Custom software for hospice agencies

What makes hospice operations different

Hospice runs on time-sensitive coordination between nurses, aides, social workers, chaplains, volunteers and a medical director, often across a wide service area and around the clock. A referral can arrive on a Friday afternoon and need an admission visit that evening. A patient’s needs can change overnight, and the on-call nurse needs the full picture before driving out.

The Medicare hospice benefit adds its own structure: benefit periods, recertifications, face-to-face encounters before later periods, the interdisciplinary group reviewing each plan of care on a regular schedule, quality reporting, and the aggregate cap. Agencies are also expected to provide volunteer services and to support families with bereavement care for months after a death. Much of that tracking ends up in spreadsheets and whiteboards next to the EHR.

Where hospice teams usually feel it most:

• Referrals from hospitals, nursing facilities and physicians that are hard to track from first call to admission or non-admit reason.
• Preparing for interdisciplinary group meetings by pulling updates from every discipline by hand.
• Recertification and face-to-face deadlines tracked on a calendar someone has to remember to check.
• On-call nurses without quick access to recent notes, medications, family contacts and the patient’s wishes.
• Volunteer scheduling, training records and hours logged on paper.
• Bereavement mailings, calls and visits for each family, spread over many months.

What we build: hospice software around your EHR

• A referral and admissions CRM showing every referral, its source, status, and the reason when a patient does not admit.
• Census and length-of-stay dashboards, including a view of cap exposure your finance team can check weekly.
• Interdisciplinary group meeting prep that gathers each discipline’s updates in one view before the meeting.
• Deadline tracking for recertifications, face-to-face encounters and required visits, with alerts to the right people.
• An on-call app with the patient summary, recent visit notes, family contacts and directions, plus a log of after-hours calls.
• Volunteer management: applications, training, matching to patients, scheduling and hours reporting.
• Bereavement program tracking, scheduling each family’s calls, letters and visits over the follow-up period.
• A family portal for visit schedules, care team contacts and secure messages, if your team wants one.
• AI phone answering that routes after-hours calls to the on-call nurse and takes referral details when the office is closed.

Off-the-shelf hospice software vs. custom

WellSky, Axxess and MatrixCare are well-known hospice EHR and software vendors, covering clinical documentation, plans of care, billing and required reporting. For the clinical record and claims, a dedicated hospice EHR is usually the right choice, because keeping up with Medicare rules is the vendor’s job.

Custom software helps where those systems feel generic: referral marketing and liaison tracking, a volunteer program that has grown past a spreadsheet, a bereavement program with your own schedule, on-call tools your nurses prefer, or reporting that combines several locations or a hospice and palliative program. Building it alongside the EHR keeps the clinical record in one place.

HIPAA and EHR integration

Hospice records include diagnoses, medications, prognosis and family details, all protected health information. We build hospice software with HIPAA safeguards in mind: unique logins, role-based access by discipline, audit logs, encryption, automatic sign-out on shared devices and hosting with providers that offer business associate agreements. We work with your compliance advisor on the agreements and policies your agency needs.

Where your hospice EHR offers an API or data export, we pull census, patient and visit data so staff do not re-enter it. When integration is limited, we design around scheduled exports and keep anything clinical in the EHR.

How a hospice software project works

1. Listen to each disciplineWe talk with intake, nursing, social work, chaplaincy, volunteers and bereavement staff about what slows them down.
2. Map data and deadlinesWe write down which data lives in the EHR, which lives elsewhere, and which dates and rules the software must track.
3. Design the screensYour team clicks through the dashboards and on-call views and tells us what to change.
4. Build in roundsWe start with the piece that removes the most manual work, often referrals or IDG prep, and review each round with you.
5. Launch and adjustStaff are trained, existing spreadsheets are imported, and the software keeps changing as your programs grow.

What it costs

Zoti custom projects start at $499/month, covering design, development, hosting and ongoing changes. The price depends on how many programs and locations are included and how much the software connects to your EHR. You get a written quote before work starts.