Written on October 4th, 2011 by tasha
I’ve been on a blogpost roll with search engine optimization techniques. But spending these last few days in Las Vegas at the Conference of the National Association of Home Care and Hospice, I decided to break things up a bit and post about highlights that have jumped out at me so far:
- Concise summary of current Medicare issues for hospice (aka, “if you’re feeling tired, there’s a reason!”)
- Gee whiz technology innovations (some of which we may be incorporating into our educational web templates)
Concise summary of current Medicare issues impacting hospice
- More oversight: Hospice is no longer “the angel of health care.” It’s needing to prove value and quality like any other part of the health care industry.
- More requirements without much guidance (e.g., Face to Face requirement; Reporting of reasonable suspicion of a crime)
- Scrutiny by sector: Although the profit margin of hospice is generally low (4.2%) compared to double-digit in other branches of medicine, scrutiny is now being placed on type of hospice (e.g., for-profit, snf-based…)
- Public reporting of quality measures is coming down the pike. Be prepared now to measure and excel, especially about comfort-in-dying but also up-coming measures regarding family evaluation of hospice.
- Suspicion about fraud and abuse, especially around potential “kickback” benefits to SNFs, whether patient was properly informed about hospice and whether patient is in fact in the end stage.
- Changes in cap reporting and reimbursement calculations.
What an exhausting year!
In the Gee whiz category:
- Add a QR code to direct mail postcards to doctors. (A QR code, short for “Quick Response,” is that funny square-like bar code people can photograph with their smart phone to arrive at a website. Think of it as a phone-enabled bookmark.) Although doctors have been notably slow to adopt many computer technologies, they like their smart phones and iPads! Both platforms have plug-ins for QR codes. This is a quick way to send them to more information about a special program, for instance.
- Integrate your social media presence by putting a live feed of your Facebook or Twitter posts on your company website. Sound complicated? We’re going to be investigating this possibility as an option for our e-library. Stay tuned. This is just one more way we can get you fancy programming without your having to pay the full price yourself.
- Put a “click-to-call” link on your website so anyone browsing on their smartphone can be immediately connected to you. Compared to the younger generations, Boomers and seniors are relatively slow to adopt smartphone technology. Doctors are not! Again, I think we’ll be adding this soon to our e-library and e-newsletter sites.
- Companies with telehealth capability are using web cams to upload images of wound healing to document progress in the patient’s medical record. (May not be news to you, but I thought it was totally cool!)
- Home health is doing some amazing things with sharing medical records, especially with Emergency Departments. When a home health patient goes to the ED, the home health agency gets an automated alert and can call the ED to fill them in quickly concerning the patient’s history, physical, medications, allergies, plan of care, etc. Actually transferring data electronically is still some time off, but standards are being developed right now so home care EMRs can be made compatible with Health Information Exchange technology.
I’ll post more as sessions unfold.
If you are going the the NHPCO Clinical Team Conference in San Diego, come to my presentation (4M) on Thursday 10/6 on collaborating (safely) over the Internet. I’d love to meet you in person!
Tags: Care continuum, telehealth
Posted in Collaboration, Internet Marketing, Technology, Uncategorized
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