The problem
With reduced reimbursement, home health agencies need to explore ways to be more efficient in their care delivery than ever. Events such as missed home visits, unnecessary weekends, and after hours visits can be detrimental to agency profitability. Not only do these inefficiencies eat away at the home health episode case margin, but they also can result in dissatisfied patients and lower Home Health CAHPS scores. This impacts the agency financially within certain Value-Based Purchasing states where Medicare reimbursement can be adjusted upward/downward by 3% next year, growing to 8% by 2022 (click here to learn more).
What’s being done (manual & expensive processes)
To avoid such inefficiencies and dissatisfied patients, HHAs are ramping up their telephonic communication with patients between visits to remind them of upcoming visits and to perform certain outreach actions, such as pre-weekend outreach, to make sure that patients have everything they need to get through the weekend. However, implementing these manual processes can be expensive and often ineffective as each patient likely requires one or more calls per week.
Scalable Solutions
To address this issue efficiently and effectively, agencies are turning to technology such as CipherHealth’s home health episode engagement solution, CipherOutreach, to assist in the first layer of outreach. CipherOutreach, ranked as the #1 Patient Outreach Vendor by KLAS, enables HHAs to identify the patients who need help (E.g., clinical, experience, scheduling, etc.) through pre-recorded telephone calls. Patients who need assistance are then triaged to agency staff via an automated alerting system for manual intervention.
The result
Technology streamlines the engagement process with all patients on service, providing maximum efficiency and allowing staff focus on patient care. Better patient communication can also result in higher satisfaction, Home Health CAHPS scores, and improved adherence to the conditions of participation for home health. Please click here to learn more about how CipherHealth can partner with your agency to meet your goals.
