In today’s home health landscape, value-based purchasing is part of the race to the top.
Agencies know that in order to achieve certain financial success, the outcomes have to be there.
“Providers know that everybody’s getting better,” LTM Group CEO David Kerns told Home Health Care News. “That’s the whole idea of the program. If you’re going to potentially get that top 5% adjustment, you’ve got to get better at a faster rate than everyone else.”
That’s where investment in technology, data and analytics comes in.
According to a new case study, The LTM Group was able to reduce monthly hospitalizations of its own home health patients by 32.8% over a recent three-month period.
The LTM Group leverages two analytics tools within the WellSky “Insights” suite. The first offers predictive insights into hospitalization risk, care setting suitability and the potential for enhancing daily living activities. The second establishes links between an agency’s performance and opportunities for engaging in value-based agreements with payers and referral partners.
Put into practice, Kerns and his staff integrate WellSky’s predictive analytics into case conferences and conduct more frequent reviews of clinician workload, outcomes and engagement metrics.
Caregivers and clinicians are then able to act using real-time alerts, enabling timely interventions to prevent re-hospitalizations.
“Regardless of the software you’re on, what we found is that really trying to have a deeper partnership with your technology company is critical,” Kerns said. “Everybody in home health spends so much time with referral sources, and now with payers, but people need to think about what every single person in your organization is working with at all times: it’s technology.”
Based in Dayton, Ohio, The LTM Group is a network of home health, hospice and home care agencies across locations in Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. It provides care to about 2,000 patients.
The WellSky technology also allows The LTM Group to improve relationships with payers.
“It starts with being a quality provider,” Kerns said. “You can’t enter into any value-based arrangement with a 2-star rating. We can now see our star outcomes in real-time in WellSky. We had all six of our agencies in December were in the 5-star group. That is going to give us an opportunity to go to those payers, show them this technology and to develop something for the future.”
Kerns has made a concerted effort at his company to cultivate an “enterprise-wide strategy” around technology.
That mission has already proved to be working, especially among the company’s clinicians.
“The biggest change as it relates to that reduction in hospitalizations has been with our clinicians,” he said. “We’ve really gotten our clinicians excited and engaged about it.”
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