Ozark operates 12 healthcare divisions across home health, hospice, and other lines of care. Jamie Deken, BSN, RN, serves as Direct Administrator for Home Health and Hospice and Chief Nursing Officer across all Ozark entities, overseeing a home health census of roughly 200 to 220 patients and a growing hospice program. Ozark has used QAPIplus for more than two years and added AI Chart Audits in August 2026.
Key Outcomes
Just 2 deficiencies on Ozark's last home health survey
First survey in 10 years with zero medication deficiencies
Audit and dashboard review time cut from an hour+ to 15 minutes
Real-time PI tracking and weekly audit review, replacing a once-a-month scramble
Always-current employee roster and org chart across 12 divisions and 400 employees
AI Chart Audits projected to cut chart review from up to 2 hrs to about 5 mins/chart
Overview
Ozark operates 12 healthcare divisions, including home health and hospice programs led by Jamie Deken, BSN, RN, who serves as Direct Administrator for Home Health and Hospice and Chief Nursing Officer across all Ozark entities. With a census of roughly 200 to 220 patients in home health and a growing hospice program, Ozark needed a quality and compliance program that could keep pace with a large, multi-division organization, not one built to slow it down.
Jamie discovered QAPIplus through an ACHC webinar. She became the sole decision maker behind the switch, starting with hospice first because of its smaller census, then adding home health the following year. Ozark has now been on QAPIplus for more than two years, and in August 2026 signed on for AI Chart Audits.
The Challenge
Before QAPIplus, Ozark's quality and compliance program lived in binders. Binders for QAPI. Binders for education. Binders for audits, infection control, complaints, and PIPs.
“If you name it, there was a binder for it. We were doing QAPI, but we weren’t really utilizing it the way it’s intended to be utilized. It was more of an afterthought.”
—Jamie Deken, BSN, RN: Chief Nursing Officer at Ozark Total Healthcare
Audits were scored by hand. Someone had to count every yes and every no across dozens of questions, sometimes for 50 audits in a single month, then calculate the percentages manually. At the end of the month, it could take a team of three people working eight-hour days just to pull everything together.
“Three people working three days, just to check a box. It doesn’t drive change in the organization. It just checks a box.”
There was no dedicated audit trail, no real-time view of risk, and no consistent way to see what the data was actually telling the team. The process was largely retrospective, making it difficult to identify trends early, respond to emerging risks, and turn findings into meaningful, sustained change.
The Solution
Ozark implemented QAPIplus to bring quality, compliance, education, and audits into one connected system. Hospice went live first. Home health followed a year later. Every new hire is now added to QAPIplus the same day they're added to the EMR, before they can be assigned a single patient.
The shift went well beyond digitizing paperwork. QAPIplus changed how often Ozark's team actually engages with quality data.
“It truly is life-changing as an administrator and quality person. I mean, it just really is.”
Faster Survey Readiness
Ozark's last home health survey, completed in January 2026, resulted in only two deficiencies. It was also the first survey in Jamie's 10 years of managing home health surveys where the agency received zero medication deficiencies, one of the most common findings across both ACHC and CHAP surveys.
2 deficiencies on Ozark's last home health survey
0 medication deficiencies, a first in 10 years
100% peace of mind going into a survey window
One save came from a detail Jamie didn't even know was required. QAPIplus auto-populates compliant governing body meeting minute language. During a survey two years prior, a surveyor asked about specific verbiage Jamie didn't recognize, because it had never appeared in her paper process. It was already built into her QAPIplus meeting minutes, and it kept Ozark from a citation.
“I do not recognize that. Well, it was in the verbiage in the meetings that's automatically populated. And so that saved a deficiency.”
More Time for Improvement
Manual audit scoring and spreadsheet formulas are gone. QAPIplus dashboards now calculate compliance percentages automatically, across falls, infection control, and every other tracked measure.
“As regulations get harder and there’s more scrutiny, people have to go to automation or they’re not going to survive. There’s not enough man hours to do things that could be automated.”
Jamie estimates that reviewing audits, tracking logs, and dashboards now takes about 15 minutes for work that used to take more than an hour of manual counting and cross-checking. She now checks in on the platform daily. Before QAPIplus, that kind of frequency wasn't realistic.
Better Insight and Accountability Across a Large Organization
With 400 employees spanning 12 divisions, home health, hospice, and a separate coding company, keeping an accurate employee roster used to require a manually maintained spreadsheet on top of pulling reports from the EMR. QAPIplus's org chart and employee list update automatically as staff are added, which Jamie now relies on directly for survey documentation.
“That has also been a huge game changer just because of the amount of divisions that we had. I don’t have to worry about this spreadsheet because I can just go print it.”
Ozark's HR department now runs its own audits inside QAPIplus with a dedicated login, and case managers use the platform weekly for chart and referral audits, patient satisfaction surveys, and admission paperwork reviews. Performance improvement projects are built directly from audit findings and stay open, tracked, and assigned rather than sitting as static notes.
Fewer Binders, Every Day
Over two years, Ozark has retired binders for QAPI, staff meetings, in-service education, and emergency preparedness, including a three-inch emergency prep binder that sat on Jamie's shelf for years. In the weeks before this case study, Jamie moved policies and procedures into QAPIplus and eliminated six more binders in hospice alone, with home health's binder next on the list.
“I literally got rid of another eight binders.”
What's Next: AI Chart Audits
Even with QAPIplus in place, chart audits still required real time. A single thorough chart review, opening every visit note across a full length of stay, could take an hour and a half to two hours. With a census of 200 to 220 in home health alone, and new ADRs already surfacing on 2024 claims, Ozark needed audit coverage that could scale without adding headcount.
In August 2026, Ozark's team walked through QAPIplus AI Chart Audits. The reaction was immediate. AI Chart Audits pull directly from Ozark's EMR and answer the same technical and clinical questions Ozark's team already uses in its manual chart reviews, then surface findings, reasoning, and corrective actions ready for review. What used to take up to two hours per chart now takes about five minutes to review and confirm.
“I was sold before he even showed me the AI audit. I told the rep to send me over an agreement today and I’m ready to sign it... This should take an hour and a half to two hour long process down to about five minutes, because you’re just reviewing what the AI is giving you back.”
Findings roll directly into PI meetings and performance improvement projects, the same way manual chart audit findings already do. Clinician-level scorecards break results down by discipline, giving Ozark's team a faster way to spot where additional training or support is needed, before it shows up in a survey.
Ozark signed on for AI Chart Audits the same day, across both home health and hospice.
Final Word from Jamie
“If you're actually using QAPIplus, it's not just going to make you use less time. It also gives you the time to have better processes and to actually have a robust QAPI program. Not only could you come up with a return on investment for what you're saving on manual work, it also gives you the time to improve upon your own processes. If people bring up quality, I tell them to look at QAPIplus. Ten out of ten recommend.”
