Impacting the Current Model of Home Health Care
Home health care agency leaders continue to worry about disruption. With PDGM, some agencies may have underestimated the time needed to prepare for the new payment model. However, PDGM isn’t the only dynamic threatening to disrupt home health. According to home health industry leaders, innovative payment models and big data will likely have the greatest impact on the delivery of home health care. And, disrupting the industry should be perceived as a positive as it will bring better care – and more cost-contained care – to patients, referrals sources, payers, and the agencies themselves.
Using Patient Engagement Data to Improve Care
Analyzing and internalizing big data will help home health agencies monitor individual patient behaviors and manage health outcomes. On an individual patient level, home health agencies can use data to identify patients who are unable properly manage their condition and who may be at risk for an emergency situation. By identifying patients at risk for a transfer, clinicians have the opportunity to quickly intervene and prevent a potentially unnecessary transfer to the ED or a rehospitalization.
- With Synzi’s dashboard, the home health agency administrator can assess each patient’s level of engagement in the communication program. Messaging can be adjusted if the administrator sees that the patient is not interacting (e.g., not opening and/or nor taking the appropriate action) with each message. If the patient is not compliant, the administrator can request that a home health nurse intervenes to check on the patient and determine if a different level or type of care is quickly needed.
- Synzi’s platform also enables agencies to conduct patient assessments in order to gain insight into the patient’s progress and the patient’s current situation. Clinical and administrative assessments are pushed to patients in order to monitor progress, reinforce the clinical pathway, and identify compliant vs. non-compliant patients. Agencies value the ability to create and customize the assessments to reflect their clinical pathways and easily assign assessments to patients directly from the patient’s profile. A range of questions types (e.g., single choice, multiple choice, yes/no, rating, and text entry) also enables agencies to use the most appropriate survey design to obtain critical patient data.
Informing the Future of Home Health Care
A NEJM article highlights that big data is informing the movement toward value-based healthcare, advancing innovative care, and reducing costs. Caregivers and administrators can use data to make better medical and financial decisions while enhancing the quality of patient care. The article cites two current trends which reflect that the healthcare ecosytem is embracing big data:
- Moving from a pay-for-service model to a value-based care model, which rewards providers based on the health of their patient populations
- Using big data analysis to deliver information that is evidence-based in order to increase efficiencies and strengthen clinical pathways
Big data is critical to helping home health agency leaders better track and manage individual patient health – and overall population health – by analyzing patient patterns and related outcomes.