The Ohio Council for Home Care & Hospice held its Annual Conference & Trade Show on October 12 and 13 in Westerville. Our Head of Sales, Jay Banks, and our Client Success Manager, Anna Clark, RN, spent both days talking with agency leaders. The agenda covered a lot of ground, and a few themes came up again and again.

Value-based performance depends on accurate documentation

Several sessions focused on running an agency around outcomes and acuity instead of visit volume, with PDGM, VBP, and star ratings at the center. If you’re thinking through what the 2026 HHVBP reweighting means for your coding strategy, the chart is where it starts. Other sessions looked at revenue leakage and how to improve margins and EBITDA, and those conversations lead back to the same place. The OASIS and the diagnoses on a claim shape payment and quality scores, and missed codes mean missed revenue.

Our clinical AI reviews hundreds of pages of referral documentation to find the full set of secondary diagnoses, and our certified expert coders make sure they land in a compliant, revenue-maximizing order. That’s how PDGM comorbidity adjustments agencies consistently miss get captured.

Denials and compliance start with documentation

Sessions on managed care, fraud, waste, and abuse enforcement, and billing practices all pointed to the same lesson. Clear, consistent, well-supported documentation is the best defense against denials, audits, and clawbacks, and with CMS audits up, that foundation matters more than ever.

Our clinician-level OASIS accuracy scorecard shows which OASIS items each clinician misses most, so educators can coach on specifics. Scoring varies even among strong nurses, which we explain in why your best nurses still don’t score OASIS the same way.

AI conversations are getting more specific

The agenda included a session on what’s real, what’s hype, and what’s coming with AI in home health. Leaders have moved past asking whether to use AI and are asking how to choose well. One shift worth noting is that scribe tools are now being talked about in terms of billing accuracy and clinical outcomes, on top of the time clinicians save on documentation. That makes it smart to ask any AI vendor a few pointed questions. Who reviews the output? How is accuracy measured, and is it broken out by category? What happens when the documentation is vague? Our guide to the questions to ask before an AI tool touches a patient chart is a helpful starting point.

Olli Scribe pairs AI documentation support with a managed service team, which helps keep OASIS documentation consistent across clinicians. On the coding side, an AI-only tool can only code from the documentation it’s handed, so vague wound notes stay vague. Olli combines purpose-built AI with certified expert coders, and you can read what “AI plus certified coders” actually means inside a chart review. Our overall accuracy score is 97.5, based on nearly 1,000 chart audits across more than 100 agencies, and you can see the full breakdown in our Q3-2026 Accuracy Report. Our OASIS and Plan of Care Quality Review Service is also CHAP Verified.

Hospice had a bigger presence

Hospice-focused sessions covered access, census growth, compliance, and end-of-life care, and hospice came up more in vendor conversations too. Growing census without adding compliance risk takes strong documentation and coding at every step, and Olli supports hospice agencies as well as home health. You can see more of how we’re thinking about hospice and AI in what we took away from the 2026 Alliance Financial & Technology Summit.

Workforce pressure keeps shaping every decision

The keynote on leading with purpose, along with sessions on burnout, retention, and culture, showed how much agencies are working to keep and grow their teams. New hires, including nurses who are new to home health and may have never completed an OASIS, take time to get comfortable, and OASIS training can plateau without ongoing, specific feedback. Our scorecard and analytics help new clinicians get up to speed faster, and Scribe helps keep their documentation consistent from the start.

Let’s keep the conversation going

If you missed us in Westerville, we’d love to pick up where we left off. Start a 30-day, low-risk pilot to see how our best-in-class AI and certified expert coders work together, with charts back up to 4x faster at about half the cost of legacy vendors. You can opt out at any time.