Home health and hospice
Credential tracking software for home health agencies
Fourteen requirements are in the product before you enter a date, six of them straight out of the conditions of participation. The twelve in-service hours are counted against each aide’s own anniversary, which is the arithmetic that goes wrong in a spreadsheet.
What a home health agency has to prove, and to whom
The rule is 42 CFR part 484 subpart B, and the audience is whoever accredits you — CHAP, ACHC or the Joint Commission — or your state survey agency if you are surveyed directly. It is the home health equivalent of the 483 baseline a nursing home lives under: federal, national, and stable enough that a requirement list built against it does not need rewriting every year.
Three of its clauses are about the personnel file and nothing else, and all three are about aides.
484.80(b) requires at least seventy-five hours of training, of which sixteen must be supervised practical training, and it has to be finished before the aide provides care. Not before the end of the probation period, not before the first supervisory visit. Before care.
484.80(c) requires a competency evaluation, also before care, and it has a second clock hidden inside it that agencies routinely miss: any subject the supervising nurse finds the aide deficient in has to be re-evaluated. That is not an annual cycle, it is an event, and the only way to hold it is to record it when it happens.
484.80(d) requires at least twelve hours of in-service in each twelve month period. The twelve months run from the individual aide’s own date, not from your fiscal year, which is exactly the arithmetic a spreadsheet does badly and the reason so many agencies discover a short aide in month thirteen.
Underneath those, 484.115 sets the personnel qualifications for everyone licensed: the RN, the LPN, the therapists and the social workers all have to hold a current, unencumbered licence, and the agency has to be able to show it.
If you also run hospice, the aide requirements under 418.76 are the same shape and share the same list, so the two do not need separate tracking.
What Credolex loads on the first day
Fourteen rows for a home health agency: six from the conditions of participation, eight that bind every healthcare employer in the country whatever the setting. Eight of the fourteen are marked as the ones whose absence stops somebody working or stops you billing for them, and those are the short list you start on. Each row names the section it comes from, because a requirement that cannot answer “says who” gets argued with rather than met.
The conditions of participation
| Requirement | Says who | How often |
|---|---|---|
| RN license | 42 CFR 484.115 | Runs with the state licence, in most states every two years |
| LPN license | 42 CFR 484.115 | Every two years |
| Professional license, therapy and social work | 42 CFR 484.115 | Every two years |
| Home health aide training, seventy-five hours | 42 CFR 484.80(b) | Once, before the aide provides care |
| Home health aide competency evaluation | 42 CFR 484.80(c) | Once before care, and again for any subject found deficient |
| Home health aide in-service, twelve hours | 42 CFR 484.80(d) | Twelve hours in every twelve months, from each aide’s own hire date |
Every healthcare employer, whatever the setting
| Requirement | Says who | How often |
|---|---|---|
| Federal exclusion list screening | OIG Special Advisory Bulletin | Every month |
| Basic life support certification | F678 · 42 CFR 483.24(a)(3) | Every two years |
| Form I-9 | 8 CFR 274a.2(b)(1)(ii) | Once, within three business days of the first day of work |
| Hepatitis B offered or declined | 29 CFR 1910.1030(f) | Once, within ten working days of assignment |
| Respirator fit test | 29 CFR 1910.134(f) | Every year, and on any change of make, model or size |
| Bloodborne pathogens training | 29 CFR 1910.1030(g) | Every year |
| Hazard communication training | 29 CFR 1910.1200(h) | Once at assignment, again when a new hazard arrives |
| HIPAA privacy training | 45 CFR 164.530(b)(1) | Once, within thirty days, and again on a material change |
Not in the list, on purpose: the supervisory visit clock. An RN visit every fourteen days on a skilled case, every sixty days on an aide-only case, and an annual on-site observation of each hospice aide are all real obligations, and they are obligations about a patient rather than about a person’s file. They belong with your visit scheduling, not with credential tracking, and putting them here would mean holding half a record in the wrong system.
Background checks come from your state rather than from part 484, and the driver’s licence and auto insurance that most agencies track for anyone driving between homes are agency practice, not a condition of participation. Both are easy to add as your own requirements, and neither is loaded, because inventing law is how a requirement list stops being trusted.
What we do not do
We are not a learning management system. The seventy-five hours of aide training, the competency evaluation and the twelve annual in-service hours all happen wherever they happen now. Credolex records that they happened, on which dates, in which topics, and against each aide’s own anniversary. It does not deliver the course, host the video, mark the test or print the certificate.
We do not verify anything with anybody. No query to a state board, a nurse aide registry or the OIG exclusion list. Credolex holds the date you checked and the document you saved, and tells you when the next check is due.
We are not visit scheduling, EVV or an EMR. No routes, no visit notes, no electronic visit verification and no billing. The overlap with your clinical system is one direction only: an aide’s credentials live here, an aide’s visits live there.
And Credolex is not regulatory advice. Every citation above is there so you can go and read it; the agency stays responsible for its own compliance.
Questions people ask about this
Does it count the twelve in-service hours per aide?
Yes, and it counts them the way 484.80(d) actually reads: twelve hours in each twelve month period measured from that aide’s own hire date, not from a calendar year. Each entry is hours plus a date plus a topic, and the aide’s total is against their own anniversary, so an aide hired in March and an aide hired in September are on different clocks and both are right.
Can it hold the seventy-five hours and the competency evaluation?
Yes. Both are one-time rows that have to be complete before the aide provides care, and both are on the short list for exactly that reason. The re-evaluation clause in 484.80(c), where a subject the supervising nurse finds deficient has to be evaluated again, is recorded as another dated entry against the same requirement rather than as a separate rule.
We run home health and hospice from one office. Does that work?
Yes. The aide requirements under 418.76 are the same shape as the ones under 484.80 and share the same rows, so one roster covers both. Where the two diverge is the supervisory visit clock, and that is not in Credolex for either of them.
Does it replace our aide training provider?
No. Whoever delivers the seventy-five hours keeps delivering them. Credolex is the record that they were delivered and the reminder before the annual hours run short. The compliance suites that bundle tracking with a course library sell the library on a multi-year contract and give the tracking away; this is only the half you were failing.
What does it cost for a home health agency?
By headcount rather than per seat: free to ten people with every feature, $39 a month to twenty-five, $69 to fifty, $129 to a hundred, $229 to two hundred. Every aide on the roster counts whether or not they are on a case this week. Adding a second coordinator or your administrator costs nothing. The pricing page has the full breakdown.