Shelley Baker had a problem. Fortunately, she also had a solution.
In business and health care, the term “solution” has become a stand-in for any piece of tech that business owners can use to solve problems. It’s so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget the reason for the name: it quite literally is a solution to a problem. As the Vice President of Care Management at Enhabit Home Health & Hospice, Baker knew that success in a value-based landscape required an efficient operation that empowers caregivers to get the most out of their team members.
She also knew that in a 24-hour business, providing high-quality care to patients whenever they are in need is the difference between success and failure. Managing your entire patient population, responding quickly to patient needs and doing so without overburdening clinicians is critical, especially in a value-based landscape.
“Enhabit continuously evaluates new platforms and technologies that could help our organization with efficiency and quality of care,” Baker says. “With the evolution of health care and the increasing ability of our patients to adopt new technologies, we made the strategic decision to adopt a virtual engagement platform to better support patient care which we believe will help us better manage complex patients in an environment of limited clinical resources.”
Here is a look at how Enhabit made that move, and what it’s doing for patients.
The connection between patient engagement and nurse triage
Every home-based care provider knows how the phone call goes. Reacting to incoming calls from patients, whether urgent or non-urgent, places a significant burden on clinical staff. Proactively addressing patient needs before they or their caregivers have to call can alleviate this burden and improve the patient experience. Enhabit identified proactive patient engagement as a strategy to increase clinician capacity and meet patient needs preemptively.
“Value-based care boils down to two things really: keeping patients safely at home — out of the hospital and the emergency room — and creating an excellent patient experience,” Baker says. “Significantly better engagement creates opportunities for both.”
For a cost-effective patient engagement platform, Enhabit turned to care coordination technology partner CareXM. Their solution gives providers exactly what they need most in today’s value-based landscape: more clinical capacity and flexibility to care for patients in a timely, effective manner and proactively meet patient needs.
“There’s some immediately obvious value that adopting a virtual health strategy provides: lower overall cost, increased capacity for your staff and better staff satisfaction,” says Ellen Kuebrich, CareXM Chief Growth Officer. All of that adds up to better patient communication.
That’s what patient engagement means: patients get high touch interaction with their provider, leading to improved adherence in their care plan.
“We call that high-tech, high-touch patient engagement,” Kuebrich says.
Since implementing the solution in August 2022, Enhabit has used these lower-cost encounters to create more touchpoints with patients. For an organization providing care annually to 228,000 patients, “tools like this have to help us move the needle on reducing unnecessary in-person visits, emergent care and hospitalizations,” Baker says. “Doing so will continue to position us as the provider of choice for value-based agreements.”
It also gives Enhabit an increase in clinician capacity, because adding virtual visits to their organizational capability creates more hands-on time with patients.
“Our clinicians appreciate the benefit of having an additional resource on their care team to help patients reach their goals,” Baker says. “Additionally, the majority of our patients have expressed a positive experience with the virtual interventions and found great value in this type of interaction.”
Patient engagement means family engagement
With a high-tech, high-touch patient engagement and virtual visit platform, and a centralized virtual clinical team, Enhabit meets a patient’s needs and promptly delivers what they call A Better Way to Care® through a variety of ways.
“In home health and hospice, there can sometimes be a lot of foot traffic in and out of a patient’s home. This can be stressful and overwhelming to some patients,” Baker says. “With a virtual engagement platform, we can connect with our patients via video calls, high-risk text assessments and direct messaging, giving them another opportunity to check in and receive an additional layer of comfort about their health care journey.
Success with CareXM comes down to two keys, she says. First, a provider must have organizational leadership support, from the local clinical supervisors to the executive level. Second, the education and communication lines have to be clear and open. Because virtual interventions are somewhat new, there is a lot of unknown and even some skepticism from the clinicians. To drive success, it is critical to ensure they know the resource and its value and can communicate that with patients.
After that, the positive outcomes roll in.
“The home health and hospice agencies that are going to win in value-based care are actively adopting proactive triage and patient engagement strategies now,” Kuebrich says.
With customizable and automated care pathways, on-the-go surveys, and various modes of communication, patient engagement can reduce readmissions while offloading staff.
“Winning strategies for home health and hospice reduce nurse burden and achieve what everyone seeks: lower cost of care with better patient outcomes,” she says. “The key ingredient to this strategy is fast, flexible, on-demand reactive triage support combined with proactive patient engagement. This engagement is personalized for patients yet automated for your staff.”
With the success of Enhabit’s virtual health program, they will expand to include CareXM’s on-demand nurse triage service for faster response times and to bring further peace of mind to staffing.
“The greatest benefit of our limited deployment has been the ability to customize the correct type and number of encounters to each patient to help them meet their specific health care goals,” Baker adds. Enhabit uses a predictive analytics tool called Medalogix Pulse to better clinically manage their patients. As the partnership with CareXM expands, Enhabit will have even more actionable insights through call coding and know when and why patients are calling in.
“An engagement platform such as CareXM has allowed us to reach our patients through audio, video and written communication via secure text messaging,” she says. “Our aging population has become more and more tech-savvy over the last several years, opening up greater opportunities to utilize these technologies successfully to make a greater impact on patient care.”
CareXM is a leading telehealth provider, partnering with seven of the top ten home health and hospice agencies to deliver innovative solutions that extend the capabilities of care teams through proactive and reactive triage strategies. Its patient engagement and virtual visit platform and 24/7 on-demand triage service is a game-changing solution that reduces nurse burden, drives down costs, and improves patient satisfaction. To learn more, visit www.carexm.com.
