Hospice volunteer tracking software that's ready when the surveyor asks.
Document the volunteer hours, cost savings, and Medicare 5% level-of-activity your Conditions of Participation review expects — and hand your board a finished report in seconds, not tallied from a binder. All with no patient data, ever.
- No patient data required
- Medicare 5% level-of-activity built in
- Cost-savings documentation
The hospice coordinator's view — active volunteers, hours by area of service, and the totals a survey or board report draws from. Shown with sample agency data.
The volunteer record a hospice survey actually asks to see
Everything a Conditions of Participation review asks about the volunteer program, in one record: the documented volunteer hours by area of service, the cost savings behind them, the Medicare 5% level-of-activity, and a history that holds up no matter who's in the coordinator's chair that month — without a single patient name ever entering the tool.
The Medicare 5% level-of-activity, without patient data
42 CFR §418.78(e) asks a hospice to keep volunteers active at a level equal to at least 5% of total paid patient-care hours. Volunteer Ledger already tracks the volunteer side; for the denominator you enter one aggregate number per reporting period — total paid patient-care hours from payroll or your EMR. That single figure isn't a patient record, so nothing protected ever comes in.
Volunteer Ledger then shows your volunteer hours as a percentage against the 5% floor, with the qualifying-area rules built in: direct patient and family care and day-to-day administrative hours count; fundraising, development, and board service are excluded. The number a surveyor asks for is computed for you — no spreadsheet, no patient chart.
Cost-savings documentation you can show, not guess
The hospice Conditions of Participation (§418.78(d)) expect you to document the cost savings your volunteers provide. Volunteer Ledger keeps that figure standing by: log hours by area of service, set your agency's value rate, and the documented savings calculates itself — broken out by program and traceable down to individual dated entries.
When a surveyor or a board member asks "what did volunteers save us this year?", you don't reconstruct it from sign-in sheets. You open the report. Every dollar points back to the hours behind it, so the number isn't a guess — it's documentation.
Hours by area of service, ready for a date-range request
Surveyors and program reviews rarely ask for one number. They ask for hours over a specific period, split by where volunteers served — administrative, auxiliary, bereavement, hospice house, pet therapy, camp, veteran. Volunteer Ledger tags every entry to its area, so any window and any breakdown is a filter away.
No more pulling an all-nighter to slice a spreadsheet before a site visit. The structure that a review wants to see is already in the data, because every hour was entered against the program it belongs to.
One agency account — no patient data, no volunteer logins
Coordinators enter hours from the paper time sheets your program already collects, the way they do it now, just faster. Volunteers never create an account, and the system never asks for a patient name, diagnosis, or anything from a chart. Every hour lives in your agency's account with an audit trail of who entered or changed what.
So when a coordinator leaves, the documentation a survey depends on doesn't walk out on a laptop — the next coordinator inherits a complete, organized history. The evidence belongs to the agency, and protected health information never enters the reporting tool.
Turn a year of sign-in sheets into one page of evidence
When a surveyor, an administrator, or your QAPI committee asks what the volunteer program contributed, the answer is a report — not an afternoon of adding up paper. Here's the page Volunteer Ledger hands them.
The figures a hospice review keeps asking for
Pick a period, pick the areas of service, and Volunteer Ledger assembles the volunteer hours, the documented cost savings at your agency's rate, the by-program breakdown, and the §418.78(e) 5% level-of-activity into clean, printable pages. They drop straight into a site-visit binder or a board packet without reformatting.
- Medicare 5% level-of-activity vs. paid patient-care hours
- Documented cost savings at your value rate
- Hours split by area of service
- Active volunteers behind the hours
- Every figure traceable to dated entries
Volunteer Cost-Savings & Participation Evidence
Sample report — illustrative figures. The 5% level-of-activity is computed inside Volunteer Ledger from the one aggregate paid-hours number you enter; no patient data is used.
The spreadsheet on survey week vs the report on survey week
The spreadsheet way Scramble
- Hours re-tallied from a binder before the site visit
- Cost savings estimated from memory and a calculator
- By-area breakdowns rebuilt by hand for each request
- "Where does this number come from?" has no good answer
- The file lives on one coordinator's laptop
The Volunteer Ledger way Ready
- Totals already summed, the moment the hours were entered
- Cost savings documented at a rate you set, not guessed
- Any date range, split by area, in a single report
- Every figure traces to dated, attributed entries
- The record lives in the agency's account, ready for anyone
One record, four people who depend on it
Hospice volunteer coordinators
Enter hours from the time sheets they already collect, tag each to an area of service, and never tally a binder for a survey again.
Quality & compliance staff
Pull the cost-savings and by-area hours that support the Conditions of Participation review — with read-only access and a clean audit trail.
Hospice administrators
Get the program's hours, value, and trends as a finished summary instead of waiting on a coordinator to build one by hand.
Leadership & the board
See the documented dollar value of the volunteer program in plain numbers — proof of impact that's ready before the meeting, not after.
Your EMR stays the system of record for clinical documentation. Volunteer Ledger is the companion that turns the volunteer program into evidence — the administrative, auxiliary, bereavement, hospice-house, pet therapy, camp, and veteran hours, the cost savings behind them, the 5% level-of-activity, and the recognition records — so the whole program is documented in one place, without ever mixing clinical data into a reporting tool.
Related programs in the same workspace: palliative care volunteer tracking, We Honor Veterans volunteer tracking, and pet therapy volunteer tracking.
Hospice survey readiness, answered
Does Volunteer Ledger calculate our Medicare 5% volunteer ratio?
Yes — and it does it without ever holding patient data. The 5% level-of-activity under 42 CFR §418.78(e) compares your qualifying volunteer hours to your total paid patient-care hours. Volunteer Ledger already tracks the volunteer side, and for the denominator you enter one aggregate number per reporting period — total paid patient-care hours, from payroll or your EMR. That single figure isn't protected health information, so no patient names, diagnoses, or charts ever come in. Volunteer Ledger then shows your volunteer hours as a percentage against the 5% minimum, with the qualifying-area rules built in: direct patient and family care and day-to-day administrative hours count; fundraising, development, and board service are excluded.
What does this give us that a binder of sign-in sheets does not?
A binder holds the raw sign-in sheets but answers no questions. When a surveyor asks for hours by area of service over a date range, or leadership asks what the program saved last quarter, someone has to add the binder up by hand. Volunteer Ledger keeps every hour as a dated, attributed entry, so the same totals, the cost-savings figure, and the by-area breakdown come out as a clean report in seconds instead of an afternoon of tallying.
How is the documented cost savings figured?
Volunteer Ledger multiplies the volunteer hours you have logged by an hourly value rate you set for your agency, broken out by area of service. You control the rate, and every dollar traces back to individual dated entries you can show. This is the cost-savings documentation 42 CFR §418.78(d) asks hospices to keep — the in-kind value of the volunteer program — and it sits alongside the separate §418.78(e) 5% level-of-activity tracker in the same reports section.
Can our quality and compliance staff get to the records without editing them?
Yes. On the Complete plan you can give QAPI, compliance, and leadership read-only access, so they can pull the cost-savings summary or the by-area hours for a survey or a board packet without being able to change an entry. Coordinators keep edit access; everyone else sees a current, trustworthy record. Volunteers themselves never need a login of any kind.
Will this hold up if a coordinator leaves before survey?
That is one of the main reasons to get the program out of a personal spreadsheet. Every hour lives in your agency's account, not on one person's laptop, and every entry carries an audit trail of who created or changed it. When the next coordinator steps in — or a surveyor arrives — the full history is already there, organized by area of service, with nothing trapped in a file that walked out the door.
Be ready for survey before it's on the calendar.
Start a free 45-day trial, import your roster, set your value rate, and have a cost-savings report ready to print by the end of the week. No credit card, no setup call, no patient data — ever.