Home Healthcare Provider Reduces Hospital Utilization, Saving Projected $5.4M
A major provider of home health services, delivered significant breadth and quality of care. However, home health workers often lacked needed resources, resulting in patients going to the ED. Learn how this provider resolved this, with projected $5.4M annual savings.
Providing or receiving home healthcare is familiar to most Americans. It’s now a common lived experience, or it will eventually be for most of us. According to the National Association for Home Care and Hospice, some 12 million Americans each year receive some form of in-home health or hospice care. Industry estimates vary, but the value of the U.S. home healthcare market was estimated at $153 billion in 2023 and is set to increase an average of 7.5% annually to $253 billion by 2030. While demand for home healthcare has been rising steadily for years due to industry shifts in providing care outside of hospitals, the recent pandemic and the increasingly aging U.S. population have accelerated demand.
The entire in-home care industry relies on a robust and well-performing system of healthcare providers and care managers to provide coordinated care to keep patients at home and out of the hospital. A major provider of home healthcare services, with 200,000+ annual admissions, delivered significant breadth and quality of care. However, home health workers often lacked needed resources to adequately provide timely care in the home, resulting in the need to send patients to the emergency department.
Rather than tackling this issue on its own, the provider sought assistance from healthcare consulting firm Freed Associates (Freed) to leverage Freed’s extensive experience with home care to develop a new pathway to provide real-time support to home health clinicians to keep patients safely at home.
Building a Virtual Clinical Escalation Hub
Freed began by helping the provider craft the model for a virtual hub, a “one-stop shop” for supporting home healthcare provider’s need to communicate with a skilled clinician. For example, if a home health specialist, during a patient home visit, identified a likely wound infection requiring a new antibiotic prescription, they’d have an urgent need to connect to a prescribing provider. Under the provider’s current operational system, such an identified need might take days to fulfill and could result in the patient being sent to the emergency department or readmitted to the hospital. Instead, with the virtual hub, home health workers would be able to consult in near real-time with a hub of physicians and nurses. The hub would be charged with fielding and responding to these urgent requests within 60 minutes – the typical duration of a home health visit.
For Freed, creating a virtual hub entailed analyzing typical clinical workflows in home health. The team identified requests and patient needs that could be addressed virtually or by phone. They then defined the associated clinical information required to relay for the clinician to appropriately respond. Freed and the provider coordinated on developing more than two dozen different protocols for the hub based on a variety of home healthcare scenarios and operationalized these protocols for the staff.
With processes and procedures in place, Freed and the provider worked through a staffing model to ensure appropriate nurse and physician availability to staff the hub and ensure requests were fulfilled within the 60-minute goal.
Finally, Freed ensured ample training was provided to the home health workers on how and when to utilize the hub.
Virtual Hub Thrills Patients, Providers and the Client
The virtual hub rolled out as an initial pilot in one geographic area and proved a major success. The goal of handling inbound requests within 60 minutes was far exceeded, with an average 32-minute turnaround time. This meant that home health providers could receive answers to requests during their patient visits, be able to communicate responses to patients in real time, and execute the plan of care. The ability of providers to better serve their patients improved home health staff satisfaction by 17%.
The provider identified over $300,000 in savings within the first few months of using the virtual hub due to avoided emergency department visits and readmissions. A projected $5.4 million in savings is expected for the following year based on a planned expansion of the virtual hub from one to five geographical locations covering upwards of 20 home care agencies.
