While accountable care has been receiving a lot of press lately, let’s look at the objectives of accountable care, as defined by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (Federal Register, November 2, 2011).  Within the context of the aforementioned final rule, the overarching objectives of accountable care were defined as:

1. Better care for individuals
2. Better health for populations
3. Lower growth in health care expenditures

With so much focus on the hospital and physician providers, how can home care, a lower cost provider, substantively contribute to accountable care objectives?  Read more...

by Keith R. Crownover

No ethical member of the home care community would condone defrauding the Medicare program. The Senate inquiry was not at all a surprise after the April 26, 2010 Wall Street Journal article, which first brought the potential gaming issue to light. The three companies mentioned represent less than 17% of Medicare providers of home care services. The vast majority of home care providers, numbering more than 10,000, provide services that are desperately needed by our senior citizens to recover from surgery, falls and complications from chronic conditions.   Read more...

by Keith R. Crownover

We recently worked with a marketing firm to establish a brand narrative for Delta Health Technologies.  A brand narrative is intended to tell a company’s unique story, the story of their culture, the story of what makes the company different.  The narrative is built by interviewing the company’s staff and customers to understand what is unique about the company, its products and services.   The marketing company, Varsity Branding, then presented three different versions of the narrative to Delta’s leadership to see which of the three resonated as being the most true to the company’s core values and unique value proposition.   Read more...

by Keith R. Crownover

OK. Let’s see. There’s Facebook, of course.  And…LinkedIn, Twitter, HomecareCommunity.org, blogging, MySpace, YouTube, and and countless others.  It seems as though every agency and company on the planet is either attempting to engage their customers via social networking or feeling left out for not having yet done so.  Does it matter?  Is anyone really listening or actually using these tools for something other than FarmVille?  Read more...

by Keith R. Crownover

That name has a poetic ring to it doesn’t it?  That’s not the name of a fictional character in a corny Western but was the given name of my mother who was born Elma LaRue Roub on November 9, 1930.  She wasn’t fictional but she was larger than life to me, my five siblings, her two adult step-children, 15 grandchildren, and 8 great-grandchildren….I could go on and on.   Read more...

After announcing that we were launching our new software solution, ClinicalVirtuoso, we had an amazing response from not only the industry at large, but from the very people for whom it was designed – homecare therapists.

We took the clear, definitive, evidence-based and clinically-driven guidelines established at the Delta National Excellence in Therapy Forum (also available in the Delta National Excellence in Therapy Report) and incorporated these into the early design of ClinicalVirtuoso.  Read more...

by Keith R. Crownover

I know that everyone who is anyone in cyberspace blogs these days. And, to be honest, I actually did write one blog entry way back when (I doubt that you can be called a blogger if you only “blog” once). While I have long wanted to start blogging, fear held me back. I view blogging as one of those things that is easy to start (as my earlier, single entry demonstrates) and very difficult to maintain.  Read more...

by Bonnie A. Yingling

MedPAC (Medicare Payment Advisory Commission) published their Report to the Congress: Medicare Payment Policy on March 15, 2011. Of course there are multiple recommendations included in the report applicable to home health, most of which were of no surprise. You might want to take the time to look over the recommendations.

One thing that caught my eye was that “Medicare margins for free-standing providers in 2009 were 17.7 percent.” This, along with other findings, has led to the recommendation of the elimination of the market basket update for 2012.  Read more...

by Bonnie A. Yingling

A colleague and I had the honor of attending Fazzi Associates’ National OASIS Leadership Forum in San Antonio from February 28 to March 2. Thank you to Fazzi Associates for this amazing event!

Not only was the weather fabulous, but the conversations throughout the forum were quite enlightening and at times thought-provoking.

During one session, the topic of the “comprehensive assessment for homecare” was being discussed. Through the course of the conversation, it came to light that perhaps we as a homecare community need to change and stop referring to the OASIS as though it were something separate.  Read more...

While the debate is still swirling around Healthcare Reform, we’re going to take a look at one of the “hot button” topics of discussion, Accountable Care Organizations, or ACOs. In this series, we’ll do our best to explain what they are, their purpose, and their implications going forward.

ACOs are a new model for delivering healthcare services. They offer providers financial incentives to provide good quality care to Medicare beneficiaries while keeping costs down.

So what exactly is an ACO?  Read more...