Most practices think the visit is where Value-Based Care happens. The provider walks in, reviews the chart, addresses the chief complaint, and hopefully remembers to check on a screening or two before the patient leaves. But the highest-impact moment in your day is not the exam itself. It is the five minutes of CareEmpower chart prep pre-visit planning that happen before the patient ever sits down.
That short window is where care gaps get surfaced, where sick visits become well visits, and where your team spots the activities that generate quarterly Equality Care Incentive Program (ECIP) financial support. Skip it, and you are relying on memory during a 15-minute appointment with a patient who has three chronic conditions and has not been in for eight months. Build it into your routine, and every visit becomes more complete, more efficient, and more financially productive.
Why Pre-Visit Planning Matters More Than You Think
Without a structured pre-visit workflow, practices default to reactive care. The patient presents with a complaint, the provider addresses it, and the team moves on. Preventive screenings get deferred. Immunization gaps stay open. Documentation opportunities for risk adjustment go unnoticed. The visit closes, and two months later a report shows you missed three activities that were sitting right in front of you.
We see this pattern across the more than 8,200 providers in our network. The practices that consistently outperform on quality and financial support are not staffed differently or seeing fewer patients. They have built a pre-visit habit. CareEmpower® makes that habit easy by consolidating everything your team needs to review into one place, organized by priority, before the patient arrives.
Right now, 77% of our attributed members have Primary Care Provider (PCP) practices that log into CareEmpower regularly — 83% in Arizona, 73% in Texas, and 81% in Tennessee. Across all five markets, approximately 1,400 unique users engage with the platform every month. The practices getting the most out of those sessions are the ones using the Chart Prep Tool consistently before every visit.
The CareEmpower Chart Prep Pre-Visit Planning Checklist
The Chart Prep Tool is an enhanced feature inside CareEmpower that pulls together everything your team needs to review before a patient walks through the door. It can be accessed from the patient’s Manage Visit window or bulk-printed from the Scheduled Visits page. Either way, the goal is the same: walk into every visit knowing exactly what is due, what is open, and what will count toward your ECIP activities.
Here are the six categories to review in every pre-visit prep session.
1. Open Care Gaps
Start with the Manage Visit drawer. When you select a patient’s name from any worklist, CareEmpower shows all the visit tiles that are currently actionable — Annual Comprehensive Visit, Child or Adolescent Well-Care Visit, Chronic Care Management, and more. Each tile displays its current status (Open, Scheduled, Marked for Closure) and the required activities underneath. Your first task is to scan for open gaps: cervical cancer screening that has not been completed, a blood pressure check that is overdue, an SDoH screening that has not been addressed. These are the items that close care gaps and improve your Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS) performance. If you do not look for them before the visit, you are hoping the provider remembers them during the visit. Hope is not a workflow.
2. Due Immunizations
For pediatric patients, the Chart Prep Tool surfaces the full Childhood Immunization Status (CIS) Combo 10 series with a completion percentage and dose counter for each immunization — from Hepatitis B and DTaP to Rotavirus and Influenza. For adolescents, the Immunizations for Adolescents (IMA) Combo 2 series shows Meningococcal, Tdap, and HPV with the same dose-level tracking. Each immunization displays the required number of doses and how many have been completed. Before the visit, your team should know exactly which doses are still needed so the provider can address them in the room — not discover them afterward when reviewing the chart.
3. Chronic Condition Status
The Chronic Care Management tile in the Manage Visit window lists every active chronic condition for the patient — depression, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, asthma, chronic kidney disease, COPD. CareEmpower prioritizes high-risk member visits on regular intervals (every three or 12 months depending on the measure) and flags patients who are overdue. Before the visit, review which conditions are active and whether the patient’s last high-risk visit was recent enough to keep them in compliance. This is especially critical for patients classified as Very High risk on the worklist, who should be seen more frequently.
4. ECIP-Eligible Activities
Every visit tile in CareEmpower maps to specific ECIP activity pillars: wellness visits, transitions of care, high-risk member management, and prevention and screenings. The Chart Prep Tool shows which activities are open and eligible for that patient. Before the visit, your team should know which activities are available to complete — because those are the activities that generate quarterly ECIP financial support. A wellness visit that also closes a screening gap and addresses a chronic condition can touch three ECIP pillars in a single appointment. But only if your team knows those opportunities exist before the patient sits down.
5. Sick-to-Well Visit Opportunity
Most children visit their PCP when they are already sick. Many Medicaid Managed Care Organizations (MCOs) allow payment for a combination of certain services completed on the same day — including sick visits, well visits, immunizations, and labs. CareEmpower’s worklist flags patients who are due for a wellness visit even when they are on the schedule for a sick visit. Before the appointment, check whether the patient has an open wellness visit tile. If they do, your team can prompt the provider to convert the encounter from a sick-only visit to a sick-plus-well visit. That single conversion captures preventive care, closes a care gap, and counts toward your ECIP activities — all in a visit the patient was already coming in for.
6. Referral Needs
The Manage Visit window includes a Referrals tab that connects your practice to CareEmpower’s integrated referral pathways. Before the visit, check whether the patient needs a referral to coding support for documentation accuracy and HCC capture, care coordination for transitions of care or specialist referrals, or in-home care for patients who cannot access the practice. Addressing referral needs before the visit means the provider can initiate them during the appointment rather than adding them to a follow-up list that may never get completed. CareEmpower connects to 17 integrated SDoH referral partners, so if a patient needs help with transportation, food access, or other social barriers, your team can make that connection in the same workflow.
Advanced Tips for High-Volume Practices
The six-item checklist works for every visit. But practices running a full schedule can accelerate the process with a few CareEmpower features designed for scale.
Use the Patient Engagement filter on the worklist to identify which patients are engaged with your primary practice, engaged with another practice, or not engaged at all. This filter is on by default, but understanding what it tells you matters: a patient marked “Not engaged” has not had any interaction with any practice in the last 18 months. That patient needs a different conversation than someone who was in last quarter. Knowing this before the call — or before the visit — changes how your team prepares.
Use the Visit Gap Status filter. The worklist defaults to showing Unscheduled and Left Message patients, but you can also filter for Unable to Contact, Patient Refused, and Changed PCP. When your team is working through the Recommended Now list from top to bottom, these filters help you focus on the patients you can actually reach and schedule — rather than cycling through records that need a different kind of outreach.
Take advantage of bulk-printing from the Scheduled Visits page. This page organizes your upcoming appointments by day and includes a Print Chart Prep Tool button for each day’s slate. Click it, and CareEmpower generates chart prep sheets for every patient scheduled that day. Your front office can have them printed and clipped to the encounter forms before the morning huddle starts.
Build the Habit, Not Just the Checklist
A checklist is only useful if it becomes part of the routine. The practices in our network that get the most from CareEmpower chart prep pre-visit planning are the ones that have made it non-negotiable — the same way a pilot runs through a preflight check before every departure, not just the long ones.
Your Practice Performance Advisor (PPA) can help you build this into your daily workflow. PPAs are on-site at practices for exactly this kind of process implementation — working with your front office, your MAs, and your providers to make pre-visit prep automatic rather than aspirational. Your Provider Account Manager (PAM) reviews this in monthly performance meetings too, connecting your Chart Prep habits to your ECIP earnings and quality targets so you can see the direct relationship between preparation and results.
Five Minutes That Pay for Themselves
The math is straightforward. Five minutes of CareEmpower chart prep pre-visit planning before each visit surfaces care gaps that would otherwise go unaddressed, identifies activities that generate quarterly ECIP financial support, converts sick visits into more complete encounters, and catches referral and documentation needs before the patient leaves. Across a full day of appointments, that is the difference between a practice that is keeping up and a practice that is getting ahead.
We built CareEmpower to be the workflow tool that makes Value-Based Care manageable — not one more thing to check, but the one thing that makes everything else easier. The five minutes before the visit is where that promise lives. The practices that protect those five minutes are the ones seeing the strongest results — in quality, in earnings, and in the kind of care their patients actually receive.
