor still sells EVV as a differentiator rather than as plumbing, you are talking to a sales team that has not noticed the market changed.
Questions people ask about evv software
Can we keep using paper timesheets alongside EVV?
For Medicaid-funded personal care and home health visits, no: the electronic record is the claim's evidence. Agencies do keep paper as a fallback for a device that dies mid-shift, but the visit still has to reach the aggregator, and a manual entry is an exception the state will eventually ask about.
Do we need EVV for private-pay clients?
Not as a legal requirement, because the mandate rides on Medicaid funding. Most agencies run every visit through the same system anyway, because two processes at the door is how a carer ends up clocking the wrong one, and the visit record is useful evidence in a private-pay dispute too.
What happens when a carer has no phone signal?
Any serious EVV system captures offline and syncs later, using the device clock and GPS at the time of the visit rather than at the time of upload. Ask to see that on a demo device in airplane mode; it is the single most common real-world failure and the fastest way to separate mature products from new ones.
Is a free state EVV system enough on its own?
For a small agency running one Medicaid programme, often yes. It stops being enough when you run more than one payer, need scheduling and billing to read the same visit, or find your office rekeying the state's screen into your own records.