The landscape for the home care market has always been shaped by the available reimbursement for care. This won't change, but the care models of the future will evolve and will move to a model that requires the combination of skilled care services, with non-medical home care services and monitoring.

Why will Home Health and Home Care need to combine?

The value of the combination of home health and home care is significant. Here's why:

• The health of populations is only 20% related to health care matters. The other 80% is related to shelter, food, companionship and activities of daily living (ADLs). Non-medical caregivers can focus on the 80%.
• With the growth of the elderly population, there simply won't be enough care providers (on both the medical and non-medical side). Organizations that can provide both can identify synergies and reduce overall cost
• In a combined organization, there is an opportunity to train non-medical caregivers to perform healthcare oriented tasks under the direction of skilled staff. This creates career paths and allows skilled resources to cover broader populations
• Non-medical caregivers can observe patients/clients and escalate early warning signs of issues that can lead to hospitalizations. Read more here.

Bonus predictions:

Despite all of the great benefits described above, it still won't be enough to deal with the growing elderly population that is more than doubling in the next 20 years. Two additional measures will need to put in place to close the gap, as follows:

• Affordable Patient Monitoring: We will need to check in with patients between visits, but telehealth is too expensive. The affordable way to do this is via automated phone calls and text messaging. Whereas telehealth generally costs over $100 per patient per month, new approaches (including Ankota's Foresight Care [tm]) can be deployed for under $10/month.
• More Care will need to be delivered via phone: A home health nurse in an efficient home health organization sees up to 6 patients per day. By contrast, a nurse in a call center can outreach to 30 or more patients per day

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One of Ankota's recent whitepapers, entitled "Seven Habits of Highly Effective Private Duty Home Care Agencies" available for download and we think you'll find it useful.  Please click the link or the picture below to download.  If you're interested in scheduling an online demo of our home care or care transitions software solutions, just click this button: