Have you ever called customer support, only to receive more questions than answers? Many times, customer service representatives don’t completely understand the inner workings of the caller’s company or daily life, leading to lengthy questions and over-explaining the issue. What if there was a program the representative could go through to gain a deeper understanding of the caller’s daily routine and struggles?
As residents and their guests become more tech savvy, high speed Internet is becoming a necessity in any senior living community. Senior living providers across the country are moving to install guest/resident wireless solutions and dedicated Internet bandwidth to meet the high demands of social and streaming media. For residents with family out of town, a strong Internet connection is vital for staying in touch via social streaming apps such as Skype and FaceTime.
Health care reform initiatives make measuring, monitoring and reporting outcomes an important factor in new and continued business collaboration for Senior Living and Post-Acute Care providers. As your company grows, making rapid, informed business decisions can be challenging due to the lack of consolidated information, and monitoring Key Performance Indicators (KPI) like census, labor, and cash collection can be time consuming.
In healthcare, transparency refers to the availability of information about the quality and cost of healthcare, allowing consumers to choose a healthcare provider based on value. Increasingly, consumers are taking an active role in directing their own healthcare. Increased transparency is a theme of healthcare reform, and changes are on the horizon for senior living providers.
Universal Applications for all Health Care Providers
Accountable care will dramatically impact the way information is managed in post acute. In order to be relevant at the negotiating table with hospitals, providers must be able to capture data about episodes, leverage it to drive higher quality that results in lower readmissions, and communicate it to a portfolio of risk-bearing partners – who will make (or break) margins on a bundled payment.
With the passing of the HITECH Act in 2009, market forces are moving the industry toward paperless medical records at a record pace. Data will be key in the outcomes-driven world of ACOs to come, and clinical EMRs will be strategic reporting assets.
As you take your business from paper to digital, the volume of data you’re managing is increasing rapidly. And the next digital wave will include scanned signatures, digitized documents, images, and video. Get ready for costs and complexity with data storage to rise exponentially. Unless, of course, you have a strategy. There are four main drivers:
Due to the impact of health care reform and its rewards system based on data-driven outcomes, post-acute healthcare is undergoing a rapid transformation from paper-based to electronic clinical processes. In the world of bundled payments, positive outcomes are a provider’s competitive advantage…and lifeline to revenues. Those that leverage these outcomes will be rewarded with higher census, higher reimbursements, better reputation, and lower risk in a complex regulatory environment. In the new world of Accountable Care Organizations, the providers who demonstrate the lowest readmits back to the hospital, highest quality outcomes, and lowest costs will have a competitive advantage. As a result, a provider’s clinical outcomes reports based on the transaction-level data from its EMR will be a key strategic sales weapon because ACOs will “shop around” for providers with the best outcomes. From 2000 to 2009, CMS ran demos and pilots to test the validity of value-based healthcare; healthcare reform passed making it law; in 2012 we’ll see much of the foundation laid, and in 2014, ACO-driven, value-based healthcare will be the new operating reality.
