Reducing hospitalizations with smarter care planning
We’re back with the next step in our free, 8-week educational series Countdown to Value-Based Purchasing: 8 steps to prepare in 2022. This video series is designed to support home health agencies as they prepare for HHVBP. This week we’re focusing on reducing avoidable hospitalization with smarter care planning.
Reducing hospitalization leads to cost savings
Reducing avoidable hospitalization and emergent care for home health patients holds a lot of weight under HHVBP and across the payer market given the related cost savings. CMS has proven these cost savings – the HHVBP demonstration led to $604.8 million in cost savings from 2016-2019, driven principally by reductions in acute care hospitalizations.
Total Performance Score impact
Think about the big impact of hospitalization on your Total Performance Score (TPS). Claims-based data is going to impact the TPS by 35% for the large agency cohort, the bulk of it being the acute care hospitalization (ACH) score. For the small agency cohort, claims-based data impacts 50% of the TPS. Hospitalization and emergent care rates are extremely important to every key stakeholder involved – the patient, the agency, and the payer – and the pressure is high to continuously improve your hospitalization rate and emergent care rate so that your TPS impact can always be lifted. It is crucial to understand where your agency stands compared to the average, as you are now competing on value.
Tools for smarter care planning
Reducing ACH and emergent care is within reach when supported effectively with the right integration of people, process, and advancing technology. Being able to focus on the patients with the highest risk will help you improve your clinical results across the board. Using data to impact decisions related to when to visit, what to focus on, and how to best see and manage rising risk will help you move the needle on performance. One of the top strategies is the effective use of predictive analytics – both in the office and in the field, to help guide clinical decision making with the aid of machine learning – helping your team see and address rising risk for hospitalization or hospice suitability.
Next steps
To learn more about reducing hospitalizations with smarter care planning, visit wellsky.com/HHVBP and watch this week’s episode.