Posted by Will Hicklen on Wed, Jul 07, 2010 @ 03:06 PM
In a related piece, the Veterans Administration Proves Home Telehealth Works for Everyone—Payors, Providers, and Patients. From Tim Rowan’s Home Care Technology Report (11/17/09): Titled "Care Coordination/Home Telehealth: The Systematic Implementation of Health Informatics, Home Telehealth, and Disease Management to Support the Care of Veteran Patients with Chronic Conditions," a report detailing results of a four and a half year study should be required reading for every home care agency owner, every clinician and especially every state and federal lobbyist. It declares without bias and without vendor influence that use of home telehealth systems had the following measurable effects for 17,025 patients over nearly five years:
- Reduced bed days of care by 25%
- Reduced number of hospital admissions by 19%
- Added $1,600 per annum cost to per patient average of $13,121 for home-based care
- Avoided $77,745 annual nursing home costs with this $14,721 investment
The paper’s onerous title notwithstanding, the lessons from the VA’s success are clear. A proactive program of home-based care and monitoring that allows the patient to spend more time at home results in
Fewer hospitalizations
Less time per visit in the hospital
Lower overall healthcare delivery costs
Ankota is not a telehealth company (we develop Healthcare Delivery Management or HDM technology that helps home care businesses better coordinate and utilize staff while cutting operating costs). However, telehealth and home monitoring technologies have been proven to be valuable tools in managing care at home. This VA report is the most comprehensive ever published on the topic, and provides compelling data that will certainly help advance adoption.
Without question, these technologies will be an important part of the home care ecosystem, which includes providers in Home Health Care, Private Duty Home Care, Respiratory Therapy, Home Infusion, DME and other companies that provide staff, equipment and supplies to support patients in the home.
From a simple economic perspective, these technologies offer the opportunity to scale various home care services with less overhead and infrastructure costs such as staff and travel time. In an industry that desperately needs to increase staff utilization and efficiencies, and fuel growth, this is a welcome development.
A few things to consider: As Home Health, Private Duty, and Respiratory Therapy companies—Ankota’s customers—add telehealth and home monitoring services, they should expect that this will also require some new management discipline and add complexity to their businesses. Consider that providers will have to coordinate delivery, implementation, service, and recovery or disposal of equipment in addition to providing or provisioning monitoring services. This brings a component of physical distribution that must be managed, much like a DME company faces today. Staff, delivery and fuel expenses can be optimized through HDM technology like Ankota’s. Consider also that, as these devices proliferate, so will the need to "monitor the monitors." New skills will be needed and new processes managed. Expect command and control interfaces to emerge that allow providers to aggregate disparate monitoring technologies, manage responses, and assign staff for follow up based on established best practices.
Telehealth and home monitoring technologies have been proven effective and present new business opportunities for providers. The benefits to patients and healthcare delivery models will be considerable, but will also require a disciplined approach to process management. Look for tools to help do this job more efficiently.
Related Links
Click here for Tim Rowan’s Home Care Technology Report
BeClose (Vienna, VA) Remote home monitoring, elegant simplicity for family members to monitor home activity. There is a good report on this on the Aging In Place Technology Watch website
Honeywell Hommed One of the better established telehealth companies
GE-Intel related article: http://futureofaging.aahsa.org/2009/04/intel-ge-team-to-develop-telehealth-technology/
Cariocom download a white paper titled "Ten Steps to Building a Successful Telehealth Program"
Posted by Marc Ottinger on Thu, Jun 24, 2010 @ 10:20 AM
I attended the National Private Duty Association (NPDA) Annual Conference in Philadelphiain the spring. One of the break-out sessions I attended was Veterans & Start Ups – Access Your Agency’s Potential, presented by Regina and Kelly McNamera of Always There Home Care in Southington CT.
What impressed me the most was how the McNamera’s leveraged technology to focus their core competencies and as a result what is most important, their clients. Some examples of what the McNameras do includes –
- Outsourcing everything in the office except the intake of clients, e.g., payroll and even book keeping.
- Using a virtual receptionist that covers the phone 24/7 with a live person. I contacted the company they use, MAP Communications. Map Communications does such a great job training employees; I challenge anyone to say the receptionist on the phone is not an employee of Always There Home Care.
- Giving Blackberrys to all their care givers, who appreciate the trust that is extended to them. As a result there is a huge return on increased efficiency.
- Texting instead of phone calls has been an enormous time saver. It is amazing how something so simple applied effectively can have such an impact.
But my favorite statement Kelly made in the presentation was, “Telephony helps keep me sane.” I continue to be amazed at how private duty agencies can turn a blind eye to technology when it is technology that will allow them to do what they want to do most … care for the clients.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Mon, Apr 26, 2010 @ 07:15 AM
Having attended several recent home care trade-shows for Private Duty (NPDA and NAHC Private Duty), and for Home Health Care (e.g., NAHC in LA), I've tried to participate in the education sessions as much as possible so that I can learn what our industry is learning. Not surprisingly, a large number of the sessions are dedicated to marketing and sales, and teaching you ways to close more business for your agencies. So when my CEO passed along an article about Generating Referrals for Free to my sales team, I immediately wanted to share it with our readers. The article came from American Express Open Small Business site and is entitled "11 Free Ways to Generate Referrals". Here's a link.
First and foremost, the author, Julie Rains, encourages us to remember that the best kind of referrer wants to solve a problem for a friend. So our goal is not to get them to promote our business, but rather to make it clear that we can solve an important problem.
Here are a few pieces of advice from the article:
- Thank all customers who attempt to make referrals (not only the successful ones)
- Offer a unique product or service
- Truly understand and convey your market positioning
- Interact with customers consistently well
- Be easy to find and contact
Be sure to check out the full article for detail. If you are thinking about attending an industry tradeshow, here are links to some highlights from recent shows we've attended:
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery and Home Infusion organizations, and is interested in helping to efficiently manage other forms of care. To learn more, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Sat, Mar 13, 2010 @ 05:20 PM
Ankota had the chance to attend the 8th Annual NPDA Leadership Summit from March 10th-12th in Philadelphia. We wish to thank everyone who participated in the event, and especially thank our customers and interested prospects who stopped by our booth to see our Private Duty Software, our new Family Connect feature and our beta product for nursing assessments on a tablet PC.
Please enjoy video highlights from NPDA 2010:
NPDA 2010 Highlights from Ankota, Inc. on Vimeo.
Ankota is the pioneering company in the field of Healthcare Delivery Management and provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital, including a comprehensive solution for managing Private Duty Care (for a brochure, click here). To learn more about Ankota, please visit www.ankota.com or contact Ankota.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Mon, Mar 08, 2010 @ 06:56 AM
Back in October, we introduced twitter on this blog. If you don't know what twitter is, you can see the original post here. Those short five months ago there wasn't a lot of conversation occuring about Home Care on Twitter, but since then things have started to pick up and many agencies, individuals and vendors are using twitter to share news and best practices 140 characters at a time. On a broader scale, Twitter last week surpassed 10 billion tweets - that's a lot of messages!
Today I did some searching on twitter for titles and profiles of users with Home Care or Private Duty in their Title or Bio, and the number is over 1,000, so slowly but surely twitter is catching on.
But finding and following individuals interested in home care or private duty care can still be tricky if you look for them one-by-one. To make this easier, twitter recently introduced Twitter Lists, which are essentially groups of people with a common bond. By visiting a twitter list, you can see what a whole group of related people are talking about. There's a great explanation of twitter lists in this article (courtesy of Mashable.com - the social media guide)
Based on my searches for twitter users who talk about matters related to home care and private duty care. I created some twitter lists that you can explore with a single click. For the home care one, go to http://twitter.com/AnkotaCTO/home-care and for the Private Duty one, go to http://twitter.com/AnkotaCTO/private-duty-care. Note that you don't have to be a twitter user to check these out, but if you are a twitter user you can click "follow" and then the list will be available on your profile page so you can check into the conversation at any time. To make it even easier, you can push one of the buttons below.
Note that the Home Care list has 75 members so far and Private Duty has 33 (but we'll try to build this one up this week at NPDA in Philadelphia).
If you'd like to be added to (or removed from) either of these lists, we'd be happy to take care of that for you. You can comment on this post or contact Ankota. Be sure to tell us your twitter name (like mine is @AnkotaCTO).