Getting Started with Ankota

The Ankota™ system is a next-generation management hub for scheduling and management of home care for an aging population. This highly customizable software offers full home care agency and Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) management. It manages people, payers and programs via configurable business rule sets and supports optimized delivery of care in homes, readmission reduction, individualized plans of care and cost controls, all in addition to Foresight Care™ to help prevent hospital readmissions. 

This article will walk you through the essentials of the onboarding process that establishes your relationship with Ankota.

Onboarding

To get you onboarded with the system, we will start with a kick-off meeting with the Ankota team prior to your "go-live" launch.

During this initial meeting, we will ask you a number of questions to learn how we can best customize your Ankota system environment.

The information we will need from you to begin the process is as follows:

• Full names of office staff who will use the system (or the first few who will work on the project team)
• List of the Missouri programs your agency participates in (e.g., CDS, In-Home Services, HCY)
• Your NPI and taxonomy codes
• If you have any other referral sources such as private pay or VA, please provide a comprehensive list
• Client and caregiver demographical data in Excel (more details on this below)

Based on this discussion, the Ankota team will then configure your environment to best suit your organization’s needs.

Uploading Clients and Caregivers

As mentioned above, while your system is being configured by Ankota, your team will need to gather implementation data about your clients and caregivers into an Excel spreadsheet so that we can upload the data into your system. To make this process easier for you, Ankota will provide you with templates.  

The following is the information you’ll need to present in the Excel spreadsheet.

Client Information

Please provide:

• Program (e.g., CDS or In-Home)
• DCN (Medicaid ID)
• First Name
• Last Name
• Address (broken into street address, apartment, city, state and zip)
• Phone Number
• Diagnosis Code

Some of our customers also prefer to upload the following additional information:

• Date of Birth
• Employer Identification Number (EIN)
• State Unemployment Tax Act ID (SUTA ID)

Caregiver / Attendant Information

 Please provide:

• First and Last Name
• Address
• Phone Number

Additionally, you may wish to provide:

• Authorizations, Care Plans, and Schedules in excel format
  • If these are not provided, your team will need to load those into the system manually.
• Skills or certifications in excel format
  • This will be discussed in your implementation meeting

As part of the upload, each Caregiver will be assigned a numeric ID and a PIN number for clocking into the EVV (Electronic Visit Verification) system. Most of our customers have Ankota assign 3 digit IDs to their caregivers (e.g., starting from 100 and going to 221) 

For the PIN number, the most popular methods are to either use their birth month and date (e.g.,1102 for November 2nd) or the last four digits of their social security number.

Please note only active clients and caregivers are generally updated. If you want to upload historical clients or caregivers, please contact us. There may be an additional charge for this service.