Home Care Heroes Blog

2 Steps for Selling Your Home Care Agency's Care Transition Services to Hospitals

 

We blog a lot about Care Transition Services as a differentiation for home care agencies and we spell it out for you in detail in our free white paper Why Care Transitions is the Next Big Thing for the Home Care Industry.  But for those of you who are new to the conversation, allow me to recap it for you:

  •   Failures in care transition (such as moving a patient from hospital to home) are prevalent.   Read More
  •   For Medicare patients, failed care transitions are costing $26B and CMS in fining hospitals for excessive readmissions. Read More
  •   There are evidence based protocols for reducing or avoiding readmissions. Read More
  •   These programs are working. Read More

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Nobody Doubts that Care Transitions are Good, But How Do We Sell it to Hospitals?

This has been the toughest question - How do I sell this service to hospitals?  Here's a two step plan:

Step 1: Create a Service for Safely Transporting a Patient Home From the Hospital and ensuring that the home is ready for their arrival

Put together an offering and a brochure that hospital discharge planners can share with patients and families who need safe transition home.  Don't "sell it" to the hospital, but instead let them know that it is available.  The service can be as simple as providing a ride, picking up a few groceries, making sure that there's no spoiled food in the refrigerator and getting the lights and heat working.  Here's a post about an agency who has successfully done this in Florida.  So, your first step is not "selling" anything to the hospital.  Instead, you're providing a solution to a problem that some of their patients and their families are likely to be experiencing.

Step 2: Once the first program is successful, market your care transition program for avoiding readmissions:

CareTransitionsPenaltyAnkotaHomeCareblogOnce your "step 1" offering has established credibility with the discharge planner, they'll be open to talk to you about a broader program.  Put together a program where your agency provides the aide services for avoiding readmission. This should include ensuring that the patient's meds are filled and they know how to take them, ensuring that a PCP visit is scheduled, working with the patient to document a personal health record, and reviewing the "red flags" associated with their condition.  Close to 70% of the hospitals in America received penalties, so they are likely motivated to work with you.

Bonus: These programs are very likely to result in Referrals to Your Agency

It is very likely that a Medicare patient requiring a care transition service also requires home health aide service on an ongoing basis.  Why not be the agency that gets that referral?

Ankota focuses on home care agencies who are looking to future proof their businesses with capabilities like those listed above and agencies looking to position themselves to manage care transitions.  Let us know if we can help. 

As a start, you can download our white paper, Why Care Transitions Is The Next Big Thing for the Home Care Industry.  Just click the link to download.

If you're interested in learning more about our home care management software solutions, or about our Care Transitions component as a way to increase revenue, just click the button below: 

Tell us how we can help you!

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Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital, focusing on efficiency and care coordination. Ankota's primary focus is on Care Transitions for Readmission avoidance and on management of Private Duty non-medical home care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact us.

 

 

 

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