Posted by Will Hicklen on Tue, Aug 24, 2010 @ 02:09 PM
I saw a thought provoking piece about elder mediation and home care, posted on LinkedIn this morning by Rob McClenehan of Right At Home. If you are a member of LinkedIn, you can read his post here, and perhaps also join the Home Health & Hospice Group.
The topic of elder mediation is probably most relevant to our Home Health Care and Private Duty customers, but our Infusion, Respiratory Therapy and Rehab customers might also find it useful. If you are one of these companies, take a look and consider what role elder mediation might play in the future of your clients.
Rob referenced an article called Elder Mediation by Angel Carl, which you can read here on Right At Home’s blog. Right At Home credits an article by Georgia Daniels of Mediate.com. Ms. Daniels is a family mediator and author in Pasadena, CA. From Right At Home’s blog, the article begins:
Eldercare mediation is a growing field that will increase in prominence as the number of elders increases. As parents age, conflicts can erupt between parents and their children over living situations, driving, or the need for more help with daily activities. In addition, conflicts may spring up between siblings about their parents’ aging, such as when it is time for more in-home care, assisted living, or which sibling is responsible for what aspects of a parent’s care. Mediation can also address more complex issues such as estate planning and inheritance or health care choices, and may be used to develop alternatives to conservatorship. Mediation offers an opportunity to explore options and develop the best plan possible for the elder and family. More…
The Role of Home Health and Private Duty Providers
After you have a good plan that the parties support--and a good mediator will help guide you through the planning--the follow through makes it successful. In addition to providing quality care, home care providers can help with this by providing clear and consistent communications on a regular basis. When families feel engaged and informed, tension is mitigated and caregivers can focus their efforts on their client. It's a better result for everyone. Family communications are simple & inexpensive to manage using existing technology. Ankota's FamilyConnect is an example of one simple way to do this. http://www.ankota.com/ankota-family-connect/
As a provider, you might also consider establishing relationships with elder mediators in your area. If the need arises with one of your clients, you will be in a better position to refer to someone confidently. Who knows, some mediators could even develop into referral sources for your business.
The topic of elder mediation continues to gain attention. Click on these images to learn more:
Posted by Ken Accardi on Mon, Aug 02, 2010 @ 08:59 AM
Will Hicklen's blog article "Telehealth, Home Monitoring and Home Care Business" from July 7th attracted a lot of attention as he shared compelling results from a 4.5 year unbiased Veteran's 
Administration study showing tremendous savings from Home Telehealth. Home care technology analyst and pioneer Tim Rowan has been ahead of the curve and evangelizing about this topic as his main message since launching HomeCareTechReport a year ago, and now even the mainstream media is catching on - both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have featured pieces on home telehealth in the past weeks, interestingly however one focused on remote monitoring by healthcare professionals, while the other focused on remote monitoring by family members. Let's explore...
The Wall Street Journal Article, entitled "The Do-It-Yourself House 
Call", by Avery Johnson on July 27th looks at the case for telehealth monitoring of Congestive Heart Failure (CHF) patients. CHF has been the issue of choice in many initial studies of the value of home telehealth and rightly so, because the value can be measured in significant savings and significantly improved patient quality of life. This particular article focuses on "phase II" where the remote devices include a wireless scale and a wireless blood pressure cuff, making the patient experience easier and more comfortable. Click on the image below to read the full article.
The New York Times story, entitled "Technologies Help Adult Children Monitor Aging Parents" (July 28th by Hillary Stout) talks 
about families keeping better track of their loved ones using remote monitoring technologies. This further validates that family members are looking for better ways to stay in touch with their aging loved ones. This same trend is what inspired Ankota to offer FamilyConnect, which enables agencies to communicate more effectively to the families of those for whom you provide care. Click on the image below to learn more about FamilyConnect.
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy 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 Thu, Jul 22, 2010 @ 09:28 AM
The Home Care Software Geek posts in this blog don't talk about Home Care Nursing Software, Private Duty Telephony, DME Delivery Software, Home Infusion Care Management or the other topics we focus on regularly at Ankota. Instead, these posts are intended to keep our readers up to date with technology trends that might be useful to your agencies, such as social media technologies, mobile devices, and what's happening from the big-boys like Microsoft, Google and Apple.
Let's start at the beginning and talk for a moment about what cloud computing is... The general idea is that you don't need all of your software to run on computers that you own or have in your office. Instead, the software can be hosted outside of your company and you can access it via the Internet. Another related term is SaaS which stands for "Software as a Service". Again, the concept is that you don't have to buy software and the computers, instead you can use them online, and generally pay a monthly fee. Having said this, there are different ways for your software provider to set up the system and these might impact data security and HIPAA compliance. I'll get more into that below, but first I want to share the article that inspired today's post, entitled "Healthcare Solutions Cloud Up". Click here or on the image below to read it.
The article author is Jeff Kaplan, who has dedicated himself to SaaS and Cloud Computing. Jeff is an analyst, blogger, consultant, and excellent speaker, and he also runs a site called SaaS Showplace where you can go to find a searchable catalog of SaaS solutions that might be useful for your business.
Some of the key points of Jeff's article, are as follows:
- There is an ongoing debate about whether On-Demand computing is OK for health care. Concerns are primarily related to patient information security and availability
- On the other hand, improved communication and shared information are key factors in improving the quality and cost of care
- There are now several big examples of healthcare applications on the web. Jeff talks about Microsoft Health Vault, Google Health, Dossia and the IBM/U. of Missouri Life Sceinces Research Project, plus others
- The bottom line is that there are still questions to overcome, but more and more services are becoming available and adoption is fast
For the especially geeky ones among you, there are multiple ways for your software vendor to host your application. One is via dedicated hardware, and the other is through virtual shared hardware (where software Vendor A's software runs on the same hardware as Vendors B, C, D and more) where the potential advantages are that you have more computers to help when there are spikes in traffic and less computers sitting around idol wasting electricity. Some people call the former SaaS and the latter Cloud Computing. At Ankota, we use the dedicated hardware approach because not all of the security risks of shared computing have been retired to our satisfaction yet.
Ankota provides software to improve the delivery of care outside the hospital. Today Ankota services home health, private duty care, DME Delivery, RT, Physical Therapy 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 Will Hicklen on Wed, Jan 27, 2010 @ 02:36 PM
Ankota announced its entry into the Private Duty Home Care market last week, timing the announcement with its exhibit at the 5
th Annual Private Duty Home Care Leadership Summit in Phoenix, AZ, January 24-26
th.
See related news release ANKOTA ANNOUNCES LAUNCH OF ANKOTA HDM FOR PRIVATE DUTY HOME CARE (January 18, 2010).
http://www.ankota.com/releases/bid/33990/ANKOTA-ANNOUNCES-LAUNCH-OF-ANKOTA-HDM-FOR-PRIVATE-DUTY-HOME-CARE
Q: Why is Ankota entering the Private Duty market?
A: (Will) Private Duty has always been part of our plan. Our vision is to change the way that healthcare is planned, coordinated, and delivered outside of the hospital setting, and Private Duty is an important piece of that equation.
It's also a big market, and growing rapidly. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 1.2 million people work in private duty care and more than 400,000 jobs are expected to be added by 2020, making it the fastest growing segment in home care. We see a huge opportunity to help Private Duty companies better plan and schedule their services and operate more profitably, especially in an era that demands greater accountability.
Q: Why is Private Duty growing so quickly?
A: (Will) There are several trends driving this, but one of the primary reasons is that Private Duty companies are uniquely positioned to provide what are called "non-medical" services to the elderly. The "Silver Tsunami" is coming, and the population that is aged 65+ is expected to triple over the next 20 years. People prefer to live at home as long as possible and avoid nursing facilities as long as they can. The demand for home health and support services will continue to increase, and Private Duty will play a major role.
Q: Why does Private Duty need another software company?
A: (Will) They DON'T need another software company! They need to be more productive with the resources they have and they need to grow their businesses profitably. Technology can enable a lot of that, but most software companies miss this opportunity. We're stepping in to solve it with technology that organizes health care into a "delivery model," to make it more efficient and reliable. We call it "Healthcare Delivery Management," or HDM for short.
Posted by Ken Accardi on Wed, Dec 09, 2009 @ 06:58 AM
One of the tricky things we struggle with when developing software for home care is to determine who we're creating it for. Let's face it, our market today is an older crowd in their 70s, 80s and older. They're not the most high tech bunch out there. So in general, even though we blog and tweet, many of the companies we deal with are just starting to use email.
Having said that, we're confident that this is going to start to shift because our future demographic, the baby boomers, are a pretty high tech bunch. This article from the New York Times shares the results of a study performed by Microsoft and the AARP entitled What do Baby Boomers Want from Technology?
This study, rather than a standard survey, was conducted in a series of dinner meetings around the country. Among the findings and conclusions, one was that technology adoption is no longer going to "drop off a cliff" at age 60, and that boomers are going to be "the driving force in the adoption of information technology in healthcare."
You can read or download the full report (a 28 page pdf) here.
We at Ankota are already working to enable the home care industry to perform well for this new demographic in both small ways and large. We blog and tweet because the future of our industry is tech-savvy... But more importantly, we recognize that the family members of patients today are very interested in being connected to their loved-ones' care, so we offer agencies a way of connecting to those family members via the web. This is a service that will allow you to provide better care, get more customers, and even make more profit. For more information, please contact Ankota.
Posted by Marc Ottinger on Thu, Sep 10, 2009 @ 05:20 PM
Ankota is about to launch the Ankota solution for the Home Medical Equipment (HME) and Durable Medical Equipment (DME) market. The specific problem Ankota solves is streamlining the delivery of HME and DME.
A case study of potential savings is posted here.