Before joining Vivo Infusion, Rodgers was CEO at AccentCare for over a decade. He was also formerly CEO of OptumHealth Collaborative Care, a division of UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) that owns, manages, and provides administrative and technology services to health care delivery systems.

Earlier in his career, he was a health care executive at General Electric, responsible for purchasing health care benefits.

Vivo Infusion provides cost-effective infusion care to patients in partnership with their physicians.

Accra names Frette as chief solutions officer, Chad Derner CFO

Accra has named LeAnn Frette as chief solutions officer. Frette transitions to her new role after serving as chief financial officer (CFO) for over a decade. The company has also appointed Chad Derner to succeed Frette as CFO.

“Over 18 years of service at Accra, LeAnne has guided our organization through tremendous growth and helped us maintain financial success despite constant disruption in the home care industry,” said Accra President and CEO John Dahm said in a statement. “Her expertise will be critical in clearing the future hurdles we face to best serve the thousands of Minnesotans who need care at home.”

Accra is a nonprofit organization providing individualized home care services to people with disabilities and older adults. Headquartered in Minnetonka and operating in all counties throughout Minnesota, Accra helps people who need care get self-directed assistance with activities of daily living.

As chief solutions officer, Frette will partner with leadership on all operational and strategic issues and provide recommendations based on financial analysis and projections, cost identification and allocation, and revenue/expense analysis.

“I am excited to dive into my new role as chief solutions officer and look forward to collaborating with Accra’s executive leadership team on strategies to build an ecosystem that better meets the needs of Minnesotans who require personalized care at home,” Frette said.

Frette started with Accra as a system analyst in 2006 and supported the company’s growth by building out its financial operating systems and practices. She was named CFO in 2014.

Taking on Frette’s former role as CFO, Chad Derner will manage Accra’s accounting and billing departments, oversee all financial activities and operations and provide strategic guidance to leadership. Derner joins Accra with 25 years of experience in finance and accounting, the last 16 of which have been in leadership.

“I am thrilled to welcome Chad Derner as Accra’s new CFO,” Frette said. “Having dedicated many years to this role, I understand the importance of having a leader with Chad’s extensive experience and strategic vision. I am confident that Chad’s broad health care experience will help Accra grow and thrive in our ever-changing industry.”

Derner will focus on identifying opportunities to optimize financial strategies across all of Accra’s business ventures. He will be critical in ensuring Accra fosters financial excellence and strategic growth.

“I am excited to join this dedicated team and contribute to Accra’s mission by ensuring financial excellence and strategic growth,” Derner said. “I look forward to leveraging my experience in financial management and technology-focused health care to support Accra and significantly impact our community.”

CaringBridge announces new board members

CaringBridge, a Bloomington, Minnesota-based health care platform supporting family caregivers, recently announced new members to its board of directors: Sandy Chung, American Academy of Pediatrics immediate past president, CEO of Trusted Doctors, Medical Director of the Virginia Mental Health Access Program; Kristy Lindquist, co-founder and partner at Chasm Partners and Steve Margolis, retired health plan executive, independent board member and current president of the Vitality Group.

The company also announced that retired health care executive Sarah Krevens was the board chair, and Linda Ireland, an independent board director, was the board vice chair.

Calvin Allen, executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has joined as Treasurer, Finance & Development Committee chair.

Cris Ross, chief information officer at Mayo Clinic, is the new Impact Committee chair.

Adrian Slobin, chief growth officer at Huron Consulting, has joined as the Governance Committee chair.

Scott Spiker, board director and chairman at First Command Financial Services, is board chair Emeritus.

“I am thrilled to welcome our new members to the CaringBridge board,” CEO Tia Newcomer said in a statement. “Our board comprises seasoned professionals in health care with deeply personal connections to caregiving. I am truly excited about the future and what we will accomplish together. The board is essential in continuing our path of meaningful and transformational work to surround family caregivers with emotional, social and functional support as they care for a loved one on a health journey.”

nVoq welcomes Iddings as chief revenue officer

nVoq announced Dawn Iddings as its chief revenue officer. Iddings brings over 20 years of experience in health care, technology and electronic health records. Most recently, she served as senior vice president and managing director of post-acute care at Netsmart Technologies. 

“Dawn is an incredible addition to our executive team,” President and Chief Operating Officer Debbi Gillotti said in a statement. “Her deep expertise in the in-home health care market, combined with her career-long commitment to creating technology solutions for our industry, will elevate our ability to service our agency customers and industry partners.”

nVoq Inc., headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, provides HIPAA-compliant, SaaS-based technology for the in-home health care industry.

“The in-home health care market is on the brink of a significant transformation, and AI is at the heart of it,” Iddings said in a statement. “nVoq has been developing and evolving this technology to meet the unique needs of clinicians for over a decade. Our solutions continue to redefine efficiency, quality and accuracy in clinical documentation, and I’m thrilled to be a part of this journey.”

One Senior Care expands executive leadership team

Erie, Pennsylvania-based One Senior Care announced the expansion of its leadership team.

As chief medical officer, Dr. Jerry Wilborn, a 25-year veteran in post-acute care, will work alongside the organization’s medical directors to drive clinical strategy and positive health outcomes.

“Over the last few years, it’s become increasingly clear that seniors want to age in their homes. One Senior Care is making this a reality for the older adults we serve in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, and soon, Ohio,” Wilborn said in a press release.

The newly appointed chief operating officer, Craig Worland, brings a professional background in leading growing health organizations, having previously served in Southeast Primary Care Partners and Tanner Health System.

“I’m honored to join One Senior Care, which has great potential to expand this truly integrated and participant-centered program to serve more older adults and communities across the country,” Worland said in a press release.

As chief quality and compliance officer, Laura Lyons will enhance the company’s quality and compliance programs, according to the release.

“As we look toward the future, we look forward to building upon our reputation in quality care and continuing to ensure that older adults can live healthy, happy and independent lives in their own homes and communities,” Lyons said.

Element Care appoints Thompson new CEO

Element Care announced the appointment of Douglas Thompson as chief executive officer (CEO). Doug brings experience in health care leadership, financial management and community engagement to the company.

“In seeking a new CEO, it was essential to the board of directors to select a candidate that not only has the leadership and technical skills necessary to manage such a complex organization but also someone committed to providing high-quality health care to low-income seniors,” President of the Board of Directors, John Feehan said in a statement. “We are extremely excited to have Doug join the Element Care team and look forward to working with him to bring high-quality, wrap-around medical services to many more seniors in need.”

Element Care, based in Lynn, Massachusetts, provides managed care for senior care options (SCO) under a contract with Commonwealth Care Alliance. The company serves over 1,000 Program for All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE) participants and 2,000 SCO members across 60 North Shore, Merrimack Valley and Greater Boston communities.

“I’ve worked with diverse populations throughout my career and am passionate about developing innovative programs to serve patients with complex health needs,” Thompson said. “I am excited about the mission and high quality of health care that is the foundation of Element Care. I look forward to building on the success of this organization and leading its next chapter as the population of aging seniors continues to grow.”

Thompson was previously the CEO and founder of Perfect Health Inc., where he developed a comprehensive primary care clinical model as a risk-bearing provider organization focused on serving seniors with complex health care needs at home. He was also the former chief financial officer of the Massachusetts state Medicaid program and three Medicaid managed care organizations.

Avenues Home Care welcomes Hendrix as senior care coordinator

Avenues Home Care announced Grant Hendrix as senior care coordinator for northwest Georgia and southeast Tennessee. Hendrix will help families and veterans living in Dalton, Chattanooga and surrounding areas engage with home care services to meet their needs.

“At Avenues Home Care, we are committed to offering those we serve professional, compassionate and flexible home care solutions,” CEO Doug Markham said in a press release. “With our years of experience and industry knowledge, we empower our local teams to foster meaningful connections within the community. Grant’s extensive experience, education, and the Avenues’ vision and support give him the essential insights and resources to ensure we meet our clients’ distinct needs.”

Dalton, Georgia-based Avenues Home Care is the parent company of community-centric home care agencies spanning multiple communities across the South. The company provides in-home senior care, activities of daily living, medication assistance, meal preparation, companionship, transportation, light housekeeping and more.

“Avenues’ motto, ‘your journey, our care,’ is something I will strive to remember every time I visit families and their loved ones,” Hendrix said. “My passion is to connect people to exceptional home care services that will help improve their quality of life. With their excellent reputation and resources, Avenues Home Care has given me a great opportunity to help families in the areas we serve.”

In his new role, Hendrix will analyze the market, visit communities and meet with clients in their homes.

Integrated Home Care Services Inc. welcomes Ajani Nimmagadda as CMO

Integrated Home Care Services Inc. (IHCS) announced that Dr. Ajani Nimmagadda has been named the organization’s new chief medical officer. Nimmagadda will assume clinical and medical management leadership across the organization.

“Dr. Nimmagadda’s leadership in driving clinical outcomes, quality of care and health care affordability will be instrumental in helping us continue to fulfill our mission and support our continued growth,” CEO Christopher Bradbury said in a statement. “Her proven track record of achieving better outcomes for patients, providers, and health plans and her expertise across the health care ecosystem will further accelerate our innovation and value-based care solutions.”

Integrated Home Care Services is a home care benefit manager that enables and accelerates value-based home care for health plans and risk-based provider organizations. Headquartered in Miramar, Florida, the company services millions of patients across many states and Puerto Rico.

“I am honored to join IHCS as chief medical officer,” Dr. Nimmagadda said. “I look forward to leveraging my experience in successful health care operations and improved operational efficiency while optimizing clinical outcomes. IHCS’s approach is reinventing home care benefit management, replacing fragmented approaches with an integrated, insights-based, coordinated model that improves clinical outcomes and patient experience and reduces health care costs. Improving care in the home has always been a passion of mine, and I look forward to unlocking the full potential of care in the home with our team members, providers, caregivers and health plan partners.”

Dr. Nimmagadda has nearly three decades of experience in health care, both as a practicing internal medicine and infectious diseases physician and as a health care executive.

Most recently, she served in various leadership roles at Cigna Healthcare, overseeing comprehensive medical and pharmacy utilization management programs and specialty drug clinical programs, including gene therapies.

The post Former AccentCare CEO Joins Vivo Infusion; Accra Names New CFO appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Home Health Care News: Can you provide a brief background for the audience on yourselves and your company? Jason, we’ll start with you.

Jason Banks: I’m the Vice President of Business Development for nVoq. nVoq is a speech recognition provider in the home health and hospice space. My background is in technology in the post-acute care space. I’ve been in the space for a little over 20 years. Having run a provider for about two and a half years I know how difficult it is for the folks here at the conference in the room. I’m excited to talk more about how organizations survive and thrive under some of the headwinds that they’re facing and look forward to the conversation.

Jennifer Maxwell: I am co-founder, CEO and a counselor in the mental health acute hospital space. From there I moved into home and community-based services, all the 1115 waivers in the state of Colorado, and oversaw the Adult Protection Area Agency on Aging and other adult services programs. From there, I moved into the trade association space and was the CEO and executive director for the Minnesota Home Care Association.

For about three and a half years after that, my husband and I became business partners. I did a small stint in sales in corporate, and we decided to start Maxwell Healthcare Associates. We are a post-acute care, home health, hospice, and palliative care consulting firm. We cover all 50 states and all payer sources as well as private equity and technology.

HHCN: Given the tightening of the belts, everyone’s trying to become more efficient, but also trying to cut back on cost. What is the value proposition? How do you convince someone that it is the time to invest in a tool like nVoq?

Banks: We’re in a cycle. The cycle never really stops, right? You’re going to have up periods, down periods, you’re always going to face reimbursement challenges and regulatory challenges.

The interesting thing that I see is that there’s always an uproar when it comes to payment cuts. No matter what, if there’s a payment cut or even an increase, that’s not to the level that the organizations in our industry find acceptable, which I don’t think there’s ever been one that’s been acceptable, then there’s a huge uproar about it, right?

There’s not the same uproar as it relates to regulatory compliance and regulatory burdens that CMS continues to come out with, and I find that interesting. I know we have comment periods on some of the proposed changes to regulatory. I don’t see the same level of outrage on the regulatory changes that are occurring.

I think there’s so much there in terms of burden that’s put on the individual clinicians from a regulatory perspective. Let me just give you one example. When we had to comply with the addendum on uncovered services, it placed undue burden on the provider, on the clinicians, on the entire system. We were covering much of the non-primary hospice diagnosis stuff anyway.

I feel like there’s just not enough visibility put on the regulatory compliance, and I know there’s a whole cottage industry there focused on OASIS answers and how we answer those questions and staying aligned with care plans, and if you watch a clinician, whenever you say the word care plan, their eyes start to roll in the back of their head.

I think that nVoq has a value proposition in multiple areas, making clinician workflow more efficient and improving the quality. Most of the technology that is out there, and the EHRs do a great job, we’re partnered with most of them, they do a wonderful job at keeping the organization in regulatory compliance as it relates to the documentation. There’s a gap there in efficiency, right? A lot of times with technology, there’s a trade-off.

The more efficient you make the clinician, quality suffers or the higher the quality they suffer from an efficiency perspective. nVoq is unique in that we’re making it faster for clinicians to document, which ultimately will result in less burnout. There are studies out there that state after-hour documentation is the number one cause of clinician burnout. We feel like we make a significant difference there, but also in the quality of the data as well. Those are the main value propositions that we’re looking to drive.

HHCN: From the consultant perspective, how do you explain why investment matters even in times like this where cuts are occurring?

Maxwell: That’s a great question. A lot of the work that we do, we’re going into organizations and we’re figuring out how to strategically align the innards of the organization, all the operations, the people, the workflows, also quality and bottom line is your DSO and cash flow, right? When we think about all of those things, timely, effective, efficient documentation that meets, as Jason said, the regulatory requirements, that gets into the EMR in a timely fashion and is up to date, provides a much better reimbursement potential and a quicker reimbursement potential.

If you know that your clinicians are working off of narratives that are highly detailed and using an assistive technology that helps to maybe remind that clinician, “Hey, did you ask that question? I don’t think that one was finished in the OASIS set.” Those are some of the things, and especially on the home health side, that really help.

I would also say to the point of documentation outside of the home, if you’re documenting after-hours and you’ve had six or eight visits throughout the day, and you’re coming back and trying to remember what you did with your first patient of the day at eight o’clock at night, after homework, after swimming lessons, and whatever else it is, that quality of documentation, and what you remember is not going to be as accurate as it should be.

Which increases your issues with, is the plan of care being followed correctly. Are you seeing things that potentially this patient might need sooner than later? Then the care teams are not aligned either. When you think about being able to bring in that technology to document quickly, being able to be less distracted when you’re at the patient’s bedside as well. Then my last piece to that is quality of care goes up, and patient satisfaction.

We all know that patient satisfaction is going to be a big deal because that’s your star rating. That’s what CMS is looking at the end of the day. If you don’t have good satisfaction scores, you’re also going to have the issues with payment as well down the road.

HHCN: Jason, you said earlier that you admitted that you were biased. Can you provide evidence of how this can make home health agencies more efficient during a cut period?

Banks: We’ve actually done a number of formal and informal studies over the last two to three years in working with organizations around improvement in DSO. How quickly are we moving from care to the bedside to reimbursement for that care? We’ve been able to improve DSO in a lot of cases by speeding up the documentation, but also moving it closer to the actual patient visit itself. You see things like NOAs getting sent out earlier, QA processes getting sent out earlier, and the QA process not being as back and forth so it can lower QA costs.

Then, ultimately, we’re seeing a tremendous impact on clinicians’ satisfaction, which ultimately we’re tying to retention. We just recently worked with an organization that saw the clinicians that were using our speech recognition engine tool about a 20% reduction in turnover. As I look across the industry, there are a number of things that organizations can do to help with clinician shortage and clinician burnouts. Not a lot of them, though, have a direct impact to the clinician the way that speech recognition does.

We have organizations today that are producing video testimonials from their clinicians saying, “Hey, with this tool, I’ve been able to save 20%, 30% of my charting time.” If you look at an industry average of home, health and hospice, the average amount of documentation as compared to care, is about 20% to 30% for a routine visit and upwards to 50% to 60% for an admission visit.

It’s a significant amount of time, which also means they’re saving a significant amount of time. Those organizations are using those clinician testimonials as recruiting tools. I don’t think saying, “Hey, we’re investing in our clinicians.” Again, I don’t think speech recognition is the panacea for everything, but it is an important thing to directly impact one of the biggest burdens that clinicians face, which is the documentation time.

HHCN: Sometimes it’s a better place to start with retention than recruitment, trying to keep the clinicians that you do have. Do you see this as something that can really be leveraged to help home health providers hold on to their clinicians longer-term?

Maxwell: Absolutely. What we’re seeing when we work across organizations, some of you have obviously state regulations and overtime and a half after hours for documentation. Some of our larger clients out in the California area, anything after 5 PM is paid at time and a half. Also, they are struggling to be able to get their family life and work-life balance into play. What we’re seeing is if they’re doing it during the workday or even as much as you push the button and you’re talking into the microphone in your car, into the mobile device.

Being able to get that taken care of before you get to the next home is a greater level of satisfaction to clinicians, is what we’re finding. Those that leverage speech-to-text technology such as nVoq really do save that time throughout the day. We’re able to bring in more admissions, be able to move clinicians quicker through different processes without them feeling the stress of, “Oh my gosh, I have all of this paperwork to do, and all of this documentation.

They are really feeling satisfied with the work they are doing, and they are feeling like they are providing the care that they set out to be a clinician for and being able to work at the top of their license rather than sitting behind a computer and typing.

HHCN: For both of you, how much time do you think this can save on a daily basis for clinicians?

Banks: It depends. For instance, we’re seeing upwards of 45 minutes to an hour savings on every admission visit from a documentation perspective. Then, on more routine visits, subsequent visits, we’re seeing in the area of 7 to 10 minutes saving per visit on the documentation side. It does result in significant cash flow improvements, ROI improvements, significant savings on turnover, etc.

There’s a very strong ROI component. Usually when we start working with home health or hospice organizations, they intuitively get a lot of head nods from the clinicians and also the IT department, they intuitively know that this is the right thing to do. It’s normally getting over that ROI hump with the financial buyer, whether it be the CFO or somebody else within the organization, if she is focused on how is the ROI going to pay for itself, that’s typically where we are spending the most time, I would say, again, that a lot of the clinical leadership, they just intuitively get this right off the bat.

HHCN: Even if the ROI is there at a time like this when providers are busy, how do you help them get through the burden that is applying any new technology to their business. I imagine that’s not an easy process, especially for some of the agencies that are short-staffed, and don’t have a person on board who specifically has that job. What do you do to help them ultimately get that to be a part of their business without it really hurting them in the short term?

Maxwell: I think that’s where the partnerships come into play. MHA is a partner with nVoq. We actually, in the client life-cycle of working with organizations, to your point, boots on the ground within any one organization to implement a series of technologies. We strategically align the technology at the right time. When we’re hitting an efficiency level within the organization in a specific type of workflow, then we feed in the voice to text.

We get the organization bot on board and trained on what the new process is going to be prior to just slapping the technology on them, because at that point, they haven’t really had a chance to absorb it, be able to talk about it, and have true buy-in, because there is a team focus when we look at organizations as a whole. Then as we work individually with clinicians and chaplains and therapists, there’s a different angle that they’re all coming at, “What is it in it for me? What is in it for my patients?”

They have a smaller ecosystem than the larger ecosystem. We really sit down and walk them through the why, not only the how, and then show them what those results will be, not only for themselves, but for their clinical teams, for the outcomes of their patients, and for just overall work-life balance.

Banks: It’s about getting the most value out of the tool. It’s exactly where they have executive-level buy-in, exactly where they have Maxwell’s help in terms of change management or getting clinicians the information on what’s in it for them. Why is this important? In addition to the how. The how is fairly easy to figure out. I always talk about this.

Clinicians do an amazing job in our industry, but there’s a certain percentage of them that don’t have five minutes to go to the bathroom in a day. Introducing a new technology is like it’s so difficult unless you convince them that this is in their own best interest. Maxwell does a great job of that, but also preparing the organization to say, “Here’s what we need from you in order to be successful as well.” I think Jen put it great.

HHCN: Jason, how do you differentiate yourself from other companies in the industry?

Banks: I think we’re really focused on moving the needle for the individual user, for the provider organization. We really want this to check all the boxes when it comes to technology and how it’s going to produce an ROI for an organization, but also how it’s going to influence that individual clinician. I can tell you that every day when we have these listening sessions that we do with clinicians, they tell us, “It’s changed the way that I feel about my work. I feel like I get to spend more time with my patients, which is why I got into this industry,” and Jen talked about it earlier. These are special men and women that get into home health and hospice.

The whole reason why they get into this industry is because they’re relationship driven. They’re not transactional individuals. When you take that relationship aspect away because they’re so worried about, I’ve got this much charting to do at the end of the day, and I got to get to my next visit, and my next visit, and they’re not really present at that time, it’s taking a lot of that satisfaction away from them. Even if we’re making a dent in that, and I think we’re doing much more than that, it’s really beneficial.

Partnering with leaders who understand the industry like Maxwell is also a differentiator for us. We know that Maxwell understands exactly the needs of these organizations and how to impact change within them. I think that makes us different as well.

HHCN: What does the integration look like in current mainstream EMRs?

Banks: We are integrated with a number of EMRs. We also are available as a standalone offering. We actually integrate with the operating system, so Windows and Android devices. If your clinicians are using iOS, we would integrate with the EHR side. All of that behind the scenes is very, very simple. The technology is simple to deploy and, operate. We work in SSO environments, clinicians have a real seamless experience. IT can push it out via mobile device management or whatever tools they have to deploy it.

We try to make that as frictionless of a process as possible so that we can focus on leveraging Maxwell to get these in the hands of the clinicians. We don’t have any technical barriers that we have to jump through to get there.

HHCN: Jennifer, what other areas should home health agencies focus on improving or automating through technology?

Maxwell: I would tell you the world of technology and tech-enabled solutions is definitely top of mind, top of priority in our space. If you think about all of the technology that’s out there in different verticals, whether it’s when it comes to technology and automating things, that we’re starting to see more of a flood. I think when you think about technology, you need to think about what it is that you want to solve. What’s the problem you want to solve? What is the ROI that you need out of it?

We’re of the mindset that good technology will pay for itself, right? If you think about ROIs on technology that’s out there, a technology that should cost you a lot of money, but it’s not going to pay for itself and you’re still going to have to have money out of your pocket probably isn’t the technology that you want to use, go forward. We’re always thinking about those types of things that ROIs, the different use cases.

Even when we think of nVoq as a use case, some of the use cases that we’ve come up with is, “Hey, why aren’t you using nVoq for your QAPI program? You can do batch audits; you can automate things even further. I’m a strategic advisor and owner of another technology and data science AI company. When you think about the data that can go in and what the possibilities are coming out of in an automated fashion that really delivers better quality outcomes for patients is really where we’re headed, right?

It’s not about, okay, we’re going to cut a bunch of jobs. It’s about how we don’t have the clinicians coming out of school anymore.

The volume that is required to take care of the people that are going to be needed to be cared for is the numbers that don’t match up. We got to think about technology from a holistic pattern, whether it’s workflows, whether it’s speech to text, whether it’s data science and AI that can do predictive analytics for patient outcomes and visit scheduling.

There’s a plethora of those things that are out there. I always tell everybody, think about it and think about what you want to be strategically in the next one to three years as we see these cuts coming.

HHCN: Jason, does nVoq have any translation services from Spanish to English?

Banks: We don’t at this point in time, we do handle accents and dialects very well though. What I find is, I slur my words together, [laughs] I find that even clinicians with ESL (English as a second language) actually do really well with the tool because they have good word boundaries. Really, it does an excellent job. We work with clinicians all across the country that have various beautiful dialects and accents and the tool does really well with them, but we don’t translate just yet.

We’re also experiencing new models where we go out and we’re doing this with a couple of providers today where we’re implementing speech recognition as a part of their EHR rollout.

The clinicians just intuitively take to speech recognition thinking, “Well. I guess this is how we do our dictation. How we do our documentation, we just do it via dictation.” We’re seeing tremendous value and uptick there. As they’re learning the new EMR, they just roll in speech recognition like it’s a natural part of the process. We’re seeing that that makes a tremendous difference. Versus, again, you’re disrupting them multiple times if you’re rolling out a new EMR and then you’re trying to add things on top of it.

HHCN: Once a home health agency does sign on, what does the clinician adoption rate look like?

Banks: Typically, you’re going to get 60% to 70% adoption right off the bat. Then it’s really about creating that model that is sustainable to get to 80%, 90%, 95% adoption. We have clients today that are well above 95% adoption rate, but that’s where Maxwell comes in. They understand how to organize and get the organization ready and make sure that they have the executive level buy-in, and they have a plan to roll this out. Again, a lot of it is about the why, as you pointed out earlier.

nVoq Incorporated provides a HIPAA compliant, cloud-based speech recognition platform supporting a wide variety of healthcare delivery scenarios including post-acute care with an emphasis on home healthcare and hospice. To learn more, visit: https://sayit.nvoq.com/.

The post HHCN FUTURE: Addressing Home Health Agency Readiness for Potential Payment Cuts in 2024 appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Home Health Care News: Can you give a brief background of nVoq to the audience?

Jason Banks: nVoq is a speech recognition provider, and we have been around for over 20 years, primarily in the acute and ambulatory space, serving physicians as more of a utility under the covers for companies like Dolbey and Suki and Konica Minolta. I was around operating in that mode for the better part of 15, 16 years. A few years ago, I got involved in post-acute care, home care and hospice.

We thought there was a huge market there to really make an impact with home health clinicians, home health hospice, nurses, social workers, chaplains, PTs, and OTs. We got involved in that industry just a couple of years ago and just took off. I had no idea if it would take off, I was hopeful, because I thought it really could make a difference in the average lives of the clinicians.

What we found over the past couple of years, it’s doing what we hoped it would do, which was giving some space back to these amazing superheroes that are out in the homes, serving patients and families. Ultimately, that has a lot of really awesome downstream impacts to the business as well.

HHCN: What have you learned in the last year about how this can affect the home health and hospice space?

Banks: We learned a couple of things and some of it was just by reporting. There’s a study in the Journal of Nursing Education and the study was done right before COVID. The net of the study is that you have home health which used to be a much more satisfied workforce than acute and ambulatory care in the year 2000. That started to flip in about 2004, and has gotten progressively worse since. We try to really figure out and understand why.

The theory is that the regulatory and documentation burden has gotten so high, that it is driving these clinicians out of the industry. One of the things that we were looking to solve is to create that work-life balance for those clinicians. Then, like I said, it ultimately will result in a lot of good downstream things too. Not just retention, which is probably the most important thing, but it also results in decreased QA costs, because the quality of their documentation actually goes up, decreased write-offs for the organization, decreased ADRs for the organization.

Our mission is to serve the frontline clinicians and make their documentation process as easy as it possibly can be. Then over the last year, what we’ve actually been able to do is work with some of the folks in the room, as well as other providers across the country to realize that data and codify it in study. We have a number of clients that we’ve either had case studies, formal studies, or just anecdotal sort of research that we’ve done with them to prove out that dictation is really saving them material time up to 90 minutes, sometimes two hours a day per clinician.

I had the good fortune of running a hospice in Chicago for a couple of years. I had clinicians that we paid very competitively. We had a really fun culture supporting each other, but they were still leaving the profession and we were bound and determined to figure out why. Through a number of efforts, ride-alongs, meetings, one-on-one meetings, exit surveys, looking at all the data we found the same thing. It was after-hours charting.

It was two to three hours of after-hours charting after they went to see a full day of caseload that was making a significant impact on their satisfaction and ultimately driving them out of this profession. I’m speaking to the choir, you all know this, but the reason that most clinicians get into home health or hospice in the first place is because they love relationships with people in their home. They love that relationship factor. That’s one of the drivers that drew them to the marketplace.

Yet what they’re finding when they get into the profession is that they’re constantly worried and thinking about all their after-hours workload and getting from patient to patient. There’s a lot of solutions to this speech. We think it is an important one, but we also think smart scheduling is absolutely a factor in this. It’s been talked about a lot today, making sure that you’re paying proper benefits and making sure that your employees have certainty and schedules and things like that. That’s all part of it.

Our main focus is I believe what is the main driver of turnover in the certified home health and hospice industry, which is that after-hours charting.

HHCN: The recruiting and retention piece is huge. How have you seen these helping providers with retention over the last year?

Banks: Again, we look at leading indicators of retention, that work-life balance, that satisfaction, the leading drivers of people that are leaving either the organization or the profession as a whole, and we’ve seen dramatic time savings. Again, we did a recent study, a very formal sort of rigorous process with the VNA health group, which is out of New Jersey and Cleveland. We took a hundred of their clinicians and put them in with our dictation tool, they had over an 85% adoption rate. Their time savings was on average an hour.

Some of their clinicians, the clinicians that struggled most with the documentation, were saving upwards of two hours. They had over 10% of their clinicians saving two hours of time. What we found is that even those clinicians that weren’t materializing that time savings, we saw two other things. One of them is that they still love the product, quite frankly. [laughs] It was so easy to adopt and use that they absolutely loved it. Even if we couldn’t necessarily quantify the savings.

The second was that the quality of the data went up. They saw that the volume of documentation actually increased as their time documenting decreased. That’s an unusual thing to have happen. Usually, there’s a trade-off between quality and efficiency. If quality goes up, usually efficiency goes down. If efficiency goes up, usually quality goes down. We actually had a positive impact in both.

HHCN: When it comes to new lines of business some of those we’ve talked about today, also we’ve talked about getting a value-based care arrangement. What are some of the opportunities you’ve seen there?

Banks: With value-based care and when I was on the provider side, we were just starting to get involved in it. Obviously, things like reporting and analytics are really important when you’re going to payers. When you talk about HEDIS scores or you talk about Star Ratings, it’s absolutely important and imperative that you speak the same language as them.

I see organizations like Aspirus or Prospero or some of these organizations that Home Health Care News has absolutely reported on in the past and talked about the impact that they’re making in the community. What’s the difference with those organizations?

When you dig under the covers really truly there’s a couple of differences. One of them is that they’re adopting technology at a rate that most certified home health and hospice providers are not adopting it. Other than you’re a medicist or some of the larger organizations in our space are adopting it. The second is that quite frankly, the documentation requirements are different. They’re not completing OASIS. They’re not having to do after an admission, 130 questions that I would argue are subjective in nature and have really no objective measure of quality.

Everybody’s afraid to say it but that’s the truth. There’s two objective measures to quality caps and rehospitalization in emerging care, the rest is a documentation exercise. That’s the reality. I think this MA Plans understand that and they’re looking for organizations that can truly bend the cost curve without having to deplete 48 pages of documentation and so you have these organizations that are taking care of the chronic care management.

I have friends, nurses, social workers, PTs, OTs, that have moved into these organizations working with MA Plans and I said, “What’s the difference? Why are you so much happier at the organization?” They said, “We adopted technology at a rate that we couldn’t before and so we’re using things like dictation tools as just a standard, we don’t even think about it.”

Then the second thing is the documentation requirements aren’t nearly what they are in certified home health, or hospice episodic care, it’s not even close. What we got into the profession to originally do again, driving back to the relationship with the patient and family is exactly what we spend all day doing, which is taking care of the patient and family. We don’t necessarily even think about the charting at three hours after the workday is done.

HHCN: What have been some of the barriers to technology adoption in the post-acute space that you’ve seen?

Banks: I come from the EMR side. They have an impossible job, they do an amazing job. I know everybody likes to bash their EMR, but they do an incredible job and you should thank your EMR provider for keeping you in regulatory compliance and what they do around that.

Other than the EMRs, I don’t see much innovation, Andrew, in the clinician efficiency space. Most of the innovation that I see outside the EMR vendors has to do with coding, and billing, and hosting, and all of the other tech services, but it really doesn’t drive home on exactly what the core issue is. There was a recent study by a company called BerryDunn, which is an accounting firm, and I’ve recently posted about it on LinkedIn.

The study talked about the fact that all of these signup bonuses and retention bonuses, all of these short-term things have a real shelf life. What truly matters is making a change in the lives of the individual clinicians, and that will have significant downstream impacts.

The point of the study was that all this focus is being put on recruitment, and that is a part of it but retention is the most important thing that providers can do today to make their organization poised to take on new lines of businesses or expand into value-based purchasing or any other areas.

HHCN: Why has there been such little advancement in clinical workflow?

Banks: It’s hard. I think I had a chart somewhere that talked about the post-acute regulatory environment as compared to an acute care setting. We have four times as many regulatory hurdles to jump over as a hospital. The regulatory burden is really difficult. I just think it’s hard. It’s really hard work but it’s worthy work, and I’m happy to be part of finding the solution to it.

HHCN: How can you change course there?

Banks: I think ultimately painting a vision for the future. Today, we help with narrative documentation, and not just the speed of that documentation but the quality, but I see a truly voice-enabled note. I’m sure you all see this, particularly on the provider side where you’re employing more millennials, Gen Zs than ever.

I see this as ultimately what we provide is table stakes. It’s going to be commonplace in the industry. Then we look at how we can automate the dictation on top of what we’ve done and we’ve built some features in there to really automate and supercharge some of that, we’re happy to show any of you. I think we can take it to the next level, but I think voice dictation will someday be commonplace just like it is in a hospital or ambulatory setting.

nVoq Incorporated provides a HIPAA compliant, cloud-based speech recognition platform supporting a wide variety of healthcare delivery scenarios including post-acute care with an emphasis on home healthcare and hospice. To learn more, visit: https://sayit.nvoq.com/.

The post HHCN FUTURE Conference: Fireside Chat with nVoq appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Home Health Care News: Jason, earlier today we talked about the operational side of running a large post-acute provider. For the better part of two decades, this has been your experience. What do you see as some of the top trends affecting home health and your customers in the next couple of years?

Jason Banks: Particularly now with COVID, there are three main themes in a lot of the shows that we go to, and in our conversations with prospective providers or clients. I think the workforce shortage is first and foremost on a lot of the providers’ minds.

The second thing is regulatory, and the regulatory burden that comes along with running a post-acute care organization, and we’ll talk more about that, but it’s significant. Then, the third is the shift towards value-based care. We’ll hear a lot about this all throughout the day — the hospital, the home, ER diversion, SNF-at-home and all the other models and flavors coming out.

It seems like overnight, I was just entering into post-acute care, and now I’ve been in the industry for over 20 years. We’ve been talking about, “Hey, we can probably do more with these incredible men and women that go to people’s homes and take care of them.” It’s incredible that post-acute care has become the flavor of the day when it comes to providing care for chronic care management, end-of-life care and those sorts of things in the home.

Over the past seven years, I’ve been thinking about, “What are some of the root causes of these opportunities or challenges that providers are facing?” One of the root causes or common threads throughout are the documentation requirements or the challenges associated with documentation. Clinicians are spending between 30% to 50% of their time documenting.

If you’ve seen other environments or explored home care and hospice outside of the U.S., you’ve probably found that the number greatly decreases for multiple reasons, whether regulatory compliance or other factors. You’ll also notice that the care really is fantastic in those environments, the patients are happy and the clinicians are satisfied.

A common theme that’s been running through my head for well over a decade now is, “How do we get to hands-free documentation?” chiseling away at some of the things clinicians are doing that don’t add value to the patient experience — that’s what nVoq does. nVoq is speech-to-text at a 30,000-foot level, but deep under the covers, we’re addressing opportunities these providers are experiencing on a daily basis with revenue optimization and making sure that they’re recruiting and retaining the right talent.

I got the phone call from Chris Moran, who’s in the audience, and Debbi Gillotti, our COO, about six months ago, and they said, “Hey, we’re getting interest from these post-acute care providers around bringing speech-to-text to not just the physicians, but also to the frontline clinicians providing care. The interest is across the board from large providers, medium, small providers, nonprofit, for-profit, hospital-based, non-hospital based. We think there’s something here, would you be interested in exploring this?” I said, “Absolutely. This is exactly what I think the industry needs.”

HHCN: That’s great. One of the themes a lot of our clients are talking to us about as well is that shift to value-based care; I call it everything at-home. Talk to us about how you guys are positioning what you do in terms of value-based care from a risk standpoint, and how you are laying the groundwork for value-based care in the long term.

Banks: I was told not to say what I’m about to say, but I’m going to say it anyway in my true nature. Some of the folks who have worked with me in the past will think this is funny because I’ve said this for a while. Post-acute, over the past 20 years that I’ve been involved, is similar to AA, Alcoholics Anonymous. Meaning, I’ve never met anybody going to post-acute care that said, “I had a fantastic day. I need post-acute care.” It’s, “I had a really bad day.” Sometimes the worst day of their lives.

If physicians come in and tell them there’s nothing more they can do and they need to seek out hospice care, it’s sometimes the worst day of their lives. I’ve equated it to AA for the past five or six years in that you need something bad to happen to go to post-acute care. Why does it have to be that way? Plenty of people are living with chronic care conditions who can be serviced to prevent those acute events from happening. In order to do that, those providers need to operate at the highest level of their licensure.

You need to have cross-discipline functions within the home to make sure you’re addressing everything from the physical needs to the spiritual and emotional needs, to the social determinants of health. I often talk about patient tax. Patient tax, in my mind, is anything that doesn’t add value to the patient experience. In value-based care and the at-home models, the hospital-at-home, the ER diversion, the SNF-at-home models — you’re seeing a lot of those patient taxes being eliminated.

Patient tax, in my mind, would be doubled documentation. I had the pleasure of serving in a hospice and palliative care organization here in Chicago. I ran the organization for about two and a half years. We would have our nurses documenting two or three times in a single visit. Did it add value to the patient or family? Absolutely not. Was it regulatory-compliant? Absolutely. There are a thousand of those things across any provider organization that you can strip out of the process. And by new innovative programs, you’ll see more organizations strip those out of the process and add value to the patient experience.

HHCN: Let’s spend a minute talking about that regulatory environment because it’s changing. With COVID and the pandemic, new things have come about and we’ve had some freedom and flexibility in certain areas. What does that look like for you going forward, and how does that impact providers today?

Banks: I read an AMA article that said hospitals have about 96 continuous learning points (CLPs) while post-acute has 288, and they have to comply with all the other technical requirements associated with data security, HIPAA compliance and everything else. When you’re providing either at-home care or care in a facility setting, there are so many regulatory requirements to consider.

One of the things we’re looking to do is alleviate some of that burden of the regulatory requirements by allowing the clinicians to be with the patient to take care of them. Then, we’re actually taking some of those components of regulatory compliance off their hands and saying, “Hey here’s something you may want to add to the note that is either regulatory compliant or going to add to the patient experience.” That’s one of the things that we do with nVoq as well.

HHCN: Let’s talk about workforce shortages. I think that’s permeating into everything we cover nationwide. How can your voice tech help clinicians and frontline staff combat the shortage issue?

Banks: This is probably one of the strongest value propositions, albeit not the only for nVoq, but it’s one we’re laser-focused on. At the beginning, we talked about three core challenges that providers are facing with workforce shortage, regulatory compliance and the shift towards value-based care. The workforce shortage is number one, two and three. You have excellent leaders in this room that have varying degrees of participation in, “How do we solve for that workforce shortage?”

Things like hiring. I know there are a number of organizations in the room that can help you find and stand out amongst potential recruits. There are also sign-on bonuses, hiring bonuses, referral bonuses, retention bonuses, increased pay and cultural things you can do as a provider. Those all play a part, but I think there’s an underlying problem with the workforce shortage.

That is, why do clinicians leave organizations? Why do they select organizations? What’s different about home health and hospice from other settings they might practice in? One of the things I think a lot about is, “Why do clinicians select home health and hospice as a profession?” One thing jumps right out to me, and it’s that they prefer relationships. They prefer relationships with the patient and family over transactional care.

Again, the common thread that’s a barrier to relationships are the documentation requirements. If they’re spending 30% to 50% of their time documenting, either because of regulatory requirements or other reasons, and the whole reason they got into post-acute care in the first place was because of that relationship component, that is what’s driving them out.

I’ve seen that in exit interviews over and over and over again. “We’re leaving because of the documentation requirements. We’re leaving because of the regulatory burden. We’re not leaving because of the organization, and we’re not leaving because we don’t care for patients or families.” These are incredible men and women serving our primarily elderly population. We’re laser-focused on alleviating that documentation burden for them.

HHCN: I have one last question for you. One of the things I like to read about is technology. Amazon just came out with some new Alexa devices and Siri is permeating everything that we do. How do you see the proliferation of consumer voice tech affect those who are working with your software today?

Banks: I think it’s great because I use voice tech in my own home. We have Alexa in the home today. I use an iPhone, so I use Siri particularly when I’m in a mobile environment where I want to shoot a quick text or something like that. When I’m riding in the passenger seat and I want to shoot a quick text, I’ll use voice-to-text. We’re seeing that capability more and more, and I think it’s going to become second nature for those clinicians.

This article is sponsored by nVoq. nVoq Incorporated provides a HIPAA and PCI-DSS compliant, cloud-based speech recognition platform supporting a wide variety of healthcare delivery scenarios including post-acute care with an emphasis on home healthcare and hospice. nVoq’s speech recognition solutions convert speech to text in seconds and are highly accurate for most medical specialties. To learn more, visit sayit.nVoq.com

The post FUTURE Talks: An Interview with nVoq appeared first on Home Health Care News.

“My love for home services comes from the joy I see in the faces of our patients who can continue living with their families,” says Jamie Brown, vice president of home services with Vancouver, Washington-based Eden Health. “[And] my passion is serving as an advocate for our frontline clinicians.”

The company operates 17 home health, hospice and home care agencies in six states, making for a high number of clinical notes and patient care plans. To improve the care documentation process for its clinicians — and ultimately its patients — Eden Health adopted nVoq speech recognition software in Homecare Homebase’s PointCare EHR.

“Before using speech to text to document care, our clinicians were typing hours’ worth of documentation for our patients,” Brown says. “On average, our clinicians are documenting admissions 30 minutes faster [than before]. Multiply that by the number of admissions a clinician documents in a day, and that’s a significant time savings.”

With nVoq, Eden Health clinicians can document care while they’re in the patient’s home, with the patient, meaning they are no longer documenting care after their scheduled shift.

“That’s good for Eden Health’s bottom line: It means we’re not paying overtime,” Brown says. “I want to free up our clinicians to focus on patient care, rather than worrying about spending hours every night documenting in the EHR. With Eden Health, we need to do this across 16 different offices in five states.”

They are achieving this with nVoq. Here are three best practices that Brown and the team at Eden Health recommend for other agencies deploying speech-to-text technology.

Choose speech software that supports HIPAA compliance

Making the move from manual note-taking to speech recognition is more than just asking clinicians to use the technology already on their phones.

“Siri can help you locate the closest gas station, but it doesn’t support HIPAA compliance,” Brown says.

To help its clinicians, Eden Health had to turn off the speech option on their tablets and smartphones, and bring them the HIPAA-compliant nVoq technology. Another key benefit of using a speech-to-text tool created for home-based care: built-in home health care and hospice medical vocabulary. That’s another time-saver.

Select a go-to contact for clinicians out in the field

To support clinicians out in the field while they learn to document using speech to text, Eden Health gives them the name, phone number and email address of a person who can answer their questions. That person is also in charge of getting clinicians excited about the software and how it can benefit them.

Confirm that the patient understands their care plan

Because the clinician is documenting by voice in real time, the patient in the home can hear what they’re saying about the visit and their care plan, and the plan for the next visit. This is a win, Brown says.

“Documenting care plans by voice really helps us from a regulatory and audit perspective as well,” she adds.

And while HIPAA-compliant speech-to-text tools benefit the patients, it is benefiting the clinicians too.

“Eden Health was awarded a Great Place to Work® certification for the second year in a row for 2020-2021,” Brown says. “But we got consistent feedback for years that documenting care in the EHR was complicated and it takes a lot of time. Investing in speech-to-text is helping our clinicians focus on patient care, and they’re happier as a result.”

This article is sponsored by nVoq. To learn more about how speech-to-text technology can help your agency, visit sayit.nvoq.com.

The post 3 Best Practices for Deploying Speech-to-Text appeared first on Home Health Care News.

This is a huge problem, as agencies experience literally millions of dollars in lost revenue due to lack of adequate staffing each year. The soaring demand for workers in the home is driven primarily by an aging population and seniors leaving nursing homes to be with family during COVID.

Alarmingly, the gap between home care job openings and available hires is getting wider. The home health industry faces multiple labor challenges, including worker safety concerns stemming from the pandemic and an aging workforce where 40% of RNs are over the age of 50. This is compounded by multiple career options such as high pay travel nursing assignments, growth of advanced practice careers, telehealth, and clinicians leaving the profession from burnout.

“The top reasons a health care worker leaves one job for another includes the relationship and support from their supervisor, pay-rate, and having access to the tools needed to efficiently do a quality job,” says Kay Cowling, a leader in health care workforce strategy, and CEO of Cowling Advisory Services. “Retention in 2021 and beyond is going to require attention to leadership development, improved processes, and technology to make the job easier.”

Speech recognition addresses both process improvement and technology. Clinicians experience a smoother work day, less time needed to chart and fewer errors that otherwise threaten to send them back to the chart after hours. The result is more quality time with a patient and more free time for the clinician. This increases the clinician’s ability to tell a patient’s story, often complex with comorbidities, and share it with the broader care team.

Just look at the numbers that reveal the deep benefits of speech recognition:

— Clinicians can typically speak a note three times faster than they can type it
— Spoken notes have shown to increase note detail by 40%
— Overall documentation time can be reduced by over 50%

Here, then, are three key reasons to utilize speech recognition to improve clinical staff satisfaction and reduce turnover.

Speech recognition is the technology clinicians want

Consumer speech recognition offerings are already simplifying our daily life – on our phones and in our homes. Clinicians want that same capability on the job. Yet current consumer speech recognition tools don’t meet the need for medical accuracy, HIPAA compliance and security. Tools such as nVoq Incorporated’s industry-leading nVoq.Mobile Voice solution are designed specifically for the unique needs of hospice and home health, providing a secure, highly accurate and medically informed alternative.

Speech recognition boosts productivity – and job satisfaction

As noted, speech recognition enables clinicians to focus on care, increase efficiency, deliver more in-depth notes and go home relieved that their duties are done. Productivity rises, satisfaction does too – and the work-life balance is vastly improved.

“The clinician who gets home at night and has to chart on the computer when they’d rather spend time with their family, brings unwanted stress home, and to the job,” Cowling says.

Cowling has seen it firsthand, as a former CEO of a home health agency, a board director for Care Synergy, Colorado’s largest end of life provider. Her daughter-in-law works as a hospice nurse, so she knows the stress and dissatisfaction clinicians can have around the documentation requirements.

Speech recognition increases job satisfaction and reduces turnover – and that’s good for everyone

Clinicians enter the profession to nurture and provide care, not to spend excess time on administrative documentation. Speech recognition helps them deliver that care by providing a complete picture of the patient’s status. This improved patient story, through speech, enhances the handoff between clinicians, therefore creating a better patient experience when the next provider sees the patient.

“Retention of staff is a result of employee engagement and satisfaction on the job,” Cowling says. “Agencies that provide access to technology such as speech recognition tools have a competitive advantage in this tight labor market. The number one avenue to recruit talent is through employee referrals. If a clinician is happy on the job, they will tell others who will want to join that organization.”

Speech recognition technology, such as nVoq.Mobile Voice, empowers clinicians to document high quality patient care notes with speed, accuracy and security. nVoq.Mobile Voice enables organizations to rapidly address key employee communication challenges, creating a positive ROI for the organization within weeks of implementation.

nVoq.Mobile Voice not only helps in clinical direct care and documentation — it improves the overall business process. That capability supports a positive company culture, essential to attract quality workers in a short supply environment.

This article is sponsored by nVoq. To learn more about how nVoq can help your agency attract and retain top talent, visit sayit.nvoq.com.

The post 3 Reasons to Implement Speech Recognition appeared first on Home Health Care News.

Insurance giant Humana Inc. (NYSE: HUM) and tech-enabled health services company Seniorlink are expanding their relationship.

Louisville, Kentucky-based Humana is one of the largest health companies in the U.S., both in terms of Medicare Advantage (MA) membership and in terms of associated provider organizations. Kindred at Home and Humana At Home, for example, are just two of the in-home care entities Humana operates. 

Meanwhile, Seniorlink — headquartered in Boston — is a technology company that builds care-collaboration solutions. As part of its mission, Seniorlink partners with risk-bearing provider and payer organization to augment existing care-management capabilities through tools leveraging human touch and technology.

Humana’s expanded relationship with Seniorlink will focus on providing further support to the insurer’s MA members diagnosed with dementia being served through Humana At Home. Through the Humana-Seniorlink arrangement, MA members and their caregivers will have access to a management program where they can receive dementia coaching and guidance.

Humana At Home cares for Humana Medicare Advantage members who have multiple chronic conditions, struggle with daily activities and who experience frequent hospitalizations.

“We’re excited to expand our collaboration with Seniorlink to offer coaching and support to those helping to care for our members living with dementia,” Cheri Greenfield La Tour, Humana SVP of home care operations, said in a statement. “We hope this additional level of support helps to alleviate the burden placed on these caregivers.”

Enrollment in Humana-Seniorlink program will begin in late November and initially total 500 caregivers.

Globally, a new case of dementia is diagnosed every 3 seconds, according to Alzheimer’s Disease International. The total estimated cost of worldwide dementia care is projected to exceed $2 trillion by 2030.

Mavencare announces new partnership

Mavencare — a home care technology company that supports older adults looking to age in place — is partnering with Minuteman Senior Services. A 45-year old nonprofit organization based in the Greater Boston Area, Minuteman Senior Services is a multi-service agency that provides a variety of care programs for seniors, adults with disabilities and caregivers.

Toronto-based Mavencare is a tech-driven, clinically focused personal home care company. In addition to Toronto, Mavencare currently operates in the New York and Boston markets, plus a handful of other Massachusetts locations.

Through the new partnership, residents in Minuteman’s footprint will now have access to Mavencare’s services.

“This partnership gives us the opportunity to expand our service area and work with a progressive organization that is passionate about providing high-quality care to older and disabled adults who wish to remain in their homes,” Dr. Adam Blackman, CEO and co-founder of Mavencare, said in a statement.

Mavencare’s payer sources include a mix of private-pay, managed care and other streams. Increasing consumer awareness and access to in-home care has been a priority for the company throughout 2019 — and a topic it recently explored in an October survey. 

Amedisys turns to nVoq

Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based Amedisys (Nasdaq: AMED) is turning to nVoq — a provider of HIPAA-compliant speech recognition software — to help its caregivers quickly and accurately capture patient narratives at the point of care.

Boulder, Colorado-based nVoq provides SaaS-based speech recognition solutions to the entire health care sector, though it places a particular emphasis on the post-acute care segment. The technology company’s platform supports both mobile and office-based clinicians.

“Amedisys is committed to providing our caregivers with the right tools to offer the best possible care for our patients,” Amedisys COO Chris Gerard said in a statement. “We are excited to be a market leader in innovation by equipping our home health and hospice clinicians with nVoq’s medically relevant speech-to-text capability — improving the patient experience, clinician satisfaction and our business efficiencies.”

Improved efficiency across all areas of home health care will be key in 2020 after the Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM) takes effect.

The use of nVoq will likely play a role in Amedisys’s mitigation strategy.

As of Nov. 30, at least 60 Amedisys care centers have been in “PDGM test mode,” CEO and President Paul Kusserow explained during his company’s recent third-quarter earnings call.

The post Humana At Home Targets Dementia Care; Mavencare Partners with Minuteman Senior Services appeared first on Home Health Care News.