Home-Based Care Providers Increasingly View Updated Technology, Interoperability as Imperatives

The National Association for Home Care & Hospice (NAHC) this week laid out the gaps that exist in the long-term and post-acute care (LTPAC) sectors, and what Congress needs to do to help fill those gaps.

In a response to a request for information from the U.S. House Republican “Healthy Futures” Task Force Subcommittee on Modernization, NAHC and others laid out policy ideas that would help the home-based care industry get up to speed on health information technology (HIT).

“Despite widespread recognition that an interoperable health data environment that seamlessly connects all providers is a vital component of a modern and person-centered health system, major gaps exist in the LTPAC community’s ability to invest in, support and scale the kind of infrastructure that would make this kind of system a reality,” NAHC said in a statement.

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Home-based care agencies’ HIT and electronic health record (EHR) systems lag behind the rest of the health care industry.

That’s mostly due to the fact that they did not receive funding from the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) in 2009, which gave billions of dollars to acute care providers to update their systems.

That has resulted in a “unbalanced playing field,” according to NAHC.

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Since then, and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, operators have had to fend for themselves. Especially over the last two years, agencies have invested heavily in technology, including in partners that make HIT and EHR processes simpler.

“The need for interoperability across the care continuum has only accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has highlighted how important timely data sharing is for clinical decision support, patient care, patient safety monitoring and public health reporting,” NAHC said.

But in the grand scheme of things, COVID-19 is just one of many reasons why home-based care providers have been forced to update technology.

According to a recently released report from Homecare Homebase and Home Health Care News, other factors – such as staffing and the introduction of the Patient-Driven Groupings Model (PDGM) in home health care – have been key drivers in technology adoption.

Source: 2022 Home Health Care News Outlook Survey and Report

Agencies also reported that interoperability will have an impact on their ability to grow in the future – 43% of those surveyed said it would have a “high impact,” while 29% said it would have a moderate impact.

The group that said it would have a “high impact” increased by 14% year over year.

Source: 2022 Home Health Care News Outlook Survey and Report

Given the aforementioned structural barriers, NAHC is asking Congress for legislatively appropriated funding to ensure “nationwide HIT interoperability and data exchange and sharing across the care continuum.”

Specifically, Congress should direct the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to establish an incentive system to help LTPAC providers make the transition to more up-to-date technology, NAHC argued.

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