The vision for this blog is to create a community of harmonious professionals across the care continuum who encourage each other in exploring digital media as a way to support businesses and families dealing with elder care.
Written on March 25th, 2010 by tasha
The Remington Report just hosted a great webinar yesterday on integrating disease management across the continuum. As many of you may know, CMS is working hard to reduce unnecessary expenditures, create continuity across providers/settings, engage patients in self-care, and improve outcomes. Every one is a worthy goal!
This webinar was a showcase of several programs designed to meet these goals while also addressing new OASIS-C regs for home health.
Even if you are a hospice, geriatric care manager, or private duty care provider, these changes will affect you—in a positive way!
CMS is going to be penalizing doctors and hospitals that have high re-admission rates, meaning patients who go from the hospital to home and then end up back in the hospital within 30 days for the same condition. The “revolving door” is most common among persons with conditions that need extensive management at home:
Don’t these sound familiar in terms of the conditions you frequently manage in your practice?
Companies that can help families make a smoother transition from hospital to home will be well-situated to propose partnerships with hospitals and physicians in danger of having their reimbursement rates cut.
What a GREAT opportunity to position yourselves as the agency that can make everyone’s life easier. All of these diseases need regular monitoring, and someone the patient/family can call when they have questions. Patients and families need easy-to-understand instructions about what to do on a normal day, the signs and responses for a bad day, and when a situation is emergent requiring a visit to the hospital. This sounds like the day-in-a-life of a normal home care provider. We are experts in this already!
CMS is working on demonstration projects that will very specifically promote collaboration across the continuum. It looks like they are moving toward a system in the near future that will pay for conditions on a DRG basis bundled across providers and settings, thereby requiring that agencies work in tandem.
A new insight for me in this webinar was the concept that health payors are also looking for ways to realize savings in these arenas. Many of them have demonstration projects they are putting together right now. But home care services are not on their radar.
If you have a CHF, COPD, or diabetes program, this is a fantastic time to start networking and really let payors, docs and hospitals know how you can help them. Bring any data you have about re-admission rates and suggest you collaborate on a demonstration project.
If you are serious about creating a program, consider affordable, expert guidance from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. They have an “expedition series” starting March 30 designed to help hospitals reduce readmissions for heart failure. This organization is extremely talented in using local data and a quick turnaround review process to help companies nimbly and effectively improve health care delivery processes. I believe their online mentoring fee is quite reasonable.
The writing is on the wall. If you want to be a player 5-10 years from now, you need to start thinking in terms of collaboration and how to facilitate communication between various providers and settings.
By the way, if you are not familiar with The Remington Report, I HIGHLY recommend it. It’s the best $50 in subscriptions I spend all year. Practical articles coupled with policy smarts and visionary thinking. Doesn’t get much better than that!
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[...] across several providers, change is in the offing. It behooves us to think creatively about how to collaborate across the continuum. I believe there’s a blue ocean available working with hospitals to leverage net savings [...]
Thanks for the great information, Tasha. We’ll be sharing this with our followers!
[...] new penalty provides an excellent opportunity for elder care professionals to collaborate with doctors and hospitals by offering a home care team that is able to provide the necessary [...]