How Re-Admissions and Reform Efforts Affect Home Health Nursing

Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Medicare has placed significant focus on the reduction of the costly hospital readmissions. Though 30-day hospital readmissions rates have hovered around 25% for decades, post-acute Providers, including SNF and Home Health, have considered readmission of their patients to be sound, quality patient management. Upon re-examination, readmissions reveal another side of today’s in-efficient care continuum. The excessive costs of readmitting a patient to the hospital, combined with questions regarding how the system reinforces readmissions, reveal how readmits effect the entire healthcare system.

How do readmission efforts affect how Home Health is delivered today, and how will those efforts continue to affect how we deliver services to the home? All homecare clinicians will be affected, but nursing personnel will find unique challenges minimizing readmissions while patients return home sicker and sooner due healthcare reform. Learn how Home Health nursing may change in order to address readmission efforts from this progressive presentation.

For Fiscal Year (FY) 2015, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has estimated that total readmissions penalties will be approximately $428M, up from $227M in FY 2014.

Value – Based Purchasing (VBP). Know where you stand.

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In the 2016 final rule, CMS provides a detailed explanation of the HH-VBP pilot program that begins January 1, 2016 with mandatory participation from all Medicare-certified HHAs in nine selected states – Massachusetts, Maryland, North Carolina, Florida, Washington, Arizona, Iowa, Nebraska and Tennessee as a pilot but VBP will be enforced in all states beginning January 1, 2017.

The agency that knows where they stand and how to evaluate the competition and make the changes necessary to be a competitor.

• Have other agencies raised the bar?
• Where do I rank now?
• How am I measured?

Value – Based Purchasing (VBP) comes to Homecare – How can you Prepare?

CMS reforms mandated by the Affordable Care Act will challenge many of the care production and delivery practices Home Health Providers currently employ. On January 1st of this year, Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) programs began, and these quality-based reforms will require agencies to re-wire how they treat patients, and also control how they propel their care program to achieve the desired outcomes. Success under VBP models will require care managed programs that change as patient performance and acuity change on an in-episode basis, and this will tax the standard homecare protocols.

ICD-10 - Friend or Foe?

Do your diagnosis coders seem to be speaking Greek? ICD-10 implementation makes diagnosis coding more important than ever to each agency's bottom line. Get it right, you win. Get it wrong, well, you don't. View ICD-10 from 10,000 feet in this Basic ICD-10 Coding webinar for home health and hospice administrators. You can't afford not to. And besides, it's free!