Data is often the driving force behind home care providers demonstrating their value and improving clinical outcomes and land transactions. However, providers may encounter data availability gaps. This is when critical patient or operational information cannot be collected, accessed or analyzed.
Identifying and solving these gaps in data availability, which some home care companies call the data desert, can lead to cost savings, increased patient satisfaction, and improved outcomes.
In the case of New Day Healthcare, the data that requires resolution is a lack of information available after the patient is discharged from hospital.
“The concept is that we are critical and lacking indicators when we're not looking at patients,” New Day CEO and Founder G. Scott Herman told Home Health Care News. “When we see patients in our services, we have a lot of tools and we understand their condition and needs. When we drain them, we lose all the transparency of our conditions and habits. For example, we become chronically ill.
Based in Texas, Fairview has approximately 33 locations in Texas, Missouri, Kansas, Illinois and Missouri. The company offers a variety of home care services, including home healthcare, personal care services, and hospice, serving approximately 150,000 patients a year.
New Day collects thousands of clinical and demographic data points, primarily through commercial EMR and state reporting systems. The company aggregates its data through its proprietary platform, Carelytics. The platform combines data from EMRs, patient records and payer systems across the country.
“We primarily focus on activities of daily life that affect the long-term health of chronically ill elderly people. They have proven to be our most major indicators of the worsening of chronic disease,” Herman said.
Data that identify enthusiastic health at home includes patient-specific information that is not accessible through traditional or existing data collection methods.
“Usually, it can only be accessed by observation or routine intervention, whether unstructured or in the minds of patients and their families,” Jennifer Lentz, of Avid Health, at home, told HHCN. “This data is a real-time assessment of signs and symptoms of decline, risk factors for family environments that can adversely affect patient health outcomes, personal and cultural preferences, or a person's ability and performance (activities of daily life/activities of daily life).”
Based in Chicago, Avid Health At Home is a multi-state home care provider that offers personal care, companion care, personal mandatory nursing, respite care, and Alzheimer's and dementia care services. The company is backed by private equity fund Havencrest Capital.
Data Desert Solution
Avid Health At Home leverages partnerships with third-party vendors such as Alayacare, Paylocity and Activated Insights to collect data. Throughout these partnerships, the company is looking at everything from patient diagnosis to employee data.
“We were able to live and breathe the data, and in real time, metabolize and analyze patient care plans to make sure they were appropriate,” Lenz said. “Respond to when an adverse event occurs. How do you adjust subsequent care? What are the outcomes of these adjustments? We believe carer retention is important. When we analyze the data, operational efficiency is definitely invoked.”
Devoted Health at Home has built a proprietary software solution to deal with the data desert. According to Lentz, the company is also addressing data gaps by training staff to prioritize data collection.
“How do you help field caregivers build their mindset through training,” she said. “While building a data mining solution to collect it and being able to change the way you think about the workforce through training content, these will likely be the two biggest.”
Finally, Carelytics has become an important factor in dealing with data deserts on New Day.
“Because of the way Carelytics is built, you can enter data and look for all the features,” Herman says. “We literally discover the desert of data every day. Then we need to define and classify the clinical value of having that data. The bigger thing isn't just having it, but what are we going to do with it? We're a data collection unit that starts to create pattern analysis and start looking for trends.”
Herman explained that data desert approaches will allow new days to intervene early and provide care. It also helped the company reduce medication and equipment costs, helping to reduce hospitalizations. This is a huge economic advantage for the company.
Tackling the desert for enthusiastic health at home increased patient and employee satisfaction scores.
Another bright spot is that this places avid health in good positions for value-based opportunities at home.
“We started talking with a variety of players to prepare (value-based purchases) (VBP),” says Lentz. “We actually built the whole internal structure. We behave as if we were under VBP in design. We're moving forward to alternative payment models and have a successful conversation about these types of contracts, especially so that we can accommodate duals.”
Herman believes that collecting data is ultimately a commitment to patients.
“We've been working on collecting data. Our commitment is to understand perseverance over time in a longitudinal way, not in incremental increments of those,” he said.
