Hospice IDG Coordination: Channels
Channels listens to the patient threads already in QliqCHAT, flags clinically significant language as it appears, and assembles the IDG-ready record continuously. Prep becomes reading one channel, not reconstructing two weeks.
The language your teams already use is the trigger.
Channels ships with trigger libraries built from real hospice speech, and every list is tunable per organization: expand it, trim it, re-rank urgency, match your teams' shorthand.
From a sentence in a thread to an IDG-ready record.
IDG is the cadence. HOPE is the instrument. Channels is the coordination.
The hospice Conditions of Participation require an interdisciplinary group, at minimum a physician, a nurse, a social worker, and pastoral or spiritual care, to build an individualized plan of care and review it at least every 15 days. HOPE captures patient status at admission and update visits. Neither tells the team what happened in between: the fall reported by text, the family concern from a phone call, the medication issue mentioned in a hallway. Channels is the layer that makes that in-between visible, routed, and reviewable, so assessments stay in the EMR and the coordination arrives at IDG already done.
"If I had this kind of visibility running my own organization, I would have caught patterns weeks, maybe months, before they reached a crisis point." Michelle Pickering, Momentum Healthcare and Technology Consulting, hospice executive of 20+ years, from the QliqSOFT webinar
Eliminating Manual Detective Work for IDG Prep
Forty minutes with Michelle Pickering of Momentum Healthcare and Technology Consulting and John Lovitsch, QliqSOFT product manager, including a live demo of Channels, labels, flags, and the IDG export by Giselle from our customer success team. The attendee polls below are from the live session.
Not one attendee prepares in under two hours.
Prep burden and leadership visibility took every vote. Small room, loud signal.
From field observation to IDG-ready in seconds.
Anyone reports a change
An aide, nurse, chaplain, or social worker notes a change of condition in the patient's group chat, during the visit, not after.
The channel captures it
The report auto-posts to the census-wide IDG Channel, time-stamped, with urgent changes escalating to the RN coordinator and on-call.
The IDG walks the feed
Prep is reading the channel in order; each entry links back to its patient thread, which is synced to the EMR as Collaboration Notes.
Built for the meeting the CoPs require every 15 days.
42 CFR §418.56 requires the IDG to review every plan of care at least every 15 calendar days, and surveyors check that status changes were communicated to the IDG and documented. The channel does both, automatically. Related reading: Why hospice teams spend so much time preparing for IDG
- ✓One census-wide feed, every status change, every discipline, in chronological order
- ✓Urgent changes escalate in real time; nothing waits for the meeting
- ✓Time-stamped evidence of IDG communication at every status change, exactly what surveyors look for
- ✓Each entry links to its Patient-Centered Group Chat for full context and the EMR-synced record
One capability of a connected system.
Thirty minutes, IDG channels, live in the product.
The IDG clock, already answered.
42 CFR 418.56 gives you fifteen days between reviews. Here is the cycle with the channel underneath it.
IDG Channel, answered.
Is the IDG Channel per patient?
No, it's a single feed across your whole census. Per-patient conversation lives in Patient-Centered Group Chats; the IDG Channel aggregates the change-of-condition events from all of them.
How does this help with CoP compliance?
The CoPs require plan-of-care review at least every 15 days and documented communication of status changes to the IDG. The channel creates a time-stamped record of both, with each entry's source thread synced to the clinical record.
Can it drive HOPE SFV workflows?
Yes, symptom-related changes can start your SFV tracking, so the 2-calendar-day clock is visible from the moment the flag fires.
How does Channels work alongside our EMR?
Channels sits downstream of the EMR. Your EMR holds the patient record and clinical documentation; Channels coordinates the team's response to what gets communicated, surfacing change-in-condition signals, routing them across the IDG, and keeping a defensible record of follow-up. Assessments never move.
Where does Channels fit in our HOPE assessment workflow?
HOPE captures patient status at admission and update-visit intervals. Channels is where the IDG coordinates between those assessments, so findings do not sit unaddressed until the next assessment or the next meeting.
Will Channels add documentation work for staff?
No. Staff send messages exactly as they already do in QliqCHAT. Channels listens to the existing patient-specific threads and organizes what is already being said; nobody writes anything twice.
What kinds of issues does Channels surface?
Changes in condition, falls, medication concerns and near misses, family distress, care plan updates, clinical escalations, and unsafe-environment indicators, plus the shorthand versions your teams actually type: CIC, SOB, AMS, PPS, FAST, EOL. Trigger libraries come pre-built and are tunable per organization.
Who is Channels built for?
Hospice organizations with heavy IDG prep burden, fragmented coordination, leadership visibility gaps, or multi-site complexity, and specifically the clinical managers, case managers, and IDG coordinators who own the work between assessments and meetings.
We already use QliqCHAT. How do we turn Channels on?
Channels is enabled per group. Ask your customer success manager or contact sales and it can be switched on for your organization, then tuned to your trigger vocabulary from the admin dashboard.
What does IDG stand for in hospice?
IDG stands for interdisciplinary group: the team the hospice Conditions of Participation require for every patient, including at minimum a physician, a registered nurse, a social worker, and a pastoral or spiritual counselor. The IDG creates the individualized plan of care, reviews it on a required cadence, and directs and coordinates the services delivered.
How often does the hospice IDG meet?
The Conditions of Participation require the IDG to review each patient's plan of care at least every 15 days. Many organizations meet weekly or every other week; the 15-day review is the regulatory floor, not the ceiling.
What is the difference between IDG and IDT in hospice?
They refer to the same team. IDG (interdisciplinary group) is the term the Medicare Conditions of Participation use; IDT (interdisciplinary team) is the informal name many organizations use day to day. Requirements attach to the IDG designation.
Make the channel your IDG prep.
See the census-wide feed live, from field report to IDG meeting to survey-ready record.