5. Tailoring modalities to focus on particular clinical values of specific patient populations can predict problems before they happen, saving countless dollars and hours in unnecessary visits.
Modality algorithms for congestive heart failure (CHF), one of the leading causes of ED visits and re-hospitalizations, triggered alerts for gradations of shortness of breath, swelling, chest pain, weight gain, and medication adherence. A Beth Israel Medical Center case study saw a 60% reduction in the readmission rate of patients with CHF, from 29% to 10%.
6. Limit risk to penalties imposed by the Centers for Medicaid & Medicaid Services (CMS).
Thanks to the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program which was passed as part of the Patient Protection and the Affordable Care Act, hospitals need to care for patients beyond the four walls of the facility and for at least 30 days after they are discharged. If the patient ends back in the hospital, then CMS will penalize the hospital, which in turn can impact its reputation for providing appropriate services.
7. An icon-based approach, inherently multi-lingual system using symbols to help patients, home health aides and caregivers overcome language and computer skill barriers to input information is the most practical solution for obtaining data from low income elderly and chronically ill households.
8. Analyzing thousands of data points can provide valuable benchmarks for patient treatment.
HIPAA-compliantt data can quickly go into the cloud where an extensive database can be configured for the specific needs of a care management team. Home health care agencies can quickly review the aggregated information with analytics that determine performance on basic questions:
– How long does it take to respond to an alert with an intervention?
– What are the outcomes for the organization?
– How well are the home aides reporting information?
– Why are certain care managers having better results when it comes to hospitalizations, and how can we share best practices?
– How can we perform better than other agencies?
9. Manage disease states for better population management and results.
Using the aggregated information, insurers and health aide workers alike can achieve better outcomes by analyzing the data to answer questions like:
– What are the normative conditions of patient populations?
– How do they respond to different modalities?
– What is typical and what is aspirational when it comes to prescriptive and diagnostic tools?
10. While one size does not fit all in healthcare, a single system needs to be disease agnostic and customizable by populations, conditions and individuals if it is to be practically useful.
Multiple logins for assessing and treating different conditions are not practical for care managers, and systems must be intuitive to learn and use and fit into their work flow if they are to be implemented.
Generating savings in many ways, remote monitoring creates the best possible virtuous cycle for payors, planners, providers, patients and family members. Remote monitoring empowers managed care administrators to control costs while operating within capitated rates structures, by giving care managers the ability to quickly receive vital information, set and evaluate alerts and assess trends, while also giving voice to home health aides who are on the front lines of care management.
Robert Herzog is the founder and CEO of eCaring, a web-based home health care management and monitoring system that brings the benefits of digital record keeping and communications to the millions of Americans receiving home health care.
