Six EVV errors are responsible for many of the Michigan home care payment problems agencies run into: billed units that don’t match recorded hours, GPS coordinates transmitted as zero, edited visit times submitted without the required reason and action codes, visits falling outside the member’s start-of-care or discharge window, overlapping shifts for the same caregiver or member, and procedure code or payer ID mapping errors.
The frustrating part? Five of the six are preventable before the record ever leaves your system. And two can also count against Michigan’s 85% EVV compliance requirement under MDHHS Bulletin MMP 26-10, meaning the same mistake can cost you twice.
But here’s what catches many Michigan agencies off guard:
A visit can be fully EVV-compliant and still never become a dollar.
That’s because compliance and claims are two different gates.
MDHHS Bulletin MMP 26-10 measures how accurately you captured and submitted the visit. That’s where the 85% compliance threshold comes in.
HHAeXchange determines whether that visit record contains everything required to generate a claim.
One gate can say “compliant.”
The other can say “no claim.”
And since the January 1, 2026 hard cutover for managed care home health services, that second gate has become much less forgiving. Michigan’s EVV workflow only generates a claim when the EVV record is complete. If something is missing or mapped incorrectly, the claim may never be created in the first place.
That’s not the same as a denied claim you can work and appeal.
It’s a claim that never made it into the billing pipeline.
So let’s break down the six EVV errors that can actually stop the money, what each rejection means in plain English, and the specific fix for each one.
Every error covered below comes from HHAeXchange’s published EDI rejection documentation.
Why EVV errors delay Michigan payments in the first place?
Three mechanics worth holding in your head at once.
Everything routes through HHAeXchange. Michigan runs an open vendor model: use the state system or your own, but all visit data reaches HHAeXchange as the state aggregator. Claims sent directly to CHAMPS for dates of service from April 1, 2024 onward get rejected; HHAeXchange sends them on.
Incomplete records don’t become claims. For managed care HHCS after the January 2026 cutover, the state’s EVV system only creates the claim when the EVV record is complete. Revenue is gated on data quality before a payer ever sees a claim.
The clock is still running. Michigan Medicaid fee-for-service requires claims within 12 months of the date of service, and managed care plans often contract for shorter windows. A rejected visit sitting untouched for five months is quietly burning through that runway.
The good news: rejections are specific. Each one names its reason, which means each one has a fix.
Billed Units Don’t Match Recorded Hours
The rejection:
Billed units do not match recorded hours cannot be processed for billing.
The visit’s billed units don’t reconcile with the actual clock-in and clock-out times. Most often, it’s a billing-increment mismatch, or someone changed a visit time without updating the corresponding units.
The fix:
Check the payer’s required billing increment (15, 30, or 60 minutes), then correct either the units or the visit times so the two reconcile. Resubmit the record.
Stop it from recurring:
Your EVV system should calculate billing units automatically from the actual clock-in and clock-out times and block the record from export when the numbers don’t match. If someone is manually entering units anywhere in the workflow, this rejection is likely to keep coming back.
Does it affect your 85% compliance rate?
Only if you correct it by changing the clock-in or clock-out time. If you fix the billed units without altering the recorded visit time, the EVV record remains compliant.
Catch EVV Errors Before Billing
GPS Coordinates Transmitted as Zero
The rejection:
Clock-in/clock-out latitude cannot be 0.
The EVV record was submitted without valid GPS coordinates. Usually, that means location services were disabled, the caregiver had no signal when clocking in or out, or location permissions were previously denied or reset.
The fix:
Enable location services and verify that the EVV app has the required location permissions. If the visit genuinely has no GPS data, use the appropriate visit edit/reason code to correct the record. Just know that recovering the claim may come with an EVV compliance hit.
Stop it from recurring:
Make location permissions part of caregiver onboarding, not a troubleshooting step after a rejection. Have supervisors spot-check permissions regularly, especially after Android or app updates, and flag any zero-coordinate visits before export.
Does it affect your 85% compliance rate?
Yes. This is a double-penalty error. Missing GPS on a mobile visit can make the visit non-compliant under MMP 26-10, while HHAeXchange can separately reject the record because the required coordinates are missing.
Edited Times Submitted Without Reason and Action Codes
The rejection:
Visit edit reason and action taken codes are required when start/end times don’t match EVV times.
Someone changed the caregiver’s clock-in or clock-out time, but the record was submitted without the codes required to explain the change. Michigan’s EDI code table specifies which edit reason and action taken codes are valid. A missing code or an outdated/custom code that Michigan no longer accepts can send the visit back.
The fix:
Add both a valid edit reason code and a valid action taken code from Michigan’s approved table. If you only provide one code, the rejection will not be cleared.
Stop it from recurring:
Make both codes mandatory any time someone changes a clock-in or clock-out time, and disable auto-rounding.
Auto-rounding can quietly rewrite clock times across hundreds of visits without anyone intentionally editing them. That can create a trail of unexplained EVV edits at scale, making it one of the easiest settings to overlook and one of the most expensive to ignore.
Does it affect your 85% compliance rate?
Yes, and this is the costly one. Under MMP 26-10, manually changing a clock-in or clock-out can make the visit non-compliant. So you can take the compliance hit for changing the EVV time and delay payment because the required codes were missing.
There’s an important distinction, though: not every manual change counts against the 85%. MDHHS clarified that schedule changes do not reduce your compliance rate. The issue is specifically changing the actual clock-in or clock-out times.
Visit Dated Outside the Member’s Service Window
The rejection:
Visits cannot be imported prior to the patient’s SOC date or after the patient’s discharge date. In some cases, the record may also be rejected because the patient cannot be found in HHAeXchange.
The visit date falls outside the member’s active service window either before the start-of-care (SOC) date or after the discharge date. It can also happen when the member’s Medicaid ID doesn’t match an active member under the correct payer and office.
This one tends to surface most often with new admissions, lapsed authorizations, and member records that haven’t been updated correctly.
The fix:
Check the member’s SOC and discharge dates in the portal. If the visit occurred before the recorded SOC date, correct the service start date. If it occurred after discharge, confirm the member’s eligibility and authorization before resubmitting.
If the member isn’t found at all, verify the Medicaid ID, payer ID, and office NPI and make sure they match the HHAeXchange record.
Stop it from recurring:
Don’t wait for a rejected visit to tell you an authorization or member record has gone stale. Build SOC dates, discharge dates, eligibility, and authorization status into a routine member-record audit so problems are caught before visits reach the billing queue.
Does it affect your 85% compliance rate?
No. This is a pure revenue problem. And that’s exactly why it can be easy to miss: an agency watching only its EVV compliance dashboard may see no compliance impact at all while perfectly valid work is sitting outside the billing pipeline.
Overlapping Shifts
The rejection:
Overlapping shifts are not allowed if your shift overlaps with the same patient/DOS or the same caregiver/DOS.
Two visits overlap on the same date, so HHAeXchange can’t determine a clean sequence of service. Sometimes it’s a genuine scheduling conflict. More often, it’s much simpler: a caregiver forgot to clock out of one visit before clocking into the next.
The fix:
Review the clock-in and clock-out times for both visits and correct the overlap. Where appropriate, make sure the visits have a clear sequence with no overlapping time before resubmitting.
Stop it from recurring:
Run conflict detection before export and trigger a clock-out reminder on the caregiver’s phone. Pay particular attention to high-density schedules, back-to-back visits, multiple patients in the same building, or caregivers moving between nearby locations, where these errors tend to concentrate.
Does it affect your 85% compliance rate?
Usually, indirectly. Resolving an overlap often requires changing a clock-in or clock-out time. If you manually alter the EVV time, that edit can affect compliance under MMP 26-10. The overlap itself isn’t necessarily the compliance violation; the time edit used to fix it can be.
Procedure Code and Payer ID Mapping Errors
The rejection:
Procedure code is required · Procedure code not found · Payer ID is required · Payer ID should be numeric · Agency is not linked with payer.
Unlike the other errors, this one usually has nothing to do with caregiver behavior. It’s a configuration problem: a service code that isn’t on the payer’s approved list, an incorrect payer ID, or a contract that was never properly linked to your agency’s NPI.
The fix:
Cross-check your procedure codes and payer ID mappings against Michigan’s current EDI requirements. Correct any mismatched or missing values, then resubmit the affected records.
If the agency isn’t linked to the payer, that’s a configuration issue that may require a support ticket and coordination with your payer/provider representative before claims can move forward.
Stop it from recurring:
Validate your mappings whenever you add a payer, sign a new contract, or introduce a new service line. Your EVV system should also flag or block exports containing unrecognized procedure or payer codes instead of sending bad data downstream and waiting for HHAeXchange to reject it.
Does it affect your 85% compliance rate?
No. But it can be the most expensive error on this list.
A bad caregiver-level record affects one visit. A bad payer or procedure-code mapping can affect every visit under that contract until someone catches the configuration problem.
That makes this less of a visit-level error and more of a system-wide revenue blockage potentially holding up an entire payer’s revenue stream at once.
The Workflow That Prevents Most of This
Rejections are cheapest in the first 48 hours and most expensive in month five.
The goal isn’t to get better at fixing rejected visits. It’s to catch them before they become aging AR.
Here’s the workflow that prevents most of the problems above:
- Run a prebilling review every time. Before you invoice, use HHAeXchange’s prebilling tools to identify visits that are likely to be delayed, held, or denied. Catching an error before claim submission is always cheaper than fixing it afterwards.
- Give the rejection queue an owner and a calendar slot. “Someone checks it” isn’t a process. Assign a specific person and a recurring daily or weekly block to review, correct, and resubmit rejected visits.
- Fix root causes, not individual visits. If six visits are rejected because of the same payer ID mapping error, you don’t have six problems. You have one configuration problem affecting six visits. Fix the mapping, then clear the queue.
- Track your resubmission gap. Measure the number of days between rejection and resubmission. That gap directly affects how long revenue sits in your AR. If a rejection is sitting for more than seven days, the workflow, not the payer, is becoming the problem.
- Turn off auto-rounding. Today. If your system is changing clock times automatically, you may be creating EVV edits without realizing it. Remove that source of preventable errors before it generates another batch of rejected visits.
- Watch compliance and billing rejections together. They are two different failure modes attached to the same visit. One tells you whether the visit meets EVV compliance requirements; the other tells you whether that visit can actually become a claim. Separate dashboards mean separate blind spots.
The agencies that stay ahead of EVV revenue loss aren’t necessarily the ones with fewer errors.
They’re the ones that find errors earlier, assign them faster, and fix the system instead of repeatedly fixing the symptom.
Conclusion
Most Michigan agencies watch one number, the 85% and assume payment follows compliance. It doesn’t. Two of the six errors above cost you both. Four cost you only money, which means they’re invisible on a compliance dashboard and can run for months before anyone notices the AR.
Check three things this week: whether auto-rounding is on, who owns your rejection queue, and how many days pass between a rejection and its resubmission. Those three answers will tell you more about your cash position than any compliance report will.
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