Success for Integrated Home Care Services (IHCS) will ultimately come down to choices.
Choices, CEO Chris Bradbury said, that are well thought out and driven by data. And choices that are strategically sound.
Take, for instance, the three areas IHCS is involved in: home health, home infusion and durable medical equipment.
“We chose those for a reason,” Bradbury told Home Health Care News “The reason is many of the patients coming out of the hospital or from a facility use all three, or use two. Not all, but I was with one of our largest clients recently, and we found that one-third of their home health users also use DME. Two-thirds of their DME users also use home health.”
IHCS is a driver of value-based care, through durable medical equipment, home health care and home infusion management. The company serves managed care plans and its members. Its model streamlines hospital discharges and care coordination.
When patients are discharged from the hospital, the coordination aspect post-facility can be daunting and confusing.
IHCS is trying to simplify that process while also providing quality and efficient care in a timely manner.
“It’s rare that we provide only one of those services,” Bradbury said. “I want to only provide those three services, and part of the reason being is that it’s a single point of contact for the hospital, the provider, the patient and their family. They just work with us. We take care of the coordination across all of those service lines, and we’re at risk for that, which makes that transition of care to the home … a lot easier.”
Another big choice IHCS has had to make: investing in data.
Bradbury said companies like IHCS need to make data collection and utilization a priority to ensure their partnerships with health systems continue to evolve.
“We’re constantly asking ourselves how to make the complex things easy to understand,” he said. “We really want to understand — within a health plan — their programs, their services and their analytics groups about what slices of data or insights can add value to their programs. We’re in a unique position to do that — and it’s a choice.”
The home care industry, Bradbury told HHCN, is in “the second or third inning” of utilizing data to its fullest potential. There’s also an opportunity to collect data in places that might be outside of the typical places a caregiver might collect it.
“Every time we’re in the home, it’s an opportunity to observe and ask additional questions that are appropriate for the role that we’re there for, but may not be germane to what [they’ve] been hired to do,” Bradbury said. “But there might be questions we know could be really important for the case manager.”
Or for payer partners, he continued.
Data can also be a way to have real-time monitoring of the patient’s overall satisfaction, which is critical in today’s value-based environment where satisfaction is tied to financial gains or losses.
“It’s filling in blind spots,” Bradbury said. “It’s providing different data insights that really are intended to support the health plan strategy.”
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