While most are familiar with the benefits of cloud-based solutions, such as real-time access and enabling clinical staff to access information at any time, from anywhere, there are clear influences that will drive cloud-based solutions supporting home-based care delivery in the years to come, as well as considerations for managing them.

“I see consumers affecting the trends, and I see innovation like AI affecting where we are in five years [with cloud-based solutions],” says Andrew Olowu, Chief Technology Officer for technology innovator and home-based care solutions provider Axxess. “And of course, regulations will always affect where we will be [in the future].”

Driving forces

With consumers adopting artificial intelligence solutions widely in their day-to-day experiences, their wants and needs are bound to drive the future of cloud-based solutions, Olowu says.

From customer service chat bots to automated driving functions and interactive GPS platforms, individuals and households have already become highly accustomed to AI in their daily lives. Now they are expecting it in the tools they use for business, cloud-based solutions included.

“Consumers are used to AI in non-health care settings,” Olowu says. “So they want that same level of technology and advancement in cloud-based solutions.”

Those technologies are already making inroads in home-based care, with the cloud being a major support of the patient and client data that remote monitoring devices collect, says Tammy Ross, Executive Vice President of Professional Services for Axxess.

“Wearables now can detect a UTI just by [collecting] health care patterns,” Ross says. “It’s increasing patients’ speed to care because the wearables are notifying the nurse immediately that there’s a change in the health care pattern and we can get a nurse out there and get a lab on them and get them treated and keep them out of the hospital.”

Virtual assistance is another form of cloud-based technology that many home-based care providers are already utilizing.

“They’re streamlining a lot of the busy work that comes into the office and maybe even for the clinician, they are using communication chat bots to answer the phones,” Ross says.

The rapid shift in data availability and management will be the core of software evolution going forward, as so many tools and technologies rely on increasing amounts of data.

“Data is what AI needs to survive,” Olowu says. “It’s like the food for artificial intelligence, so we’re seeing a liberation of data where we can put it into AI systems to make actionable decisions.”

Adapting to change

The speed at which technology is evolving has never been so great, and in many ways that is a boon to home-based care providers that are stretched thin with fewer staff and more referrals to home health. Cloud-based technology enables home-based care workers to access patient information anywhere, at any time. It also allows them to easily and quickly transmit patient information in real time, meaning more informed care decisions.

Yet managing massive amounts of data comes with new challenges and responsibilities, as well.

“It’s a reason to be excited, but with every upside, there’s also a downside that we have to worry about,” says Olowu. “When we think about AI, it’s going to bring about a lot of advancements, but it also presents data security concerns.”

Home-based care organizations need to consider that AI is an evolving technology and may not provide 100% accuracy of information. Data management and complexity are additional considerations for health care leaders, who need to consider not only the benefits to large data sets, but the security that data requires.

Olowu recommends partnering with an organization that has experience in cybersecurity and can respond to any questions that may arise with respect to navigating the challenges around technology in a cloud-based environment.

Home health organizations should also ensure that their technology partner is versed in the opportunities that data provides for more efficient operations and better patient outcomes. They have to be ready for the challenges, too.

“Partner with your technology provider,” Olowu says. “Make sure you can address those concerns as things start to exponentially grow.”

Cloud-based data: Vetting your technology vendor

For organizations that are seeking a new technology partner, or for those that want to ensure their technology partner is aligned from a data management and security perspective, here are four questions to ask, according to Olowu:

• Does the technology partner hold certifications with respect to data security? 
• Does the technology partner focus on the right things? 
• Is the technology’s leadership aligned with the overall goals of home-based care providers? 
• Does the technology partner have a proven track record of protecting patient data?

The answers to those questions will get you on your way.

Axxess is a comprehensive platform built by home-based care experts to empower home health professionals in delivering quality care. To learn how Axxess is partnering with operators to help them make the greatest impact on all stakeholders through actionable data, visit https://www.axxess.com/home-health-software/.

The post The Future of Cloud-Based Solutions in Home Health appeared first on Home Health Care News.

In fact, 64% of businesses say they expect AI to increase productivity, according to a 2023 Forbes Advisor survey, which the publication notes, “demonstrates the growing confidence in AI’s potential to transform business operations.”

Health care organizations in general and home-based care agencies in particular are no exception. While many involved in the delivery of care are cautious about the use of AI due to concerns about accuracy, data management and privacy, they also acknowledge it is changing home-based care in positive ways.

“Advancements in technology are a reason to be excited,” says Andrew Olowu, Axxess Chief Technology Officer. “When you think about AI, it’s going to bring about a lot of advancements.”

From time savings to reduced turnover and lower risk of patient hospitalizations, AI is already making inroads for home-based care operators and will continue to elevate the experience for care providers and care recipients, today’s health care technology experts say.

Time Saved for Staff

AI’s biggest value proposition is its ability to provide significant time savings, regardless of industry. Because it is able to process massive data sets in mere minutes or seconds, AI can save hours per week when it comes to processing information.

In Forbes’ 2024 Future of Professionals Report, survey respondents across legal, tax, and risk and compliance fields reported that they predict AI will free up 12 hours per week for them within the next five years. In the next year, they predict that figure will be four hours. According to the research, the four hours saved amounts to adding an additional staff member for every 10 existing employees — a future that could translate into back office roles and among clinicians doing administrative work in home-based care.

“AI is taking all the data that’s coming in and it’s putting it in the right place,” says Tammy Ross, Executive Vice President of Professional Services for Axxess. “Therefore, it’s reducing the screen time for the nurse and allowing them that bedside time… When you take away the documentation burden from the staff, you’re driving retention of nurses.”

Operationally, billing automation, scheduling optimization and remote monitoring are all made easier with the implementation of AI, Ross notes.

Scheduling Capabilities

Already, technology supports major advancements in scheduling of home-based care providers, with platforms like Axxess enabling real-time access to staff schedules with the ability to schedule and track visits in real time; schedule new visits; view upcoming visits; document missed visits and more. Axxess has long offered a scheduling solution, for example, that matches staff availability with competency and matches geolocations of caregivers and home-based care clients.

“It maximizes productivity and decreases [staff] frustration because they get to work when they want to work,” Ross says.

As scheduling platforms become even “smarter,” with the power of AI, they will learn about the preferences of patients and clients receiving care, as well as the optimal schedules for those providing the care. This is a significant shift for home-based care providers, for which scheduling is a leading indicator of turnover.

“Right now, nurses average 50 years and older in home care, and a larger percentage of those have reported on surveys across the industry that they’re contemplating retirement next year,” Ross says. “The reason they’re contemplating it is due to burnout, documentation burden, increased driving distances and lack of job satisfaction. I think AI can address all of these.”

Decision-Making Support

In addition to reviewing and summarizing data sets, the potential for AI in health care extends to decision making and optimizing outcomes for patients — perhaps among its most appealing benefits for care staff.

“AI doesn’t replace the nurse,” says Arlene Maxim, RN, HCS-C, Senior Vice President of Clinical Services for national technology innovator and software solutions provider Axxess. “It doesn’t replace our knowledge. But it does give us the opportunity to enhance our knowledge.”

The opportunity for predictive analytics to improve care outcomes is vast, with the use of predictive analytics in health care applying to many areas. As patient data sets grow, machine learning will become more important in detecting patterns and making recommendations accordingly.

“If we [utilize] AI, we might come up with some things that we haven’t even thought about to add to the care plan,” Maxim says. “For clinicians, retaining is one thing. But having these clinicians maintain their knowledge and update their knowledge as they go along and making sure that our patients have the best outcomes is where we need to be.”

The additional support is a welcome shift for caregivers and clinical staff, Ross says.

“I call it the nurse on your shoulder,” she says. “It is there to guide you so you’re not alone in the home [as a clinician]. When you get a lot of data, sometimes it’s data overload and that’s what happens to clinicians… they can miss things. But AI is not.”

In turn, this support lends itself to better, more appropriate care for patients and clients.

“A nurse that is in a hurry or who is new to home health can miss things that are going to impact the plan of care, like health literacy and social determinants of health. Taking that clinical decision and coupling it with prescriptive analytics, our software can then recommend the actions and interventions that are going to mitigate the patient risk for hospitalization.”

Axxess is a comprehensive platform built by home-based care experts to empower home health professionals in delivering quality care. To learn how Axxess is partnering with operators to help them make the greatest impact on all stakeholders through actionable data, visit https://www.axxess.com/home-health-software/.

The post 3 Ways AI is Changing Home-Based Care appeared first on Home Health Care News.

But what is the true value of interoperability, and how can home-based care agencies measure their return on investment? Several leading professionals share their perspectives on how they approach ROI calculations in their organizations.

Recruitment and Retention

For Andwell Health Partners (formerly Androscoggin Home Healthcare + Hospice) based in Lewiston, Maine, the return on investment conversation is centered on recruitment and retention.

“We’re working on strategies around the orientation process and support during onboarding,” says Angela Richards, RN and Director of Project Management for Andwell. “With that, [we] want an EMR that supports [us] as far as making it easy to use and streamlined.”

Andwell utilizes specific onboarding modules within its EMR, MatrixCare, as well as external preceptor models, which help ensure that new employees are engaged during the first six months of employment — a time period that is often indicative of the employee’s future tenure with the company.

“Turnover in the first one or two years is phenomenally costly,” Richards says.

Time Savings

Today’s home-based care agencies are doing more with fewer resources as staff continue to be scarce relative to the demand for home health care services. Due to this shift, any time saved is a critical measure of return on investment for providers.

This return for interoperability can be seen in a number of ways, says Nick Knowlton, Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at ResMed (the parent company of Brightree and MatrixCare), including the time clinicians save tracking down patient information, when they could be spending time at the bedside.

“Some of the benefits we see through interoperability are due to bringing more information on patients upfront in the care cycle,” Knowlton says. “The clinicians are better informed, they’re given real-time access as the patient’s care is progressing when they have encounters either in person or virtually with other community physicians or care providers. There are fewer surprises.”

This enables caregivers to spend more time caring for patients rather than hunting for patient information — whether related to medication or changes in condition.

“They’re able to spend their time caring for patients instead of trying to figure out things like ‘What’s in this shoebox full of medications? Which ones are still necessary?’”

Knowlton says. “Because they’re able to do that, they can feel better about the care they’re providing the patients in real-time. Also, through the power of technology, they’re able to do all of their charting in real-time with the patients instead of spending their nights trying to catch up on that. That’s a tremendous benefit for the clinician’s work-life balance.”

Providers agree that time savings is a critical ROI measure, even if they don’t specifically quantify it.

“We have multiple business units and patients may be in two to three business units at a time,” says Debroah Wesley, RN and CEO of Addison County Home Health and Hospice based in New Haven, Vermont. “Being able to click a button and copy that entire referral, it takes half an hour and turns it into seconds. Being able to have all this information instead of someone having to go out to a system, download it, scan it, copy it, and put it in, it’s there.”

Powerful Data

As the health care industry evolves to include more interactive data analysis and AI tools, the accuracy of data becomes increasingly important. The value of that data can be measured in a number of different ways — from time savings to payer appeal.

Through interoperability, many providers are also able to achieve greater accuracy through tools like voice-to-text applications that integrate with the EMR. This leads to more seamless documentation in real-time at the point of care, which leads to better quality data for other technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) tools and analytics.

“I can’t even count the amount of time that we’re saving by having everything at our fingertips,” Wesley says. “With efficiencies in the system like voice-to-text, we have the ability to type the narrative. It’s not even so much the amount of time, but the accuracy of our documentation.”

Accurate data is valuable not only to the home health organization itself, but to other organizations in the care ecosystem as well.

“The power of anything we do with analytics or anything we do with artificial intelligence, all those solutions, they’re only as good as the data quality that they’re riding on top of,” Knowlton says.

“Whatever analytics or AI overlays you’re putting on top of [the data] to interact with it the right way, that is going to pay dividends in terms of the quality of the output that you get. Not only do the provider organizations end up with happier clinicians, but when it comes time to represent the value of what they’re providing to payers, to referral sources and the like, they’re going to have much more complete data sets and much more complete overviews of those patients.”

This article is sponsored by MatrixCare, an industry leader in interoperability with an award-winning EHR built to support the entire patient journey through efficient transitions of care, connectivity to health systems, and long-term referral partnerships. To learn more about interoperability done right, visit https://www.matrixcare.com/home-health-software/.

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Training has quickly jumped to the forefront as a notable strategy for care providers to stand apart, especially as they look to other industries for talent they can recruit into care positions.

Many organizations are already moving in this direction, according to the results of Home Health Care News’s “State of Home Care Training 2023” survey, conducted in partnership with CareAcademy, a training, upskilling and compliance management platform used by home-based and facility-based care providers. In fact, 63% of survey respondents indicated that their organizations currently use a training platform, and many of those believe it has a direct impact on their ability to attract and retain staff. Survey respondents included 97 professionals who work for organizations that provide home care.

Takeaway: Training impacts recruitment

Among those who currently use a training platform, more than half believe it has made an impact on recruitment and nearly three-fourths believe it has made an impact on staff retention.

“Regardless of size, all roads lead to training as a key ingredient in our clients’ recruitment recipe. We’ve also seen firsthand how training is being leveraged to address other common industry themes that align more with retention issues. Everyone is interested in doing more with less,” says Ginger Barrientez, director of customer lifecycle marketing for Boston-based training platform CareAcademy. “Whether an organization wants to develop a strategy to expand their workforce, elevate and standardize their brand’s reputation for quality care, or upskill to provide care for higher acuity patients — including training in their strategy is mission critical.

Takeaway: Online training formats gain adoption

Due to the nature of remote work and the ability for many caregiving staff to access online resources from home, many organizations are turning to online training to some degree.

While many states require some form of in-person training for certain caregiving staff, an online component has risen as a way for caregivers who are onboarding to complete some of their training from home. With a platform like CareAcademy, they are able to conduct their training from any location at any time, and the employer can monitor progress as the training takes place.

For half of survey respondents, their organizations utilize a combination of an online training provider, third party staff and in-house staff, according to the results, while for just 25%, training is primarily provided in-house with an on-site nurse.

“Combining technology with education is a huge benefit to you and your caregivers,” Barrientez says. “Having a trusted training technology partner can help you succeed across all facets of your business with less effort on your part.” “Training compliance is a great example of this – when you have a resource that can automatically assign training and remind your caregivers to complete it, think of the time that frees up for you to focus on other tasks and organizational goals.”

Regardless of the format, the industry says there is significant value in home-care training, both for staff and those receiving care. The value spans regulatory compliance and reporting, and improving quality of care at the high end, as well as factors like improving caregiver confidence in providing care, career pathing, and speed of onboarding, among others.

Takeaway: Incentives to complete training are mixed

Even with a formal training program in place and online offerings available to new and existing staff, getting caregivers to complete training is a challenge many providers face.

Just 56% of survey respondents report that they incentivize caregivers to complete training, even though the workforce largely feels that training helps them acquire skills to help them do their jobs.

“Overall you have to do what works best for your organization when it comes to training completion tactics,” Barrientez says. “In conversations with our clients, some garner success through incentivizing their caregivers and staff to complete the training.”

These incentives may vary widely, however, depending on the culture of the organization and the individual preferences of those who are completing the training, she says.

“A lot of the process is finding out what excites team members — whether that is a financial reward, access to more specialized courses they want to take, personal time off or time together like a team pizza party. If you’re going to do it, take the time to find out what excites your team, follow through, and keep track of it. One of the fastest and easiest ways our clients track their caregivers’ progress is by using our platform’s reports – they accurately reflect the training progress for you so you can follow through on rewarding those who meet the training goals.”

Download the full survey results.

This article is sponsored by CareAcademy. CareAcademy’s mission is to accelerate the world’s transition to a caregiver-centric healthcare system by elevating caregivers and enabling excellent health outcomes. With a care enablement platform that offers accessible and engaging training content, streamlined technology solutions, and measurable insights, CareAcademy is transforming the way we train essential caregivers. See how we can help you achieve your operational and staffing goals, visit www.careacademy.com.

The post The State of Training in Home-Based Care: Key Takeaways appeared first on Home Health Care News.

For some successful providers, the key is creating a culture of productivity. That means not only defining productivity expectations but communicating and reinforcing them at every level — often with the use of technology.

“Creating a positive environment with clear objectives, where staff feel the freedom to share ideas, voice concern and work together to reach the best resolution allows for a culture of productivity,” says Jo Ann Greenslade, VP, Home Health for Jet Health Inc., a Fort Worth, Texas-based provider of home health, hospice and personal care services across four states. “Everyone has a common goal to meet the needs of the patient and spend their time in the most efficient manner.”

Home-based care providers can take several steps toward creating a culture of productivity that will in turn help attract and retain clinical staff.

1. Define productivity goals

Productivity means different things to different organizations. Without a clear definition of productivity, home-based care leadership may struggle to hold staff accountable to their productivity goals and expectations.

“When I came to Care Central, I shifted the priority of my clinical team to field staff productivity,” says Holly Chaffee, President and CEO of Care Central VNA & Hospice, a multi-service provider based in Gardner and Webster, Massachusetts. “All field clinicians including nurses, therapists, social workers, and home health aides — all have productivity expectations. Some were consistently meeting or exceeding this metric, and some were not.

“The foundational element of achieving consistent and equitable productivity across teams and individual clinicians begins with setting clear expectations and utilizing formal reporting structures. Consistent and careful review of productivity reports for ongoing measure of success or variances in productivity is critical.”

Educating and enabling staff to track their own productivity is another important component, Chaffee says.

“This is made simple by using our technology, specifically the reports in our Electronic Health Record (EHR) as well as live time scheduling views available on our clinician’s devices. Utilizing and optimizing information available in the EHR allows people to monitor and manage reports that are invaluable tools if reviewed on a regular basis,” she says.

2. Communicate progress

Setting goals is a critical part of creating a culture of productivity, but those goals are lost without clear communication as to whether staff are meeting expectations. By measuring productivity through the help of an EHR and consistently bringing team members into the conversation, teams can see their progress and can take pride in the care they are providing.

At Care Central VNA, the organization holds weekly management meetings offsite at a local community bank conference room. During those meetings, the management team reviews reports that apply to each individual area, whether it’s hospice, human resources, home care or compliance. Having leadership review and report on staff progress and quality metrics utilizing the reports codifies the value of the reports in progress toward strategic goals, Chaffee says.

“At Care Central VNA & Hospice, Inc., we utilize Homecare Homebase reporting, including analytics dashboards, for ongoing evaluation of our organizational performance,” Chaffee says. “We are quickly able to evaluate process and quality outcome metrics, which feed into star ratings and value-based purchasing percentiles, as well as operational indicators affecting financial performance, such as visit utilization and productivity.”

Additionally, the interface between the company’s EHR and other platforms allows leadership to further monitor productivity.

“On a daily basis, Homecare Homebase touches every part of our organization,” she says. “The interfaces with other vendors such as Forcura, our document management system, and SHP, our performance improvement platform, with real-time data, really gives us a complete snapshot of all metrics that we need to be successful. Our new payment system, value-based purchasing, holds our organization accountable for specific metrics. We need our staff to understand these metrics and embrace technology and reporting provided for us to be successful.”

People like to be successful at what they do. Staff like to learn and see improvements. I think that our commitment to the utilization of technology and collaborative review fosters a culture of productivity.”

3. Reinforce throughout the organization

Once staff have a clear understanding of goals and can see their progress and how it benefits the care they provide, it’s important for leadership to continue fostering the culture — at every level of the organization.

“As leaders, we have to know what the company’s values and culture are, what [staff] expect from us, and then we have to live it out,” says Gayla Gunter, homecare director for Louisiana-based Lagniappe Homecare. “It begins with our key leadership team, the office managers and the clinical managers that oversee the staff in the field. You’ve got to begin at that level with those leaders to start establishing that culture that you want your company to be known for, and just live it out before your staff. If we don’t exhibit these characteristics, we can’t expect our staff to follow.”

With buy-in across all staff levels, not only will the culture of productivity grow throughout the organization, but leadership can realize the added benefits of retention — particularly in today’s challenging staffing environment.

“Money isn’t everything,” Gunter says. “We work really hard to create an environment where employees are happy and they’re productive. When you do that, you see you have loyal employees. They remain with a company that has that type of culture.”

This article is sponsored by Homecare Homebase. Homecare Homebase is a software leader offering hosted, cloud-based solutions to streamline operations, simplify compliance and boost clinical and financial outcomes for home-based care agencies. Our customized mobile solutions enable real-time, wireless data exchange and communication between field clinicians, physicians and office staff for better care, more accurate reporting and improved revenue cycle management. For more information, visit hchb.com.

The post Retaining Home Health Clinicians: 3 Steps to a Culture of Productivity appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Further, as the caregiver population ages, ease-of-use and accessibility of training becomes even more important. Home Health Care News sat down with Howard Algeo, director of business development and training for Leesburg, Pennsylvania-based Seniors Helping Seniors, to learn about the company’s approach to training across its 125 franchises throughout the U.S. The company’s model is based on a peer-to-peer caregiver network, where active seniors — who often have background and experience in caregiving, but sometimes do not — provide care to seniors who are in need of home-based assistance.

With training as a strong focus, the organization has seen course completions across the company rise sharply, from 81 trainings completed in 2019 to more than 5,000 completions in 2021, following its implementation of CareAcademy’s online training platform.

Algeo shares the company’s training philosophy, as well as its recent implementation of CareAcademy, to not only train its caregivers but also to help with onboarding, retention and franchise relationships.

Home Health Care News: What made you first explore the idea of implementing a training program for Seniors Helping Seniors?

We got involved in CareAcademy as a result of an initiative that we started in late 2019, which we called Seniors Helping Seniors 360. The “360” was to [reference] a complete circle of care services that we could provide to the seniors we serve. As part of that initiative, we put together a number of franchise partner councils. We started with Assistive Technology, then Personal Care. A number of our partners who were providing companionship and homemaking services wanted to add additional services in personal care. We wanted to give them all the tools that they needed to do that.

We also had a Memory Care Council because we were, of course, discovering that in some cases, a majority of the seniors we served had memory issues. Those two particular councils — the Personal Care and the Memory Care Councils — came to the conclusion pretty quickly that we needed a comprehensive training tool primarily for our caregivers, but also for our franchise partners, our office staff and the people that we serve. We combined the two committees to execute this search.

How did the committees conduct their search?

As so often happens, we sat through a lot of demos — and I mean a lot of demos. I think it was eight that we saw all together in the beginning. Then we had some more. We drilled it down to three, and after going through that process, we chose CareAcademy. They won by four laps. Their offering was comprehensive and easy to access, and with senior caregivers, ease of access is really important.

What we particularly liked and what our franchise partners use most frequently are the disease-specific caregiver tools. If, for instance, a caregiver has his or her first encounter with someone recovering from a stroke, they can get help with that right away. Having a tool like CareAcademy enhances the relationship between our caregivers and our franchise partners. Intuitively, it’s a great retention tool. Our caregivers, and in particular, senior caregivers, are really hungry for knowledge and they appreciate the opportunity to get better at what they do.

In the last 14 months or so, we’ve added about 35 new franchises. CareAcademy is an integral part of how we bring them on board and train them. I think all of the new partners have engaged CareAcademy as their training tool. We don’t have what you would call, preferred vendors. We vet vendors, we recommend them. Our franchise partners get to choose who they use, but CareAcademy has been overwhelmingly adopted by our community.

What led you to choose CareAcademy relative to those other vendors that you’ve demoed?

The mobile application is easy to use and understand. I’m a senior, but I’ve had a smartphone for 15 years — a trend we’re seeing with a lot of our seniors as well. During COVID, seniors also began using their smartphones to communicate with their grandchildren in new ways. Having [training] accessible to them and easy to use on the mobile phone was really a crucial deciding point.

When it comes right down to it, business decisions are based on value and getting the most for your money. CareAcademy does their pricing based on a number of seats that you can purchase and rotate throughout your caregiver pool, and that made a big difference, too. One of the other things that stood out is the availability of Teepa Snow and all her great training for caregivers who are dealing with people who have dementia. It is a great value for a great tool. It really is as simple as that.

Have you heard from any of your franchise owners that the training helps from a recruitment standpoint?

Most new caregivers or prospective caregivers are interested in the training aspect. Having this broad-based offering, which can take you anywhere from washing your hands to dealing with the personality changes that come with dementia, is powerful. Yes, it helps, and that’s what I hear from my franchise partners. Right now, it’s a little tough to bring people on, so every little bit makes a difference. If we can differentiate ourselves, it helps. We’ve been very fortunate to have kept up the pace. I have no doubt that our access to a training tool like CareAcademy has helped us.

How does CareAcademy support operational transitions, such as new functionality or initial onboarding of your partners?

The onboarding that CareAcademy has is pretty rigorous in that it is both personal, one-on-one onboarding, as well as a whole array of supporting videos and tutorials. The people at CareAcademy pick up the phone. Our franchisees and business owners are pressed for time like a lot of people. The ability to get a correct answer promptly is so beneficial to them and to me because then I don’t hear about it.

Do you have any advice for the leadership of an organization that may be adopting CareAcademy or a training platform for the first time?

My advice is to get your caregivers engaged in CareAcademy early. Get them used to the tool and guide them to the training that will help them most at that time. Update your caregivers regularly about what’s available and integrate it into the whole process of recruiting, retaining and encouraging caregivers from the very beginning.

From compliance training to condition-based certification and more, CareAcademy is redefining the connection between quality training and quality care so providers can achieve value and outcomes for their patients and clients. To learn more, visit careacademy.com.

The post How Seniors Helping Seniors Chose a New Training Partner appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Organizations that understand the connection between training and quality care will not only serve their staff, but will also see improvement in the quality of the care their patients and clients receive.

The shift to value-based care

Connecting training with outcomes serves patients and staff, but the shift to value-based care means attention to outcomes is imperative as home-based care transitions to rewarding providers for the quality of the care they deliver.

“We’re seeing a massive shift to value-based care versus our previous form of care, which was volume-based,” says Erika Sessions, director of compliance and policy development for online caregiver training platform CareAcademy.

While only nine states have gone through the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Value-Based Purchasing Program Demonstration, all states will feel the impact on their reimbursement after adopting HHVBP in 2023.

In general, many organizations are not yet realizing value-based contracts and partnerships, but many also believe value-based care will drive business significantly in the near future. Forty-two percent of respondents project value-based contracts will account for more than half or most of their organization’s revenue in the next three to five years, according to a survey of home-based care professionals conducted by Home Health Care News and AlayaCare in early 2022.

A training partner can help home care leaders prepare for this shift and provide the data needed to succeed under value-based programs. In addition, CareAcademy’s integration partnerships with companies like AlayaCare add flexibility and freedom of choice for clients.

“CareAcademy’s kept an ear really close to [value-based care advancement], and we’re formulating ways to ultimately deliver a quality training product that will contribute to quality care and use the data measuring processes and methodology to be able to apply that and demonstrate how CareAcademy training and will ultimately impact and improve care outcomes,” says Helen Adeosun, founder and CEO of CareAcademy.

Moving beyond compliance training

Historically, many organizations have conducted training programs merely as a means to achieve compliance among their caregiver populations. However, today’s successful providers are elevating those programs based on the populations receiving care — namely the aging population and the many associated chronic conditions.

“One opportunity we are seeing is moving beyond just compliance training,” says Jessica Jones, CareAcademy care experience outcomes manager. “We are offering condition-based certification, which connects the condition to the training and allows us to track that.”

And the caregiving population is receptive to education and training, even if it is not presented to them, according to findings of a survey of 1,500 caregivers conducted by CareAcademy in 2021. Among respondents, 85% said they’re more likely to stay with their current employer if offered resources to further their education, yet 75% said their employer has never talked with them about ongoing education or training.

To support care providers caring for specific patient populations, CareAcademy offers nine specialized certifications including a dementia care certification, diabetes care certification, Parkinson’s Disease care certification, respiratory condition care certification and more.

“[There is a] high degree of variability in how we work to address training as a custom fit to ensure that agencies and caregivers are getting exactly what they need for compliance,” Sessions says. “Then that’s where we step in and say: For enhanced training or condition-based training, we’ve noticed that there’s an interest level in this region or there’s a high incidence of this type of condition, we can therefore recommend something more robust that will provide the depth needed on specific conditions to ultimately deliver better care.”

Customers have realized the value as well. Home-based care provider A Place at Home changed training platforms to adopt CareAcademy after discovering the platform’s specialized programs focused on specific conditions from falls to dementia.

“These issues require quality, in-depth training,” A Place at Home’s Franchise Business Coach Aubre Phillips shared with CareAcademy. “I didn’t want our caregivers trained by a quick little YouTube video that goes over the basics. During our search, we didn’t see a whole lot of thorough, quality training out there until we found CareAcademy.”

Adding value in real-time

As care providers continue to focus on quality care and the value they deliver, the ability to draw from training resources in real-time is becoming increasingly important.

If caregivers are able to adapt care based on what is happening in the moment, whether it is a change in patient condition or an unforeseen health event, they can deliver the highest quality care at that point in time — a luxury made available by just-in-time learning resources that are available 24/7 via mobile device.

CareAcademy offers a video library with content that is added continually to assist caregivers in the moment they are delivering care.

“We are looking at that aspect of quality care, where it’s not just training you absorb and then try to navigate in the field… but how we can deliver training that’s specific to the condition in the situation that a caregiver is experiencing so that maybe they can prevent an adverse event,” Sessions says. “That will ultimately benefit the quality of care.”

This article is sponsored by CareAcademy. From compliance training to condition-based certification and more, CareAcademy is redefining the connection between quality training and quality care so providers can achieve value and outcomes for their patients and clients. To learn more, visit careacademy.com.

The post Why Value-Based Care Begins with Quality Education appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Agencies in the nine states subjected to the HHVBP test demonstration that began in 2016 have already had several years to develop a clear understanding of what is needed in order to succeed under the HHVBP model, which incentivizes providers based on a series of outcomes. For many others informed in June 2021, that the program would be going nationwide, the model requires a more concerted approach to data collection, reporting and education, starting now.

As home-based care agencies continue to navigate the transition from fee-for-service to a system more focused on outcomes, there are several areas where they can look to adapt their operations during the second half of 2022.

Pre-Implementation and Education

Agencies that will be subject to the HHVBP program for the first time during performance year 2023 have the valuable opportunity to learn from those that have already adopted the new payment model. In addition to Department of Health and Human Services materials designed to help address home health agency questions, there are many other industry resources to help agencies adapt.

“We educate the industry on what to expect,” says Tammy Ross, senior vice president, professional services, for Dallas-based home health care software provider Axxess. “Now is the time to ensure an agency’s systems are in place prior to 2023 when many agencies will receive reimbursement adjustments for the first time.”

That does not mean agencies can sit back and let the changes take place around them.

“I think a lot of people hear ‘pre-implementation’ and think ‘I can take a break,’” Ross says. “That’s just not really true. Pre-implementation means this is when we get our processes in order. We define what to do from a quality perspective, and the things to pay attention to.”

Providers should seek and access educational resources in the form of communications, printed materials, webinars and more, to ensure agency partners are up to speed on what is needed under what timeframe.

Quality Measures and Reporting

One specific area where agencies will need to adapt is tracking and improving quality measures, starting with both the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) and the Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) improvement scores.

Further, home health agencies can utilize their required Quality Assurance and Performance Improvement (QAPI) programs, which already underscore the importance of improving quality of life and quality of care, as well as services delivered in home-based care.

Providers should also scrub Certification and Survey Provider Enhanced Reports (CASPER) data as another means to identify areas of clinical improvement, and can look to implement OASIS clinical competency training and evaluations for both new and existing employees with an eye toward the outcomes as they relate to value-based care.

“Being able to score OASIS correctly will be key to showing outcome improvements,” Ross says. “If you go in and you score a patient incorrectly, it’s going to be really hard to show any improvement at the end of the episode.”

OASIS validation, including the competing factors that play into a patient’s outcome, can provide additional insight into areas of improvement. Assessing these factors, which may include anything from the patient’s family situation and home environment and his or her access to medication, can provide critical context around each patient’s social determinants of health that have a strong bearing on their clinical success.

Business Intelligence

While the data itself is critically important to HHVBP success, business intelligence takes the data a step further by providing operational insights in addition to clinical information. Making sense of data both at scale and on the patient level is critical for agencies to grow and to ensure quality at all levels of the organization.

To this end, providers will need to track numerous metrics relating to value-based care, both through its OASIS scrubber and clinical intelligence tools. Enhanced tools that provide quality assurance and caregiver comparisons can help agencies further pinpoint areas in need of improvement and can shore up performance during the HHVBP transition.

“We’ve designed a dashboard that we call ‘at risk’ to identify those patients that are likely not to develop a good outcome without the clinician’s involvement and interventions,” Ross says. “For agencies that have 3,000, 4,000 or 5,000 patients, you can’t look at every patient. What you want to do is identify those who need the most care.”

This article is sponsored by Axxess. All home health agencies will need to prepare for value-based care if they haven’t already begun the journey. To learn more about how Axxess supports the transition, www.axxess.com/value-based-purchasing.

The post Value-Based Purchasing: Is Your Agency Ready? appeared first on Home Health Care News.

With new rules and regulations from Electronic Visit Verification (EVV) to a full rollout of the Home Health Value-Based Purchasing Program (HHVBP), the home health care landscape is ever-changing, with industry leaders consistently challenged to maintain compliance.

With added pressures due to staff shortages, leaders today need to ensure they are on top of meeting those compliance requirements — without significant disruptions for their teams. Many providers are leaning more heavily into their technology partners to help reduce the complexity of changing processes and procedures and ensure compliance is built with data in mind. Providers are also finding that even incremental changes can improve outcomes.

“Some technology platforms focus on compliance to the detriment of ease of use,” says Tim Ingram, senior vice president of interoperability for Dallas-based home health care software provider Axxess. “Compliance can be a linchpin where nothing happens until new functionality is part of compliance. The way we approach it is to focus on ease of use so that compliance happens without you even realizing you’re being compliant.”

Be Proactive

Compliance shouldn’t be reactive. Providers of any size need to leverage all available data in order to model scenarios under each new rule or regulation. This may mean:

• Modeling the impact to payments, such as in the recent update to the Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM)

• Understanding the impact on quality outcomes reporting, as is the case for the upcoming shift to Outcome and Assessment Information Set E (OASIS E)

• Aligning with value-based care programs such as HHVBP

This proactive approach is still catching on. Following the shift to PDGM in January 2020, some organizations waited for the rule to take effect before preparing, while others proactively modeled the existing business under the changes before they took place. For those proactive organizations, taking that early initiative led to certainty and success during a time when many agencies were scrambling.

Operators that take a proactive approach to compliance generally will see similar benefits. Rather than changing to accommodate regulatory updates and the need to adjust to a new technology system, proactive operators can evolve as regulations do.

“When PDGM hit us a few years ago, some organizations were just devastated,” says Tammy Ross, senior vice president, professional services, for Axxess. “They thought they weren’t going to make it. We had a PDGM modeling tool — and still do — that shows how they can survive and thrive using the new reimbursement model.”

Ross notes the experience of one customer who didn’t believe her organization would survive the shift to PDGM. Ultimately, through a proactive technology approach, the customer was able to not only survive, but double her presence from one agency location to two.

Incorporate Staff

With checks and balances embedded in compliance training and monitoring systems, stakeholders and employees are working together to improve regulatory preparedness on an ongoing basis, rather than simply gaining a certification or completing a quarterly or annual training. This also means incorporating compliance and training into an agency’s daily operations via its technology platform.

“It’s in every patient visit, and it’s in every new admission,” says Jeni Kendall, regional vice president of sales for Axxess. “We have it seamlessly built-in so that many of our nurses and agencies don’t even realize it’s being covered.”

As the industry adapts to the new OASIS-E assessment taking effect in January 2023, industry advisors, consultants and stakeholders from the field are all weighing in to equip technology platforms before the changes go live.

“Part of ensuring compliance is making sure we hear from people who have been in the industry,” Ross says. “Nurses, therapists, occupational therapists and others who have worked in the industry.”

This article is sponsored by Axxess. All home-based care agencies need to focus on regulatory compliance, and a software partner can help with this initiative. To learn more about how Axxess supports home-based care compliance, visit www.axxess.com.

The post Key Tips For Stronger Home-Based Care Compliance in 2022 appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Home Health Care News: We’re going to spend the next 30 minutes talking about care communication and some of the trends around outcomes and data. The world has been turned upside down in the last 18 months, and the pandemic has shifted the perceived value of home health and what it looks like today. Talk to us about how that perceived value has shifted to the home.

Craig Mandeville: COVID aside, think the home has always been the best place for care. I don’t think that’s changed post-COVID. What is gratifying to see is bipartisan support on the Hill or in Choose Home, which is a new reimbursement model with a lot of benefits around moving patients to the home faster. It’s arguably a better reimbursement with higher gross margins potential for home health agencies.

Elliott Wood: We were just debating that question earlier today: Did it really change the perceived value? We were both talking about how health care has become very personal during the pandemic. We have, on our team, two people who have lost immediate family members to complications with COVID. I watched my grandmother catch COVID through the window at a SNF.

Heath care has become a very personal thing to everybody. I think more than anything, it’s raised awareness that there’s a better way to do this, and not everybody has to go from a hospital to an inpatient rehab facility or SNF and step down the traditional continuum. Even for folks who have spent their entire career in health care, it has raised awareness of the opportunity to drastically change the way that care is delivered.

It’s a terrible thing to have to watch your loved ones through a window and not get to be with them, touch them and be a part of that experience. Yes, it has raised awareness and the perception of value, but I think a lot of that’s because it’s become personal to everybody.

You both mentioned the personal aspect, and Craig touched on partisan politics. We’re going to go there for a half second. Health care has almost become a divisive political issue these days. Obviously, that translates into delivery of care to the home, and when everybody wants to figure out how to deliver care to the home, you get this partisan overview of the pressure around what to do, or what not to do.

How can the home health care industry help share ideas and knowledge to other parts of the industry that need to deliver care and services to the home?

Wood: Craig and I both support The Partnership for Quality of Home Healthcare. They’re a big supporter of the Choose Home Act. One of the cool things we’ve seen as supporters of this organization is the bipartisan support around The Choose Home Care Act. For all of the politicking that happens, it has been cool to experience some alignment around this topic.

The other element is that you want home health and hospice to be talking to the Hill about what’s possible, how you can drive more care and how to reduce overall cost of care as well. But even as we have conversations with other groups here today, we want to share information without giving away the secret sauce that makes home health special and allows these providers to drive value.

We want to make sure we are helping our customers take advantage of that opportunity, so they are the ones delivering a lot of that value in the home.

Mandeville: I think this industry is so disconnected, but it has come together over the last 18 months. Look at NAHC and The Partnership. I felt like at some point, there were 75 state agencies supporting NAHC. That was incredibly frustrating for me coming into this industry because everybody had their own agenda and no one was aligning. It took a global emergency to put our heads together and start communicating.

There’s more that we can all do. Get out and share these stories — like Elliott shared about his grandmother — with your local constituents, because everyone has their own story, and health care in the home is definitely the best place. You’re seeing so many different service lines take place in the home now.

Definitely. This morning, there was talk about the process of primary care, acute care and post-acute care [working together]. Talk to us about the glue you think holds that together going forward. We’ll start with Craig on that one.

Mandeville: I don’t know. I think the glue is a little loose [laughs]. To me, they’re all competing with each other. We definitely need that connectivity. Running a technology company focused on connectivity, interoperability, communication and collaboration, I think we all need to work better together as technology companies, and more importantly, the EHRs in each one of those pillars, because you’re dealing with a lot of companies that have very old technology. Some of it’s a little more modern than others but very constricted in the way they want to share data.

Having an open API framework, allowing connectivity across EHRs and each of those three constituents will allow a better place for patients for that continuum of care through different service lines. I don’t agree there’s glue there. I think there’s a lack thereof.

There’s always the people-process-tech conversation. The reality is that the glue that holds different constituents together is economics and money. There’s been a lot of good conversation today with groups that are taking risks and managing risk. I think there’s a huge opportunity to align the three groups you just mentioned through risk-sharing. Bruce [Greenstein] with LHC Group was talking about the different ways they’re getting into risk-based contracting, they own ACOs. At the end of the day, the glue will be the alignment of incentives, and we’re not quite there yet. I think there’s a lot happening in the industry that could bear fruit along those lines.

Adding a fourth leg to that stool, we also talked about pre-acute in some of the earlier sessions. The panel before us was about social determinants of health. Tell me a little bit about how you see some of the pre-acute aspects translate into what you’re seeing with your clients today?

Mandeville: I think from a pre-acute standpoint, a lot of it is about fluid data flow and absorbing that information in real-time. Today, disconnected systems result in hours, if not a complete day, to take on a referral that’s coming from the community or a hospital. Understand what it is. Can we schedule for it? What actually happened to this patient in the last two, three weeks? Are there comorbidities here? There is a lot of absorbing information through the mind and a lack of data.

From our standpoint, automating that entire process and getting real-time information to those who need it is the definition of pre-acute, because if you have better information at the bedside, on-demand, you can make informed decisions. Today, I don’t see that happening. Forcura’s in the business of connectivity, moving information faster and connecting systems. Doing that, we’re investing millions of dollars to ensure we can automate that information so the best decisions are made and patients don’t wind up back in the ER.

Wood: I had written down in my notes that 50% of the population in home health is coming from the hospital. Somebody else said today that MedPAC’s latest number was 66%. I had not heard that yet. Two out of every three patients are coming from the community, they’re coming from physicians. What this means is home health is a pre-acute solution. What happens when you have a patient at home and the agency doesn’t take very good care of them? They’re going to end up in the hospital.

That was a stark realization for me today. Craig talked about how they’re playing and supporting their customers there. We’re a machine-learning company. We’re driving insights and clinical decision support to achieve the right level of care for the patient. A lot of it is ensuring the customer and the patient are getting what they need. If they have an issue, they’re homebound. They’re getting sent to a home health agency by a physician because the physician recognizes, “Hey, this patient is declining and they need support to improve and be independent in the community.”

I think there’s a huge opportunity for home health to align with physician practices, especially physician practices that are starting to take financial risk.

Looking ahead, success and outcomes used to be, “I don’t want to see you back here in my office; I don’t want to see you back at the hospital.” How are outcome measurements changing from your point of view?

Wood: As a data science company, our customers are primarily home health and hospice agencies. We have done a lot of work supporting them with payers and health systems. The conversation with these strategic partner groups is changing. There’s dialogue with these strategic partners about how they might create a narrow network and develop a high-performance network of PAC providers. I think that’s common. Everybody we’re talking to, especially the groups that are managing risk, they are starting to pick who their providers are and who they want to work with. They don’t want to work with 10,000 agencies.

Especially because of the risk dynamic, it’s going to shift from, “Hey, I don’t want to see you back here,” because the truth is the hospitals do unless they’re in some kind of risk-bearing situation. As the health systems and physicians start taking on more risk, it’s going to change to, “Who are the home health groups that I can partner with? Who can I trust? When I send them a patient, are they going to take them no matter who the payer is? Is the transition from the hospital to home going to be an effective one? Is the agency to be in the home within 24 hours after I discharge this patient? Or is this patient going to go three or four days without knowing whether or not they’ve been admitted to an agency’s census? Are they getting the right amount of care? Can you identify risk? If you can’t identify risk, can you do anything with it?”

Another thing we hear from a partnership standpoint is that a lot of the organizations managing risk and looking to home health for some type of partnership are struggling because of a lack of transparency.

Mandeville: I completely agree. One thing we heard about earlier is the prediction of more payer-provider — payvider. With the Humana acquisition [Humana’s acquisition of Kindred of Home], we’re definitely going to see more of that because this lack of data flow and interoperability in our industry will take a while to fix. I’m working really hard, y’all. I’m connecting these systems. When you control the data flow from payer down to the actual servicing, and caring for that patient, and that rolling back up, you own the data. Having the right care management on top of that will result in really high-quality scores, and that’s where patients will go.

Wood: They want it. In the conversations that we have, especially with payers who have horrific, arduous authorization processes, they don’t like their authorization process either, but there has not yet been a solution to align incentives. I think, until home health really steps up and takes that opportunity, and a lot of it has to do with data and coordination, you’re going to see more and more third parties introduced into the system that are helping manage PAC transitions and utilization.

You were going down a road towards care coordination, we’ll get to it in a minute. One of the things we’re talking about is using data. Earlier today, there was discussion about how many visits someone will be able to get if it’s prescribed between the payvider or however you phrase it. There’s a certain predictive number of visits and different things. Is it too few? Is it too many?

Elliott, what’s your point of view on getting the clinicians and frontline teams engaged with these predictive analytics versus their professional judgement?

Wood: It’s a multi-step answer. We have a product in both home health and hospice, where we’re making recommendations on utilization. Based on the acuity of the patient and all the data the clinician has accepted about the patient, how much utilization should each patient receive? That is a very sensitive conversation with the clinician. You’re starting to get into existential territory of what they do. I have two clinicians on my team in the back of the room who I want to have this conversation because the customer doesn’t want to talk to me. I’m an informaticist, I’m not a clinician. I don’t need to be having that conversation. I think this is true with most technology, generally, but especially when you’re starting to do things that influence clinical decision-making.

The first requirement in every implementation we’ve ever had is leadership. Do they have good clinical leadership? Someone has to step up in front of them and say, “Hey, this is why we’re doing what we’re doing. This is why this is going to make us better as an agency, and this is how we’re going to take better care of our patients as a result. ” That’s number one. That always has to happen.

Number two is — and I think most of us here are vendors — we have to create good products. It just is what it is. If we create crappy products, they’re not going to want to use them. If we’re making their life harder, they’re not going to want to use them.

Three, assuming that you have the first two, the clinician still has to experience it. We have a handful of cases where there are high levels of skepticism, then with time they see, “Oh, this actually does work. This actually does allow us to take better care of our patients. It hasn’t taken away my decision autonomy, it’s actually supported it, it’s augmented my decision.” It takes that progression in order to win clinicians over.

Mandeville: One thing I learned early in the business is, I’m a technology guy. I could have the best idea in the world, but if I develop it and deploy it without interaction with our customer, it typically flops. I think we see that a lot in technology companies and it bugs the heck out of me.

This is a partnership. We partnered with our customers and got them involved early so that they’re dialed in. Being there in their offices showing the technology and having them use it goes a long way. We’re in the business of saving time. It’s cutting administrative time, cutting out all that waste.

Our mission statement is to empower better patient care. Everything we do in the organization is around our customers taking better care of those patients. It’s not the secret sauce, but to me, it’s the true north of what we do. Getting in with our customers and having them help us develop a great product has been a winning solution.

You mentioned there’s a lot of technology vendors at today’s event, talking a little bit about all the different solutions out there. I personally had an experience where I had to encounter a care coordinator for the first time in my life, and I was required to download something on my phone, then I had to call 1-800 number. It was confusing for me as a consumer.

What do we as an industry do to help facilitate this care coordination? There are lots of tools out there. Where are we going? Because from my experience, it’s rubbish at this point. You go first.

Mandeville: I agree. Care coordination is very heavy on the FTE side. You’ve got a massive opportunity for technology to evolve and we can automate a lot of that, especially through AI tools and machine learning. Where we see things fall down is the transition of care. As a patient gets discharged to home health, palliative, hospice or maybe to a SNF, it is a complete download of that patient record. There’s literally no metadata that makes its way into the next system which impacts the patient directly. The lack of information and history of what’s happened makes it very difficult.

These are things we’re working on, that we’re delivering into the post-acute market to connect these systems. We are moving this information fluidly through the transition of care so there’s less FTE proactiveness in terms of following up and empowering you to manage your own care.

Wood: Just to speak from our experience, we do less than Craig does on pure tech-enabled care coordination. We see care coordination happening because of risks that we’re identifying, which is usually creating workflow downstream where clinicians have to coordinate. That is way harder than it sounds, and for a variety of reasons. We’re talking about care coordination, at least at the beginning of this conversation of different verticals of care: physicians, hospitals and post-acute. That is so difficult to do.

Our very first product identified patients on home health with a high probability of passing away. Curative care probably wasn’t the best type of care for the patient anymore. For a lot of patients at the end of life, one is having an end of life conversation with the patient, despite the fact that they’re about to die. We were seeing this happen even with home health agencies that owned hospice.

One of my favorite stories to tell is when we went to do an implementation of a customer of ours in Oklahoma, and we get to this meeting where we’re about to facilitate a discussion between home health and hospice. There’s a giant table in the middle of the room, and all the home health clinicians were sitting at the table, and the hospice clinicians sat at the outside of the table. This was a home health and a hospice that were owned by the same company. They were the same company, but the lack of “team” was evident, much less the capability to actually coordinate care across service lines.

We’re talking about care coordination that is best for the patient — that is very difficult in home health and hospice even when owned by the same company. As a broader ecosystem, we have to take this care coordination effort beyond our company logo. We have a long way to go and a lot of things have to get put in place. We need alignment and economic incentives around philosophies of care. What are the plays? When you’re talking about aligning physician groups and home health, what is the actual care coordination that can happen? There’s a lot to unpack there.

Both of you spend a lot of time with your customers, some of which are very large health care providers and health systems. Tell me what’s the most pressing issue that C-suite comes to you and says, “Gosh, I need help.” What is that? How are you addressing that today?

Mandeville: It goes back to seeing a lot of consolidation, not only in the market, but stratifying that risk across multiple service lines. Many of our customers are using six different EHRs and none of them talk to each other. There’s a lot of chatter like, “Oh, we’re implementing that. We’ve got all these things.” We’ve got a long way to go. That’s definitely a major investment that we’re making.

It’s connecting these systems and moving that patient data across so these teams have really good cultural communication within their organization. They also have to pass this patient data information to other care coordination teams to get a good understanding of what’s happened and why they’re here? “What can I do to make really good decisions to care for this patient?”

Elliott?

Wood: Data. We need data. Not just because we’re a machine learning company, but because we need to understand how we’re doing. When you’re implementing technologies, these customers spend a lot of money, not just on the tech itself, but also on the implementation, on the focus and on aligning their teams.

I think some of the most frequent feedback we get specific to our products are, “Hey, we need to understand more and more and more, where are we getting this right? How can we do better?” Part of our responsibility is to be good vendors and partners, quite frankly. Outside of that, the product-specific stuff, it’s all staff. There’s a shortage in the market.

This article is sponsored by Forcura. Forcura is a health care technology company that facilitates care coordination for providers across the continuum to reduce administrative expenses, optimize revenue cycle management and deliver better clinical outcomes.

Based out of Jacksonville, Florida, Forcura serves over 600 clients and 7,000 locations nationwide. The company has been recognized in 2021 as the Best Healthcare Technology Solution, ranked for the fifth consecutive year on the Inc. 5000 and is a top-20 ranked Fortune Best Small & Medium Workplaces. Learn more at forcura.com.

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