What Is EVV? A Home Care Agency’s Guide to Electronic Visit Verification

Electronic Visit Verification, or EVV, is a system that electronically confirms that a Medicaid-funded home care visit actually happened — where, when, and by whom. If your agency bills Medicaid for personal care or home health services, EVV isn’t optional. This guide covers what it is, what it captures, and how to keep your visits compliant.

Why EVV exists

EVV is federal law. The 21st Century Cures Act requires every state to implement Electronic Visit Verification for Medicaid-funded personal care services (effective January 1, 2020) and home health services (effective January 1, 2023). The goal is simple: reduce fraud and ensure that the visits billed to Medicaid genuinely took place.

States that missed the deadlines faced reductions in their federal Medicaid funding, which is why every state now enforces EVV in some form.

The six things EVV must capture

Under the Cures Act, an EVV system must electronically verify six data points for each visit:

1. The type of service performed
2. The individual receiving the service
3. The individual providing the service
4. The date of the service
5. The location where the service is delivered
6. The time the service begins and ends

Capture all six for every Medicaid visit and you have a defensible, audit-ready record. Miss them and you risk claim denials.

How EVV is verified

There are three common verification methods, and a good system supports more than one:

• GPS (mobile app) — the caregiver clocks in and out on their phone, and the app captures location and time automatically. This is the most common method.
• Telephony — the caregiver calls a toll-free number from the client’s landline. Useful when there’s no smartphone or cell signal.
• Fixed device — a small device in the client’s home generates a verification code.

The best setup isn’t GPS *or* telephony — it’s both, so a dead battery or a rural dead zone never leaves a visit unverified.

State models: aggregator vs. open

While EVV is federally mandated, each state chose *how* to run it. There are two broad models:

• State aggregator (closed model) — the state designates a single EVV system (a vendor such as an aggregator) that all agencies must submit visit data to.
• Open / provider-choice model — agencies can use any compliant EVV solution, as long as the data reaches the state.

Because these assignments change with state contracts, always confirm your state’s current model with your state Medicaid program or your managed care organization. You can start with our EVV requirements by state guides.

What non-compliance costs

EVV isn’t just paperwork. Visits that aren’t properly verified can be denied or clawed back, and a pattern of non-compliant claims can jeopardize your Medicaid billing privileges. For most agencies, denied claims are the single most avoidable source of lost revenue.

Making EVV painless

The agencies that struggle with EVV are usually the ones running it as a separate app, bolted onto their scheduling and billing. When EVV lives *inside* the same platform that builds your schedule and produces your claims, verification happens at the source — the caregiver clocks in, the visit is verified, and the data is already attached when the claim goes out.

That’s how CareAnchor handles it: GPS and telephony verification built into scheduling and billing, so every visit is audit-clean without a second system to manage.