When Enhabit Home Health & Hospice needed to better manage their fast-evolving, complex patient population, they got serious about patient engagement and virtual visits.
The benefits came quickly.
“We saw an increase in clinician capacity, allowing us to do more with less,” says Vice President of Care Management Shelley Baker of Enhabit, which provides care annually to 228,000 patients. “Completing visits virtually, when appropriate, has freed up our clinicians to better manage their schedules so they can be with patients who need hands-on care.”
With over 360 health care locations nationwide, Enhabit has seen benefits from enhancing care techniques and entering the new world of virtual care — and for other operators looking to get there, here are four keys to success.
1. Obsess over workflow
Fewer staff members and more patients mean more patients per clinician, less time for staff rest, and increased burnout. Solving this requires a new focus on processes.
“The most important key is to always obsess in reaching a deep understanding of your current state workflow,” says Si Luo, Chief Executive Officer of care coordination partner CareXM.
2. Invest in a process partner and take advantage of their expertise
With new technology comes a new process, and the challenge of gaining staff buy-in. Getting staff trained and working is even trickier. Operators must invest in a process partner that can provide stage-by-stage, data-driven feedback on how the staff is adapting to the new process and new systems.
Finding a partner like CareXM alleviates a number of initial sticking points for staff members.
“Take advantage of our expertise,” says Ellen Kuebrich, Chief Growth Officer of Care XM. “This platform was built by home health and hospice nurses for home health and hospice nurses. We live and breathe telehealth every day — whether in fast, responsive triage or for proactive patient engagement programs.”
3. Fuel staff members by sharing the ROI
Home-based care providers have a lot on their plate. Giving them new technology systems to learn can backfire.
What helps is explaining to them “the why”: show them the ROI of implementing the tech and how it will make their jobs easier and more fulfilling. Luo sees two main benefits:
- Hard dollar benefits. The savings from multiple areas of change, including systems and disparate point solutions consolidation, and labor/staffing optimization, meaning you always know the right level of staff for the right time windows.
- Quality benefits. In home health, providers work with customers to measure both utilization and clinical outcomes impact, such as pain management, skin integrity, and other OASIS components that customers care about.
“When we make it easier to do the ‘right things right,’ clinical staff members get to hunt, gather and chase a lot less to instead synthesize the right amount of context,” Luo says. “They can then hand off to the right next step of care efficiently and accurately.”
4. Tailor patient engagement to your staff and patients
Patient engagement technology changes. Patient health complexity does too. But the foundation of a patient’s needs remains the same.
“The vitals aren’t changing. You need blood pressure, you need pulse ox, you need heart rate, that type of thing,” Kuebrich says. “It shouldn’t be that weird to have one set of tools that everybody’s going to use.”
What CareXM has learned is that telehealth cannot be one-size-fits-all. The aging demographics and increased prevalence of chronic conditions have driven this new era of patient engagement. CareXM allows Enhabit to reach patients through audio, video and written communication via secure text messaging. These technology tools bring care providers directly into patient homes, even if only virtually, granting them a clean look at each patient’s social determinants of health (SDOH).
As head of Enhabit’s Care Management Division for the past three years, Baker has seen this up close and personal.
“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,” Baker says. “Enhabit has chosen to utilize a centralized team that uses the engagement platform and supports branch locations.”
Staff members are happier. Patients are too.
“In the branches that currently have access to this resource, we have received positive feedback from the clinicians,” Baker says. “They have expressed their appreciation of the centralized support and the ability to have an additional resource in their toolbox to treat patients and help deliver high-quality, compassionate 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.
