WellSky CEO Bill Miller shares insights on home-based care for Health Evolution Summit
As part of this year’s virtual Health Evolution Summit, WellSky CEO Bill Miller joined other top thought leaders to discuss the growing value of in-home care in today’s rapidly changing healthcare landscape. Along with Bill, this insightful conversation also featured perspectives from:
- Kirk Allen, SVP, Home Care, Humana;
- Sarah Iselin, EVP, Government Programs and Diversified Business, GuideWell; and
- Mary Langowski, Interim CEO, Solera Health as host.
The full session is now available to watch on-demand here: Home-Based Care — New Models and New Evidence.
Here are three of Bill’s perspectives from this conversation about the future of in-home care:
1. The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the growing shift toward and consumer preference for home-based care.
Social distancing and staying home remain two of the top strategies for mitigating the spread of COVID-19. Technology, including telehealth and other digital communications tools, can help older adults age safely in their homes, even amid a pandemic.
“At WellSky, we believe that COVID-19 will accelerate the move toward post-acute care settings and more care delivered in the home,” said Bill Miller, CEO of WellSky. “COVID-19 has taught us that the home has to be a national asset and that the home can be a place for patient care when we have pandemics and other global challenges. Other huge drivers of this larger move to home-based care are care costs and patient outcomes.”
2. Research shows that clinical and personal care providers collaborating to address social determinants of health can unlock lower-cost, higher-value care — especially for patients with chronic conditions.
“The leading technology company supporting personal care providers in the U.S. is ClearCare, which is a WellSky company. We know a lot about the impact personal care agencies can have on patient outcomes,” Bill said. “We did some long-term studies and found that including a personal care agency in some settings can ensure that your costs are about three times lower. We learned that on average, the price of one hospital stay can pay for personal care for a year. And the ancillary benefits of that personal care are far-reaching. It can be way more cost-effective to keep a patient at home with support from personal care.”
“WellSky has systems that can embed protocols into the workflows that both the personal care agency and the home health agency use, and they share information back and forth,” Bill said. “That way, if there’s a change in patient condition, and a clinician is needed, they can collaborate to coordinate that care. And vice versa. That’s our thinking at WellSky. We’re looking for ways to wire the coordination elements into our technology, so that providers can better collaborate at scale.”
3. Providers and payers alike need powerful data analytics platforms to confidently take on risk and measurably improve care outcomes.
The right technology can deliver the increased visibility healthcare stakeholders need to truly understand performance and intelligently manage risk-based agreements.
“I’m seeing that the progressive home health and personal care agencies are ready to take risk,” Bill said. “And they’re already taking risks, with the right level of confidence because they have advanced data analytics and systems.”
“At WellSky, we view ourselves as advocates for providers,” Bill said. “We’re focused on building in the data and protocols that our clients need to deliver even better care and drive better outcomes. We give them the data to back that up. We know that the post-acute care market has historically been fragmented. Now we’re focused on eliminating providers’ barriers to care coordination and delivering them the data they need to take on risk.”
–> To watch the full recorded video, visit Health Evolution’s website here: Home-Based Care — New Models and New Evidence.