New in Hospice Engine: MAR Entry and Timestamped Visit-Note Addendums

California’s new state hospice regulations took effect this month, and two of them land squarely on your medical record: how you document medication administration and how you amend a visit note after the fact. We’ve added two features to Hospice Engine to meet them — a Medication Administration Record (MAR) and timestamped addendums on visit notes — and both are already live in your system.

For the full regulatory backstory on what CDPH now requires, see our recent coverage:

• California Just Wrote Its First Real Hospice Rulebook — Here Is What CDPH Now Requires
• Your Administrator or DPCS Doesn’t Meet California’s New Hospice Rules. Now What?

This post is the short, operational version for our Hospice Engine clients: what changed, where to find it, and how to use it correctly.

Why This Changed Now

On June 22, 2026, CDPH’s emergency regulations (Title 22 CCR 74800–74908) went live, giving California hospice its first comprehensive licensing framework. Among the new requirements is a codified set of medical-record standards — the specific elements that must appear in the clinical record, including a complete account of medications administered and a controlled, traceable way to correct or supplement an existing entry.

Plenty of hospices were already capturing this information on paper or in side documents. The new rules push it into the formal record, in a form a surveyor can follow. The two updates below are built to do exactly that — and while they were driven by California’s rules, the same defensible documentation is good practice in any state.

1. Medication Administration Record (MAR) Entry

You can now record medication administration directly inside Hospice Engine, producing a clean, auditable MAR tied to the patient record. Instead of a separate sheet that lives outside the chart, the administration history is captured in the same system your clinicians already use for visits and orders.

The result is a single, time-stamped account of what was given — the kind of record the new CDPH medical-record standards expect, and the first thing a surveyor or auditor reaches for when reviewing medication management.

2. Addendums on Visit Notes

Visit notes get finalized, and then something comes up — a detail that was missed, a clarification a clinician needs to add, a follow-up from your QAPI review. The wrong way to handle that is to edit the original note and quietly change the record. The right way is an addendum: the original entry stays intact, and the new information is appended with a clear trail of who added what, and when.

Hospice Engine now does this for you. On any visit note you can add an Addendum, and it works the way the regulations expect a record correction to work:

• Added by a clinician or your QAPI staff. Both roles can append to the record, so a quality reviewer can document a finding without overwriting the clinician’s original note.
• Every entry is automatically date- and time-stamped. The system records the exact date and time each portion of the addendum was entered — you don’t type it, and it can’t be backdated.
• You can add to the same addendum as many times as you need. Each new addition is stamped on its own, so the record shows the full sequence of when each piece of information was added.
• It prints at the bottom of the visit note. The original note is preserved exactly as written, and the addendum appears beneath it on the printed record — keeping the amendment fully traceable and the original entry untouched.

That combination — original preserved, additions timestamped, author identified, all on one printed note — is precisely what makes an after-the-fact change defensible instead of suspicious.

How to Use It

Both features are already enabled in your system — there is nothing you need to turn on. MAR entry is available from the patient’s medication record, and the Addendum option is available on the visit note itself.

If you’d like a walkthrough of either one — how your clinicians enter the MAR, or how your QAPI staff use addendums during chart review — we’re happy to set up a short training session for your team.

The Bottom Line

California’s new medical-record rules raised the bar on two everyday parts of the chart: how you document medications, and how you correct a note after it’s signed. Hospice Engine now handles both — a clean MAR and a timestamped, author-tracked addendum that prints right on the visit note. Both are live today. If you operate in California, this is part of getting your record where Title 22 now expects it; if you don’t, it’s still the more defensible way to document. Either way, it’s ready when you are.