Jim Hoey, president of Prime Care Technologies

As the Payroll-Based Journal reporting deadline looms, many vendors have spent the spring selling new solutions.

Providers must start electronically submitting direct care staffing information data to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services by July 1. CMS reported at the end of April that half of providers had registered for the PBJ voluntary submission option.

Kronos Director of Senior Living and Post-Acute-Care Larry Florio says there’s been a “tremendous” amount of activity in the company’s customer base. “Holy cow, you’ve gotta get moving,” he told McKnight’s in May about other providers who haven’t budged yet. “The key word is ‘auditability’ — how does your solution provide that back to the data source?” 

Most vendors spent time talking to clients: When OnShift debuted its PBJ solution in January, CEO Mark Woodka noted it was based on months of learning.

OnShift’s pre-formatted exportable reports are meant to simplify the submission process to CMS and were developed in accordance with requirements of reporting direct care hours on a quarterly basis. At the end of April, OnShift noted many of its clients had successfully submitted PBJ reporting to CMS.

ezPBJ released its universal data conversion and reporting software earlier this year.

“We are thrilled to give skilled nursing facilities an easy-to-use tool that dramatically simplifies PBJ reporting,” said Don Feige, ezPBJ CEO.

Jim Hoey, president of Prime Care Technologies, said his users can view/monitor a summary of employee and contractor hours, automate the mapping of labor codes to CMS codes and export one inclusive file per facility for quarterly upload to CMS. 

Other companies working on PBJ products include, but are not limited to, SmartLink Solutions, StaffScheduleCare and Attendance on Demand.