How Do I Get Started with Ankota?

Getting Starting with Ankota

Your Ankota system is a versatile and customizable management tool that offers a variety of ways to help optimize your business and to save you time. This manual will teach you the essentials of the Ankota system from onboarding, daily usage, and advanced features. We will cover general concepts, step-by-step procedures, and Best Practices in detail.

Preparing for the Onboarding Process

To get you onboarded with the system, we will start with a kick-off meeting with the Ankota team prior to your “go-live” launch.

During this initial meeting, we will ask you a number of questions to learn how we can best customize your Ankota system environment.

The information we will need from you to begin the process is as follows:

Full names of office staff who will use the system (or the first few who will work on the project team).
List of the Missouri programs your agency participates in (e.g., CDS, In-Home Services, HCY).
Do you have any other referral sources such as private pay or VA?
Your NPI and taxonomy codes.

You will also be asked to gather your client and caregiver demographical data, enter it into an Excel spreadsheet, and present it to Ankota so that we can upload the data into your system. (More details about this are explained in the next chapter).

Based on this discussion, the Ankota team will then configure your environment to best suit your organization’s needs.

Uploading Clients and Caregivers

As mentioned above, while your system is being configured by Ankota, your team will need to gather implementation data about your clients and caregivers into an Excel spreadsheet so that we can upload the data into your system. To make this process easier for you, Ankota will provide you with templates.

The following is the information you’ll need to present in the Excel spreadsheet:

Client Information

Please provide:

Program (e.g., CDS or In-Home)
DCN (Medicaid ID)
First Name
Last Name
Address (broken into street address, apartment, city, state and zip),
Phone Number
Diagnosis Code

Some of our customers also prefer to upload the following additional information:

Date of Birth
EIN
SUTA

Caregiver / Attendant Information

Please provide:

First and Last Name
Address
Phone Number
As part of the upload, each Caregiver will be assigned a numeric ID and a PIN number for clocking into the EVV (Electronic Visit Verification) system. Here are some other considerations:
Most of our customers have Ankota assign 3 digit IDs to their caregivers (e.g., starting from 100 and going to 221)
For the PIN number, the most popular methods are to either use their birth month and date (like 1102 for November 2nd) or the last four digits of their social security number.
Another consideration is whether your organization wants to associate any skills or certifications with your caregivers. This will be discussed in your implementation meeting.

A couple additional notes:

Only active clients and caregivers are generally updated. If you want to upload historical clients or caregivers please ask us (there might be an additional charge for this service).
Authorizations, Care Plans, and Schedules may also be loaded if you are able to produce an excel file with the information. If not, your team will need to load those into the system manually.