Electronic visit verification (EVV) for home care

Electronic visit verification is the practice of electronically recording six basic facts about every home-care visit: who received care, who delivered it, the service provided, the date, the time the visit started and ended, and where it happened. Instead of a paper timesheet filled in after the fact, the record is captured the moment care begins.

Home-care agencies adopt EVV for reasons that go well beyond timekeeping. It protects clients by confirming that a scheduled visit actually occurred, it protects caregivers by giving them an objective record of the hours they worked, and it protects the agency when a funder, family member, or regulator asks for evidence that care was delivered as planned.

Because each visit record ties a caregiver to a client at a specific time, EVV also strengthens your privacy posture. Access to that information is recorded, which keeps your practices aligned with PHIPA and PIPEDA expectations around handling personal health information.

• Confirms the visit happened, not just that it was scheduled
• Gives caregivers an objective, defensible record of hours worked
• Produces the proof funders and families ask for
• Records who accessed visit information and when

A CareKindle visit begins when the caregiver checks in from the client home on their phone. The app captures the time and the device location at that moment, so the start of the visit is anchored to where care is actually being given rather than to a number typed in later.

You set the rules that fit your agency. A configurable geofence around each client address lets you decide how close a check-in must be, and you choose whether an out-of-range attempt is blocked outright or allowed with a recorded reason. The same applies at check-out, so the full visit window is verified end to end.

When circumstances call for it, such as a community outing, a dead-zone address, or a forgotten phone, supervisors can record a manual verification with a reason. Nothing is silently dropped: the manual entry is captured as part of the same record so the history stays complete and honest.

A shift that is never closed is the most common way EVV records go wrong: a caregiver forgets to clock out, then completes the visit hours or days later, and the worked time, and the pay tied to it, ends up wildly overstated. CareKindle closes that gap with a configurable clock-out window.

You set the window in Settings (it defaults to three hours). Once a visit is more than that far past its scheduled end, the caregiver can no longer clock themselves out from the app; they are told to ask the office instead. A coordinator then records the clock-out on their behalf at the real time, so the correction is deliberate and attributed rather than guessed at much later.

The window applies to the caregiver, not to your office. Manual records made by an administrator or coordinator are exempt by design, because correcting a forgotten or unusual clock-out is exactly their job. A visit that is actively being worked is treated the same way: rather than being cancelled out from under the caregiver, an in-progress visit is clocked out so the time worked is recorded and paid.

• Caregivers cannot self-complete a shift long after it ended
• The window is set per agency in Settings (default three hours)
• Past the window, the office records the clock-out at the real time
• Office and admin manual records are exempt so they can make corrections

Every meaningful action around a visit (the check-in, the check-out, a manual verification, an exception worked, a record viewed) is written to an append-only audit log. The trail records what happened, to which record, and by whom, without storing raw health details in the audit entry itself.

That trail is what makes a verification defensible. When a funder reconciles billed hours, when a family asks whether a visit took place, or when you review an incident internally, the answer is a record that was written as events occurred rather than reconstructed afterward.

CareKindle is built so this proof is the natural byproduct of doing the work, not a separate reporting chore. Visit data is encrypted in transit and at rest, access is tenant-isolated, and the audit surface keeps your handling of personal health information aligned with PHIPA and PIPEDA. This guide is operational guidance, not legal or tax advice; confirm your own program obligations with your funder and advisors.