HCHB Publishes Executive Guide to Help Home Health and Hospice Leaders Strengthen Survey Readiness

Survey-Ready Every Day provides practical strategies, exercises, and tools to help leaders build continuous audit readiness into everyday operations

DALLAS, Sept. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Homecare Homebase^SM (HCHB) announced the publication of Survey-Ready Every Day: An Executive Guide to Regulatory Change and Continuous Survey Readiness for Home Health and Hospice, a new resource designed to help provider executives strengthen readiness for audits, surveys, and evolving regulatory requirements. The guide examines the changing 2026 regulatory landscape for home health and hospice agencies and gives leaders practical ways to assess whether requirements are consistently reflected in clinical, compliance, operational, and revenue-cycle processes.

"Readiness cannot begin when a surveyor or auditor arrives at the branch," said HCHB President, Luke Rutledge. "Leaders need visibility into whether the processes in place are working, where exceptions are occurring, and whether corrective actions are effective. Survey-Ready Every Day gives executive teams practical tools to ask those questions throughout the year."

The guide addresses key developments affecting home health and hospice providers, including quality reporting, survey expectations, program-integrity oversight, access, eligibility, and documentation requirements. It also explores how governance, workflows, analytics, audit trails, and technology controls can support a more consistent approach to audit readiness.

Practical tools for continuous readiness

The guide includes resources leaders can use with compliance, clinical, quality, operations, and revenue-cycle teams, including:

• Executive Exercises and Checks to assess high-risk processes, accountability, and cross-functional coordination
• Home Health and Hospice Audit and Survey Snapshots outlining key forms of external oversight
• Accountability Matrix to clarify responsibilities before an external request occurs
• Executive Readiness Scorecard to support ongoing leadership review
• Mock-Survey Guidance for testing real workflows, records, and retrieval capabilities
• Technology-Control Exercises to evaluate workflows, alerts, guardrails, audit trails, and exception management
• Executive Plan of Action focused on identifying high-risk processes, assigning clear ownership, monitoring meaningful indicators, testing controls in practice, and building a consistent approach to regulatory change

The report encourages leaders to use these tools throughout the year rather than treating readiness as a one-time exercise. Teams can test patient records, evaluate home health acceptance-to-service decisions, review hospice eligibility documentation, examine variation across branches, and challenge staff to retrieve supporting records under realistic conditions.

Download the guide to learn more. Survey-Ready Every Day is available at: https://na2.hubs.ly/H07Fj2F0

About Homecare Homebase, LLC

Homecare Homebase is a Dallas-based software leader offering hosted, cloud-based solutions to streamline operations and optimize compliance, clinical, and financial workflows for home-based care agencies. Our customized mobile solutions enable real-time, wireless data exchange and communication between field clinicians, physicians and office staff for better care, more accurate reporting, and improved revenue cycle management. Founded by industry veterans in 1999, HCHB empowers over 430,000 users to service more than one million patients daily, resulting in over 120 million visits per year. The company is part of the Hearst Health network. For more information, visit hchb.com or call us toll-free at 1- 866-535-HCHB (4242).

About Hearst Health

The mission of Hearst Health is to guide healthcare organizations by delivering essential intelligence and software that improve the quality, safety, and efficiency of care. Hearst Health has been innovating with care for more than 40 years, with a commitment to making a lasting positive impact on health. The Hearst Health companies — FDB, Homecare Homebase, MCG, MHK, QGenda and Zynx Health — elevate care by informing and empowering participants across the health journey. To learn more, visit www.hearst.com/hearst-health and follow @Hearst Health on LinkedIn.

SOURCE Homecare Homebase