Home Health & Hospice Week

If your home health agency has a high number of episodes compared to your peers, do you know what to do? You may want to take a page from the playbook of Aspire Home Care and Hospice, an Oklahoma City-based company comprised of three home health agencies and three hospices.

Aspire used its PEPPER report to benchmark itself and found its length of stay high, as indicated by the episodes average number. “Initially, we identified the patients who had the greatest length of stay and reviewed those records. We asked ourselves, ‘What was their diagnosis? Was medical necessity there?’ And we progressed in this manner down the continuum of length of stay (LOS),” Aspire’s VP of compliance, Kristin Glover, says in a release from PEPPER contractor TMF Health Quality Institute.

“Now we look at all patients on a continuous basis. It’s part of our process,” Glover says.

Aspire implemented an action plan to address the long LOS issue. “We started out with education on Medicare requirements and regulations.

We recognized that we had staff turnover, and we needed to continuously educate our staff,” Glover says in the release.

Aspire then began having daily “conversations” about patients and holding weekly case conferences, utilizing a case conference template form.

That template form “uses terms that Medicare uses, such as the acute illness/injury that occurred, continued need for skilled nursing or therapy services,” Glover relates.

Finally, Aspire worked to improve its communication both within and without the agency.

More details about the agency’s Quality Improvement process are in Aspire’s case study at www.pepperresources.org/PEPPER/Success-Stories.