With the population aging and the ability to treat more diseases, the world is waking up to the fact that health care delivery will need to change.  A lot of what we hear in the news is motivated by politics and most recently health care reform, which in the case of home care focused its attention on mischarging and punished the home care industry rather than focusing on the population demographics and rewarding the industry...  But this isn't a post about sour grapes and we certainly can't tolerate the bad apples who tried (and in some cases still try) to rip off the payers.

Instead, we turn today to scientists who generally (and refreshingly) are focused on fact-based analysis and generally are not concerned with politics.  The Science Blog weighs in on the case for home care.

In most cases when our blog posts are based on another article, our goal is to give you enough information to inspire you to go read the external article.  This one, however, probably doesn't bring a whole lot of new information to those of you who work in the home care industry.  It is a nice article however because it's not political and because it describes home care to an audience who isn't knowledgeable about it.  So if interested, by all means go and read it here.

A few compelling points from the article are as follows:

• This is a global phenomenon (the findings are based on a global study involving China, France, Germany, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States)
• The article uses the RAND study on home care as its major source of information.  The report, “Health and Well-Being in the Home: A Global Analysis of Needs, Expectations, and Priorities for Home Health Care Technology,” is available at www.rand.org.
• The key conclusion is that home care can be a key solution to the chanllenge (see full quote below)

“The aging of the world’s population and fact that more diseases are treatable will create serious financial and manpower challenges for the world’s health care systems,” said Dr. Soeren Mattke, the study’s lead author and a senior natural scientist at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. “Moving more health care into the home setting where patients or family members can manage care could be one important solution to these challenges.”

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