This article is sponsored by Cardinal Health™. In this Voices interview, Home Health Care News sits down with Alex Hoopes, Director of Healthcare Innovation at Cardinal Health™at-Home Solutions, to learn how home-based care operators can take new angles on the vital yet draining discussion around the industry’s staffing shortage. Hoopes also shares advice on how home-based care providers can use technology to improve patient-caregiver relationships, and a look ahead at what Cardinal Health is doing in that space and others.
Home Health Care News: What experiences do you most draw from in your role today?
Alex Hoopes: As a health care innovator, my job is to bring novel solutions to big problems. When I think of the experiences that have helped me to be a good problem-solver, two come to mind. First is my formal background and education as a pharmacist. Pharmacists do a lot of probing and unpacking of problems, making sure that we’re solving the right problem for our patients. If a patient comes in complaining of a symptom, we have to do detective work to see if it’s a symptom on its own, if it’s related to a drug or if it’s related to their conditions. Our training as scientists helps us make data-based decisions, generate hypotheses and test those hypotheses, allowing us to excel in an innovation role.
The second experience that I draw from is being a patient. About two years ago, I had to become a patient within the health care system for the first time. One of the guiding principles of innovation and new product development is this concept of NIHITO, an acronym that stands for Nothing Important Happens Inside The Office. It’s our mantra: we have to get out and actually see firsthand the problems that our customers are experiencing. The experience I got, actually being a patient for the first time, helped shape the way that I view the health care system. That’s what I lean on.
We all know about the industry’s staffing crisis, and talking about it can at times feel like spinning our wheels. What are the other angles that home-based care operators can take when examining this crisis?
Hoopes: I think the staffing crisis, in really simple terms, boils down to this: There is too much work to do, too many patients to manage and not enough providers, nurses and aides to do that work. A lot of the conversation around the staffing crisis, and home health in particular, has been around, How do you get more nurses in the front door? How do you get more students in school to think about going into home health? How do you convince nurses to do a career switch? Lastly, how do you retain the staff that you have?
That’s a worthwhile focus, and we should absolutely be thinking through how we increase the supply of nurses. But the other angle that we’ve been spending more time on is, if we start from the workforce that we have today, how do we make that workforce more efficient?
That’s a big focus for us, especially when we think about how the Cardinal Health offerings for home health agencies can intersect with this crisis. We are evaluating the way nurses work with our programs to learn how we can drive efficiencies in those programs. But then, zooming out a little bit, we look at all the things that we ask a home health nurse to do. There’s a lot of opportunity out there to take less valuable work off of their plates so that we can get more out of the staff that we have.
I think it’s going to be a long road until we find out what the other side of this crisis looks like but I think that taking a multi-lens approach to this problem is the only way that we’re going to get through it.
If I were betting, I would say the long-term health and sustainability of our workforce, and our ability to meet the demand, will come down to maximizing the staff that we already have, as opposed to trying to get more clinicians in the front door.
What barriers, or opportunities, are most affecting how home-based care providers use new technologies to drive staffing efficiencies?
Hoopes: When we talk to our home health customers, we hear a lot about how they’re leveraging technologies, especially in process automation. This gives nurses more time to do the things that technology is not that good at, which is working directly with patients and trying to execute that plan of care.
Something I think about is the way care is paid for in a home health episode, and how payment is often still tied to doing a certain number of prescribed or defined activities. The room to innovate within those constraints is pretty narrow. As we see more innovative payment models and the federal government continues to push more value-based payment arrangements, we will see the removal of key structural barriers that can unlock the potential for tremendous innovations that create new and better ways to care for patients.
If we can get to that point, the innovation possibilities become much more expansive. How do we get to that point? Well, there is a lot of innovative work happening in the private payer space, the commercial space, even on the Medicare Advantage side, to show payers how different payment models can lead to improved outcomes. In the near term, I think agencies need to focus on engaging in more innovative reimbursement conversations with payers. The time is right for them to be proactive.
What is Cardinal Health™ doing in 2022 to help providers retain staff?
Hoopes: I think each interaction between a home health nurse and one of their agencies, vendors or partners can have a net-positive or a net-negative impact on that nurse’s day, and contribute to their overall job satisfaction. We take that idea to heart: that even though a nurse may spend a relatively small amount of time directly interacting with us, we need to make sure we’re providing as seamless, efficient and positive an interaction as we possibly can.
It’s one thing if we can provide a good value proposition to the agency when we’re partnering with our home health customers, but the nurses are the ones who are interacting with our programs on a day-to-day basis. If we create friction in that experience, it doesn’t really matter what our value proposition to an agency is.
To that end, we evaluate every aspect of the journey that our nurses take when they’re interacting with us to identify ways that we can have more net-positive impacts on our nurses and the work that they do. Our goal is to be a supplies distributor of choice for nurses, meaning that we’re providing an experience that makes it easy to do business with us because we maximize their efficiency.
We offer mobile app ordering for our nurses so that they can place orders for supplies seamlessly on a mobile device. We do a lot in terms of EMR integration. Within the systems they’re already using, we provide nurses one less place that they need to go to get the supplies they need for their patients.
We’re doing a lot with on-demand medical supplies, which makes it easier for nurses to treat their patients. We get things directly to the patient’s home right when the nurse needs them so that all they need to do is focus on showing up and executing that plan of care.
How is Cardinal Health™ helping providers improve patient-caregiver relationships?
Hoopes: I think about this in two different buckets. One, I think of the caregiver as the clinical staff, and on that front, we’re equipping the clinical staff with tools that make it easier to integrate medical supplies into the care plan, improving patient outcomes and overall patient health.
The analogy that I draw to explain executing a care plan is following a cooking recipe. You look up the recipe, get your list of ingredients, go to the store, buy all those ingredients, bring them home and then put them to work. Think of how easy it would be if, instead, you could just say, “I want to make this dish,” and everything that you need just showed up instantly.
That’s the way we’re thinking about seamlessly integrating medical supplies into a plan of care. If the nurse knows what plan they want to execute, everything they need should just come to them. All they have to worry about is executing the plan of care.
The other way that we think about the patient-caregiver relationship is with non-clinical individuals. Oftentimes the caregiver in these patients’ lives is a family member. That is a heavy burden falling on these family caregivers to navigate different transitions of care.
When a patient is in a home health episode of care, a lot’s being taken care of for them. Once that home health episode ends, the patient has to transition back into their normal life. One of the things that we’re doing is focusing on that continuity of care and how we can help the patient’s caregivers transition them back to a state of health, providing them the medical supplies they need for a seamless transition. We put a lot of emphasis on creating a smooth transition to a post-home health state of health. We want to be there for the patient throughout all their levels of care.
Finish this sentence: “The home-based care industry in 2022 will be the year of…”?
Hoopes: It’s going to be the year of reconciliation. After the last two years of the pandemic, agencies were forced to experiment in many different ways. As we hopefully start transitioning into a post-pandemic world, it’s a time of reconciliation, and we need to take stock of all the things that we tried over the last few years and adopt a few tactics, a few technologies, a few new processes that provide the biggest benefit in the post-pandemic era.
Not everything is going to stick. That’s the nature of experimenting. Now it’s time to find those things that we think will stick and ingrain them into patient care going forward.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Care is everywhere, and so is Cardinal Health™. Our health care solutions across the continuum of care help providers work more efficiently, patients live healthier and health care systems work smarter. To learn more about how Cardinal Health™ at-Home can help your agency, visit CardinalHealth.com.
The Voices Series is a sponsored content program featuring leading executives discussing trends, topics and more shaping their industry in a question-and-answer format. For more information on Voices, please contact [email protected].
