SURVEY PREPARATION, READINESS, AND MOCK SURVEY
With increasing frequency, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is revising and adding new regulations related to long-term care. Long-trusted procedures, protocols, and quality assurance activities are no longer guaranteed to provide the level of compliance success they once did.
During a survey have you found yourself thinking, “We have always done it this way and were never cited,” or “Why is this happening when we have always had good surveys?”
The best way to get a fresh look at your systems is to get an objective perspective from someone outside of your organization. This approach gives you a chance to develop performance improvement plans (PIPs) prior to survey, identifies opportunities to fix or enhance systems, and enables you to provide staff education prior to survey. A Mock Survey also prepares your staff to confidently manage questions and interviews with surveyors prior to the real event. A Mock Survey is a critical component of your approach to survey readiness.
The best times to use an outside Mock Survey are:
1. Immediately upon declaring compliance during a plan of correction;
2. Six months after the last annual survey; or
3. When you enter your survey window.
Compliagent will tailor Mock Survey services to your specific need. You may wish to have all the components of a survey included or solely to have specific compliance issues surveyed (e.g., pressure injuries, psychotropic drug management, infection control, etc.), which have been areas of repeated non-compliance that you want to finally resolve. Opportunities identified during the Mock Survey will be communicated to the facility in a written format using a similar construct to the 2567L. Compliagent can even conduct a validation visit to verify your success in developing PIPs or completing a plan of correction based on the findings of the Mock Survey.