Is there a Qlarant audit checklist I can see in advance?

Yes. Qlarant publishes its own review instruments on the Florida Statewide Quality Assurance Program site, including the Administrative tools, the Observation Review Checklist for licensed residential facilities, and service-specific record review checklists. They are free to download and they are what the reviewer scores against.

What is Deemed Status in a Qlarant review?

Deemed Status is a designation Qlarant applies to providers who reach a pre-determined score on their Provider Discovery Review, which can let them skip a review year. The score is set annually by AHCA and APD and is granted at their discretion, so the current threshold has to be confirmed rather than assumed.

Is a Qlarant review the same as an APD inspection?

No. APD licenses and monitors the home itself under Rule Chapter 65G-2, F.A.C. Qlarant reviews you as an iBudget Waiver provider under a contract with AHCA. Two different bodies, two different sets of paperwork, and passing one says nothing about the other.

Reviews08/26/2026·7 min read

Qlarant Is Not APD: What a Provider Discovery Review Actually Is

The letter says Qlarant, not APD, and most owners assume it is the same inspection under a different name. It is not — different body, different contract, different tools. Qlarant publishes the instruments it scores you with, and almost nobody reads them.

What is a Qlarant Provider Discovery Review?

A Provider Discovery Review (PDR) is a review of an iBudget Waiver provider — records, administration and service delivery — conducted by Qlarant, a private quality improvement organization contracted by Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration to run the Florida Statewide Quality Assurance Program in partnership with APD. It is separate from the APD licensing inspection of your home, and Qlarant publishes the review tools it scores you against.

The first thing worth saying plainly, because it is where most of the confusion starts: Qlarant is not APD. They are a separate company. AHCA — the Medicaid agency — contracts them to run the Florida Statewide Quality Assurance Program, and they work in partnership with APD. So a Florida group home can be looked at by three different bodies for three different reasons: APD licenses and monitors the home, your local fire authority inspects the building, and Qlarant reviews you as a waiver provider.

Passing one tells you nothing about the others. That is not a technicality — it is the reason owners get surprised.

What they are actually looking at

Qlarant's own definition of a Provider Discovery Review is the process of discovery focusing on provider compliance and accountability in delivering supports and services to the people served. In practice that splits into pieces you can name:

An administrative review — the provider-level records.
Service specific record reviews — the service records for a sample of the people you support.
Observation of licensed residential facilities and day training locations, against a published checklist.
Individual interviews, and a review of Medicaid claims data.

As of the July 2026 update to the program's operations manual, the PDR section now covers three review types rather than one — the standard PDR for service providers, a PDR for Qualified Organizations (a group of four or more Waiver Support Coordinators), and a PDR for Consumer Directed Care Plus representatives. Which one applies to you depends on what you are enrolled as.

The part almost nobody uses: they publish the tools

People search for a "Qlarant audit checklist" as though it were a secret. It is not. Qlarant posts its review instruments publicly on the Provider Review Tools page — the Administrative tool, the Observation Review Checklist used at licensed residential facilities, the individual interview tool, and a long list of service-specific record review checklists including Residential Habilitation and Life Skills Development.

Download the tool that matches what you are enrolled to provide, and read it before anyone schedules anything. It is the instrument you will be scored against, written by the people doing the scoring. There is no better preparation document in existence, and it costs nothing.

Deemed Status, and the number you should not assume

Deemed Status is the designation Qlarant applies to a provider who reaches a pre-determined score on their Provider Discovery Review. Earn it and you may skip a review year, which is why operators talk about it.

The number people quote is 95%. That number is real, and it has a source: APD Provider Advisory 2021-010 set it for fiscal year 2021-22 at an overall score of 95.0% or higher, with no alerts and no potential billing discrepancies — or with identified billing discrepancy dollars under 3.00% of the total reimbursed amount on the records reviewed. That same advisory said there would be no Deemed Status at all that year for Qualified Organizations.

Here is the part that gets left off every summary of it. That advisory is about fiscal year 2021-22. Qlarant's own glossary says only that the score is pre-determined, and that the criteria are determined annually by AHCA and APD. The 2021 advisory adds that Deemed Status is granted at the discretion of APD and AHCA and may be revoked at any time.

So: 95% is what APD published for 2021-22, not a standing rule of Florida. If Deemed Status matters to your planning, confirm the current year's criteria with Qlarant customer service rather than with a number somebody repeated on a forum — including this one.

Where a group home actually loses points

The observation and administrative pieces reach straight into the records you already keep for APD: staff training and screening documentation, personnel files, and the facility records for each licensed home. Those are dates, and dates are what expire quietly. A reviewer arriving in month nine of your year does not care that a medication validation was current in month three.

This is also why the two reviews feel like the same paperwork twice. They are not the same review, but they read a lot of the same folder — which means the work of keeping that folder current pays for itself in both directions.

Sources

This article is general information for Florida APD group-home providers, not legal advice or a guarantee of compliance. Rules change and vary by region — always confirm the current requirement with the cited source and your APD regional office.