Today’s home-based care organizations know there is value in interoperability among their technology vendors. Allowing for seamless data integration as well as ease-of-use for staff and clinical professionals, interoperability is an important consideration for technology decisions in today’s operating environment.
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/.
