Similar to other healthcare providers, home healthcare agencies are facing new regulations and changing patient preferences that impact performance. To address the challenges these changes bring, providers are turning to patient engagement as a strategy to achieve quadruple aim goals such as cost reduction and outcomes improvements.

CipherHealth has helped home health agencies to engage patients throughout and following their episode of care. Through the use of CipherOutreach, agencies are able to deploy automated calls and/or texts to every patient on census to determine if he or she needs additional assistance outside of their scheduled home visits. This type of communication is something that would typically be extremely labor-intensive and only leveraged for the patients perceived to be high-risk without the use of technology.

Katherine Major, Director of Caring Way at the University of Pennsylvania Home Health Agency shares why her team sought to leverage patient engagement technology.

“Our goal was to reduce readmission rates and we knew that if we wanted to achieve this goal, we would have to engage with patients to ensure they are on a path to a successful recovery,” said Major “However, we also knew that manually calling patients would not be the best use of our staff’s time and we needed to implement a technology to help streamline this process. Since partnering with CipherHealth we have seen a tremendous impact both on our patients and our staff time”.

With the use of CipherHealths technology, agencies like the University of Pennsylvania Home Health are able to support patient-centered care initiatives during a key point in the patient’s care journey. As regulatory changes such as PDGM continue to change how agencies operate, finding efficiencies such as those provided by patient engagement strategies, is key to success.