Filed Under: Patient Engagement, Nurse Triage Medical Answering Service Tagged With: home health, Home-Health, hospice, nurses, patient engagement, supporting nurses, Triage Nurse

Currently, the healthcare landscape is experiencing unparalleled changes, driven by technological progress, evolving patient needs, a global staffing crisis, and regulatory changes that have reshaped the way we approach healthcare.

Many home health and hospice providers anticipate future healthcare reform, but the difficult stress of today’s workplace still falls firmly on the shoulders of front-line clinicians, nurses, and care providers. In order to reap the benefits of realistic healthcare reform, home health and hospice providers must learn to become active participants in advocacy or continue to face downfall (OJIN).

What is Healthcare Advocacy?

Advocacy is taking action to support a cause you believe in. As caregivers, we believe that the power of quality care and the ability to provide the best care possible to our patients’ advocacy is the best way to advance our cause. Especially since the home health and hospice communities are so uniquely centered around patients and family needs. This is why it’s crucial that providers lead the conversation. We have the insight—and the workforce numbers—to reimagine and reshape the system in a way that redesigns our working environment without harming care quality.

Why Become a Home Health & Hospice Advocate?

Home health and hospice providers have an obligation to support and care for patients during vulnerable times. For providers to continue delivering quality care, we need policies and regulations that:

ensure healthcare offices, hospitals, and hospices are empowered to deliver care.
agencies have the capacity to enforce licensure and certification requirements.
patients and families understand the benefits of home health and hospice care (HAN).

Although it can be daunting to think about, public policy impacts you, your organization, and the patients you serve. As caregivers, we need to educate and encourage our legislators to champion policies that will make home health and hospice more accessible. By becoming an advocate, you are taking an active role to speak up for the experiences you have seen first-hand.

Lawmakers look to you, their constituents, for information and advice on what’s wrong and how it can be fixed. We need advocates who have intimate knowledge of our healthcare system to help educate lawmakers and improve access to home health, hospice, palliative care and so much more!

How to be An Effective Advocate for Home Health & Hospice

In a single session of congress, over 10,000 bills will be introduced, but only a handful will be related to home health, hospice, or palliative care. As advocates, we keep our lawmaker’s attention on bills and reinforce whether they should support or oppose those issues. For that reason, much of advocacy is about building relationships, especially with legislators to influence policies. Here some practical ways you can advocate:

Be aware of current policies. It’s important to know why and how current legislation influences certain areas of home health and hospice care. Find a subject you feel strongly about or investigate further into questions you face currently in your workplace. As a resource, most advocacy networks will have policy priority documents or advocacy training videos that break down complicated bill jargon and legislative processes.

Become a member of a professional advocacy group. Healthcare issues are complex and systematic—so join a growing community that is organized and certified to understand the legal process. Most even have an existing relationship with leaders and policy makers. They also alert you when action is needed and how to make the most of legislative meetings. Remember, becoming an effective advocate takes time and experience. One of the best ways to learn is by volunteering to serve on a committee, or even becoming a point person for an issue (Vituity).

Advocacy Organization Resources:

Contact legislators about policies and explain why they matter to you. Powerful stories make a difference. Use your voice to share about the patients and families that rely on care from providers just like you. This can come in the form of a phone call, brief email, anecdote. When an elected official is making a case for your issue, you want them to remember you and your story as a reliable resource for information. According to HAN, they recommend at least four connections with a member of congress a year. This demonstrates trust, shows honorable activism, and portrays you as a reliable resource for information.

Take action now. If there is an issue you feel strongly about, gather support, and make your voice heard. You can do this at work with your fellow providers or in your local community. Keep in mind, advocacy can be a long process–but don’t lose momentum. Now you can advocate on behalf of caregivers and home health and hospice patients at the touch of your fingertips with the NAHC Legislative Action Center.

Healthcare leaders should encourage staff to:

Grow their knowledge about the home health care and hospice industries & policies.
Illuminate the legislative process and how you as an advocate can participate.
Clarify what grassroots advocacy is and the avenues available.
Enable you to feel empowered to share your story and personal experiences.
Illustrate what it’s like to talk with/visit an elected official (NAHC).

As we rally together for home health and hospice, advocating for essential changes to our system, highlighting sector challenges and continuously stressing the importance of collaboration–we will be a voice for policy reform and increased support. Your role in advocacy is essential. Your role in advocacy is unique. Your role in advocacy is impactful.

At CareXM, We Stand for Change.

CareXM is the kind of experienced, clinical partner you can count on to deliver the help you need to elevate your patient and caregiver experiences. Our mission is to help our partners effortlessly anticipate and respond to patient needs with triage technology backed by our on-demand triage team. Whether you need after-hours triage, our cost-saving hybrid triage solutions, or in-house triage call-center infrastructure, we help you flex and extend your care, so you reach patients in the moments they need help the most. From home health and hospice to health systems and more, CareXM will transform your patient approach to lower operating costs.

Filed Under: Patient Engagement, Nurse Triage Medical Answering Service Tagged With: answering service, home health, Home-Health, hospice, medical answering service, nurses, patient engagement, supporting nurses, telehealth, Triage Nurse

The landscape of home health, hospice, and palliative care are constantly evolving, presenting providers with many difficulties such as staffing shortages and regulatory shifts. Although these are just a few barriers in this changing and challenging environment, there is still one approach that determines key to best practices.

Proactive, smart, triage enables providers to stay ahead of CMS regulations, achieve staffing success, and even thrive financially in this shifting environment. For many, embracing and mastering this strategy is crucial for healthcare sustainability in the face of several rising demands of 2024.

Rising Barriers for Health Organizations

One of the biggest challenges for 2024 home health, hospice, and palliative care providers was released with the final version of the Fiscal Year 2024 Hospice Wage Index and Payment Rate Update. Released by the CMS, the rules set a 3.1% increase to payments and raised the aggregate payment cap $33,494.01. It also includes updates with quality and compliance, health equity, higher levels of hospice care and spending on non-hospice services. Even though this final version increases hospice payments, most organizations worry it’s not enough to cover inflation and increased wages for caregivers–especially for those in rural areas.

Alongside this, another barrier to consider is the impact of regulatory oversight to quality of care. Regulations are necessary to supervise and standardize healthcare, and unfortunately, to weed out bad players. Although regulatory agencies aim to improve levels of care, their regulations often result in rule compliance rather than patient welfare (News–Medical).

If healthcare organizations are working tirelessly to meet continuously changing healthcare standards–how and when are they supposed to focus on patient care quality?

These regulatory bodies can feel like external authorities—not partners—that reduce the efficiency and heart of clinical work by frequently changing the work environment, adding extra administrative tasks, and causing unnecessary frustration and burnout (NIH).

Strategies to Win in 2024: The Five Best Practices

With so much to consider moving into the new year, smart triage acts as an innovative strategy, ready to help wherever there is a need. That’s why unveiling proactive triage programs in your organization is the key to alleviating staff burdens, enhancing patient satisfaction, and driving improved financial performance.

To help, we’ve highlighted five strategies that align with regulatory changes, patient needs and can help guide your team through the many challenges in 2024:

1. Implementing Proactive Triage

Proactive triage is a strategy that anticipates and addresses patient needs before they escalate into emergencies. It optimizes healthcare delivery and comes in many practical forms like weekend tuck-in calls, daily medication reminders and care provider surveys. In home-health and hospice, proactive triage is the gateway to preventative care, allowing timely interventions and personalized care to be at the center of your journey. This proactive approach ensures the appropriate level of care occurs before needs arise and to avoid after-hours calls and expensive ER visits.

2. Implementing Patient Engagement for Automation

Patient Engagement is the process of earnestly and actively involving patients within their healthcare journey. Through regular, automated education and check-ins, patients become more actively involved, developing a determined sense of ownership and empowerment. Healthcare providers who make an active effort in their patient relationships also benefit from this engagement. As patients grow their personal confidence, it leads to increased devotion to care plans, better self-management of chronic conditions and enhanced communication for all.

3. Data-Driven Efficiency

Leveraging data insights and patient call analytics can enhance operational efficiency and identify emerging payment opportunities for your organization. When you evaluate call data, you know what’s working, where to make improvements, and which protocols should be modified. Plus, knowing which communication channels are the most effective will help you optimize staffing and reduce costs:

Call Data tracks your incoming patient call volume, busy days, times, and call length, so you can identify opportunities for streamlining workflows.
Activity Data reveals the reason for a patient call and initiates space for your organization to respond with fast solutions.
Patient Data identifies patient needs and proactively assists patients in managing their own care and lifestyle choices, reducing readmissions and ED visits.

4. Software Integration

To reduce application errors and add ease to administrative tasks, software should be used alongside your nurse’s expertise. Smart triage technology should easily integrate with electronic health records (EHRs) or cloud systems. This allows triage nurses and telehealth clinicians to fully document all patient interactions and send that information directly to providers. It builds stronger continuums of care, offers triage services at a reduced rate, and decreases the chance of charting errors and liability to patient health information exposure.

5. Smart Routing for Clinicians

While helps prevent patient call escalations, triage-backed care coordination platforms with mobile apps help tackle patient call volume by leveraging automation to match staff availability with patient needs. These technologies reduce staff idle time and increase the overall quality of care. Empowering nurses in the field to update their status in a mobile app, whether actively treating a patient, driving, or off-shift, organizes your incoming triage calls by only sending them to clinicians that are available. This frees up valuable time that can be allocated towards patient-centered care–ensuring the right provider is available when and where they are needed the most. Smart routing transforms healthcare organizations into more effective, efficient, and responsive caregivers who evolve with patient and provider needs.

Need Experience Management for Triage? Call CareXM Today!

Filed Under: Patient Engagement, Nurse Triage Medical Answering Service Tagged With: answering service, home health, Home-Health, medical answering service, nurses, patient engagement, supporting nurses, telehealth, Triage Nurse

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a rising force in today’s tech-driven society. Many believe that AI generation systems and natural language processing tools have the potential to radically enhance the accessibility of information, even within healthcare. While it’s true that healthcare AI will help assist clinicians with burnout and improve care conditions–AI should never replace the human side of care. It should automate it.

Automation in healthcare consists of technology solutions that help boost communication, efficiency, and the overall productivity of providers. It allows clinicians more time to provide critical care, lowering care-costs, and ultimately creating a better experience for everyone involved. To bridge the gap between AI and automation, health organizations have turned to intelligent automation to include the crucial aspects of both.

What is Intelligent Automation?

The weight of administrative tasks, regulatory requirements, and staff burnout often strain healthcare budgets and the amount of time clinicians devote to patients. Automated intelligence helps to alleviate these barriers by navigating complex workflow and passing data securely from one system to another.

By combining smart-technology with trained clinical application, intelligent automation can streamline back-office functions like appointment scheduling and reduce highly repetitive or labor-intensive tasks. Providing care is exclusively human, and cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence, but tasks can. Automating everyday practices in healthcare, especially those involving patient health records, data entry, and routine communications, eliminates error, speeds up processing time and helps reduce nurse burnout.

Addressing Burnout

Being a healthcare provider is stressful, and despite most organizations facing staffing challenges, patients are relying on their providers more than ever before. When clinicians can’t provide high-quality care due to excessive stress and burnout, patients ultimately suffer the consequences. Clinician burnout has three main symptoms:

Exhaustion – a clinician’s physical and emotional energy levels are extremely low.
Depersonalization – emotional energy is depleted, also known as “compassion fatigue”.
Lack of Efficacy – doubting the meaning or purpose of your work (NIH).

It’s important to be aware and always address signals of burnout in your staff, however; you cannot reduce burnout without noticing it. A 2022 Physician Sentiment Survey revealed, “91% of respondents say the burden of regulatory requirements is getting worse, [with] 72% [of clinicians] not confident that their organization is set up to minimize the time they spend on administrative tasks so they can focus on patient care”. Luckily, intelligent automation can be used to treat all symptoms of burnout in an organization.

**Intelligent Automation for Engagement:**

Automation can be a powerful catalyst for engagement–not a replacement. Thanks to advances in technology, automated systems are creating opportunities for clinicians to streamline administrative tasks and devote more time to patients who are engaged in their own care. As intelligent automation streamlines simple tasks like medication refills and measuring vitals, clinicians have more time to commit to their patients. These repetitive activities are managed in real time by technology like connected remote patient monitoring (RPM) and automated interactive phone calls, surveys, and education that help patients take more charge of their conditions. This engagement helps providers magnify their care efforts and boost outcomes.

Automation also supports cost-effective staff deployment. Patient health and communications data, collected and reported automatically, helps providers reduce care bottlenecks and even anticipate and prevent care disruptions, like when a patient runs out of medication on a weekend. Analytics technology also accurately prioritizes and assigns tasks based on which patient needs it most and who is on-call, with a patient, or off-duty. As a result, your staff can take time to recharge without worrying about their patients after hours. And when a patient calls with an urgent need, automated portals quickly direct them to the best care provider for their situation. (HealthIT).

Maintaining Personalization:

The clinician workload is a heavy one. According to the NIH, “physicians spend more than twice as much time in the physician work room, than the time they spend with all their patients combined.” From calling patients to remind them about their appointments to making consistent and accurate patient rounds–it can be difficult to make sure tasks run smoothly without sacrificing the patient experience.

Intelligent automation creates a personalized care experience for your patients by uncovering patient insights and informing clinician decision making. One key example of this is RPM platforms alerting healthcare providers to intervene earlier if a patient is at a higher risk for certain conditions, saving costs and time down the line.

Automated interactions and alerts can assure patients their clinicians aren’t too busy, reducing the likelihood they might receive better care somewhere else. Improved patient satisfaction boosts quality scores, loyalty, and is critical to the long-term satisfaction of your organization. With this kind of patient engagement interwoven into your intelligent automation, it can produce high-quality and sustainable care for everyone (BusinessWire).

A Few Benefits of Intelligent Automation:

Improved ability to deliver quality patient care while managing costs.
Empowered healthcare workers with higher retention rates and job satisfaction.
Increased data accuracy compared to error prone manual processes
Higher levels of compliance in workflow, completed efficiently and without error.
Consistency and flexibility across interactions over time.

Ready to Integrate Automated Intelligence Today? Choose CareXM.

Even with constant technology and regulatory changes, healthcare will continue to face many challenges providing quality care. Burnout and human error are some of the biggest barriers hospice, home health, and other providers face. Embracing intelligent automation remains a key strategy for better efficiency today and in the future as the number of aging patients grows.

What is Healthcare Advocacy?

Why Become a Home Health & Hospice Advocate?