Overview
CipherHealth recently hosted a webinar focused on engaging home health patients throughout their care journey.
During the webinar, Cipher’s VP of Post-Acute Care Strategy, John Banks Powell, highlights new CoPs and CMS’ announcement to move forward with a new prospective payment system. For Home Health Agencies, this means:
- Payment cuts over the next few years
- They must increase focus on patient engagement and reduce readmissions
The current 60-day episode of care payment unit will be changed to a 30-day payment unit beginning in 2019. These changes are intended to encourage innovation and motivate agencies to meet industry standards. Agencies will no longer rely on their number of visits to influence payment. Instead, they must rely on the quality of care they give patients.
Webinar Summary
While Powell touched on various modalities to communicate with patients, he emphasized the significance of telephonic outreach. In particular, Powell explained how software like CipherHealth’s Voice technology can help agencies reduce readmissions and save cost through patient engagement.
Dan Thompson, RN, BSN, Director of Performance Improvement and Education at Well Care Home Health shared how the North Carolina based home health agency is utilizing technology to increase HH-CAHP scores, patient satisfaction scores, and decrease readmissions.
Well Care has used CipherHealth’s Voice to make more than 12,000 calls to patients. The automated outreach program saved the agency 1,408 hours over a 3-month period.
“It didn’t make sense for us to invest in X number of full-time employees to sit in the office and make random phone calls to patients when we had a company like Cipher that could offer an automated service to do that”, stated Thompson.
Lorraine Limpahan, account strategist at CipherHealth, shared insights from the data collected and analyzed, highlighting that patients who were reached and engaged with the call had a 26% lower readmission rate than those who did not.
“The gain that can be made by understanding this data and having this information . . . if it can be worked right . . . can do wonders for your organization. In terms of hospitalization, patient satisfaction, we have seen great strides in the areas where we have implemented” said Thompson.
More information
To access the full webinar for free, click here. To learn more about how CipherHealth can help you engage with your patients throughout their care journey, contact us today.
