A New Health Care Reality Hits Home
Home care leader Patricia Kelleher outlines the challenges her industry is facing, and urges agencies to advocate for themselves using the power of social media.
As the health care industry prepares to serve millions more patients as a result of health care reform, the importance of keeping those patients out of the expensive acute care setting longer has never been more evident. Home care is one area which expected to grow in response to these demands, but according to Patricia Kelleher, MS, and executive director of Home Care Alliance of Massachusetts, there are still many challenges that home care agencies and providers will face in the years ahead.
"We're experiencing a time of tremendous growth, but we're also seeing many contrasting visions about how our health system will work in the future," she says.
"We are facing Medicare cuts in revenue per episode, yet there is a real need for a new and broader role for home care in a realigned delivery system. Publicized instances of fraud are creating issues with maintaining patient trust, but at the same time, there is a growing need for more in-home long-term care. The challenge for us is to deal with these difficulties of the present, while still preparing for a future where our responsibilities will be vastly expanded."
According to Kelleher, one of the key strategic initiatives in health care will be reducing the number of preventable hospital readmissions. "As Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) begin to take shape, it will be critical for acute care hospitals to collaborate with clinics and rehab centers to keep readmissions down, contain costs, and provide seamless care transitions throughout a patient's life," she says.
Kelleher notes that in addition to working with other care providers, home care agencies must also educate themselves on what government support exists to help them succeed. "For example, the CMS Innovation Center now offers Care Transitions grants, to financially assist agencies that are community-based or have high readmission rates," she says. "These are the types of opportunities we always need to be looking out for."
Home care providers should also be taking advantage of the Internet, Kelleher says, in order to spread the word about their offerings and to advocate their own interests. "Social media is here to stay. We all must integrate these easy-to-use, powerful tools like Twitter and Facebook into our professional lives," she says. "We need to let the world know who we are, and why we're so important to the future of health care. Once people believe in us and how much we care, only then will they begin to care about what we believe."
