Encore Hospice delivers high-touch hospice care in assisted living environments across Arizona. With a leadership team grounded in regulatory expertise, the agency had long understood the importance of quality management. But understanding and executing are two very different things. Managing compliance with spreadsheets, binders, and memory was time-consuming, error-prone, and ultimately unsustainable.
“It was all manual on paper before. It was stupid and we weren’t doing a whole lot. You can only do so much and we’re small,” said Holly Carlson, Owner and Executive Director.
Holly had worked as a consultant herself. She knew exactly what compliance required, but she also knew that building a scalable, survey-ready quality program from scratch would demand more time and staff than she could afford. That changed with QAPIplus.
The Challenge
Encore Hospice used Axxess as its EMR, but the platform alone didn’t support the breadth of quality functions required for compliance. The team needed to manage incident reporting, track infections and falls, deliver monthly in-service education, and prepare for audits. All of it was happening outside the EMR, and often, after the fact.
"To remember everything that you need to be compliant and then to be able to find it when you need it is a disaster in real life," Holly said.
Chart audits were still largely manual. Staff were scrambling to meet in-service training requirements. Infection data was either missing or had to be reconstructed from prescription records.
As Holly put it,
"We were doing it manually. And you can pay one person to do that job, which a lot of places do, but I don’t have to do that with QAPIplus."
The Solution
QAPIplus offered a different path. With the platform's centralized dashboards, automated reports, and mobile access, Encore was able to digitize every major component of its quality program.
Today, nurses report incidents directly from their phones. Infections, falls, and adverse events are captured in real time with structured templates that support trend analysis. Monthly education is built into the system and pushed to staff automatically.
Encore’s non-clinical operations manager handles data entry, reporting, and meeting coordination.
"He’s non-clinical and he makes sure everything gets put where it needs to. The fact that someone who came from the financial industry can manage QAPI tells me everything I need to know about the product," Holly explained.
Leadership uses the data to drive decision-making, and the platform allows for custom chart audits that align with Encore’s specific clinical and survey needs.
More Time for Improvement
Before QAPIplus, Encore was spending 30 to 40 hours per week focused on quality and compliance. Much of that time was lost to documentation review, data hunting, and report creation. Today, all of that takes about two hours.
"I’d rather pay my QAPIplus fee than pay for an employee, pay for benefits, have everything that goes along with that. When I can have a program that does it and a few hours of somebody’s time, that’s it."
QAPIplus saved Encore the equivalent of a full-time hire. That’s more than 1,800 hours per year that are now reinvested into clinical care, staff development, and leadership priorities. Instead of recruiting, onboarding, and managing a compliance FTE, Holly has a reliable system that scales with her agency.
"If you’re a small agency, this replaces a hire. If you’re mid-size or bigger, it probably replaces a team," she said.
Faster Survey Readiness
Encore has not yet had a full survey since implementing QAPIplus, but Carlson is already confident in their preparedness.
"I am not worried about it at all," she said.
With centralized documentation, real-time dashboards, and digital surveyor access, Encore has replaced binders, paper reports, and last-minute scramble with consistent, survey-ready visibility.
From incident reports to education logs and quarterly PI meeting minutes, every required element is housed in one secure platform.
Better Insight into Outcomes
Infections are a recurring challenge in the group homes where Encore provides care. Tracking those events used to require detective work. Now, QAPIplus gives Encore the ability to spot trends early and intervene faster.
"Sometimes these people are antibiotic-resistant. QAPIplus lets us track and see that the infection never went away. Otherwise we’re chasing prescriptions backward," Holly said.
With trending reports and incident-level detail, the team can assess whether treatments are effective and take action when patterns emerge. The system also allows Encore to offer targeted education to group home staff, where unlicensed caregivers and high turnover often contribute to risk.
Easy Onboarding and Support
Clinicians adopted the QAPIplus mobile app quickly. With pre-populated fields and a simple interface, entering incidents in the field became fast and intuitive.
"If it’s not right in front of them and easy, they won’t do it. Now they just open QAPIplus and put in the information."
Chart audits are fully digitized. Encore runs 100 percent audits on every patient using a combination of standard and custom templates built within the platform.
"We do 100 percent on everybody. Between QAPIplus and our medical record, we can do that, and it’s not horrible."
Holly also praised the platform’s education module, which has eliminated the need to track down in-service training manually each month.
Final Word from Holly
"Just pay it. It is not that much money to be compliant. You’re going to pay more in fees. You’re going to pay more in your surveys. It’s just not worth it."
For Encore Hospice, QAPIplus delivered immediate time savings, stronger compliance, and peace of mind, all without increasing headcount: it was a simple decision. It worked the way a quality program should.
