Home-based care providers are changing the way they do business.
Three of the ways they’re doing so: diversifying payer mixes, adopting new technologies and engaging differently with clinicians around care plans.
“Historically we’ve allowed a lot of autonomy to the basic caregiver in the field,” Excelin Health CEO Alicia Marr said during Home Health Care News’ FUTURE conference in August. “As we’re moving progressively towards total outcome management for patients, we’re no longer letting the clinicians have rights to setting the frequencies for their patients, but instead engaging them in some conversation as a team about what the best plan is.”
The Irving, Texas-based Excelin Health is a private equity-backed home health and hospice provider with operations in Texas, California and Louisiana. The company serves over 3,000 patients.
For Excelin Health, rethinking care plans has been part of the way it has adapted to a new payment landscape.
A more customized approach to each patient, the company believes, will lead to better outcomes and financials.
“Based on the data that we have available in this patient’s diagnosis, in theory, what would be the best amount of visits that would yield the best outcome?” Marr said. “It’s not necessarily restricting our clinicians, but engaging them in some conversation to say, ‘Tell me why. What’s going on with the patient? What other services could we provide as a company to supplement the visits in the home and still yield a great outcome?’”
It’s an intentional shift from a traditional home health model to one that prioritizes value.
“What we’re seeing internally in our company – as we’re rolling this out – is improvement in outcomes,” Marr said. “We’re getting better prepared for value-based pay, reduction in rehospitalization and improvement in customer service. It’s really about taking those resources, putting them together, putting the patient at the center all the while still yielding a great outcome.”
That way, Excelin Health is set up to have deeper conversations with Medicare Advantage (MA) plans.
As more Medicare beneficiaries land underneath MA plans, that’s a consideration most providers will have to make.
“In my opinion, if you continue to only focus exclusively on the Medicare book of business, your business will naturally erode over time,” Marr said. “It’s really about building this platform that supports a traditional episodic or Medicare book of business, but then prepares us for scalability in the future for this MA model.”
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