Home Health & Hospice Week

Do you think therapy utilization dropped more than other disciplines under the Patient-Driven Groupings Model? Think again.

Data collected by Strategic Healthcare Programs shows that utilization actually fell more for non-therapy disciplines than therapy in January through October 2020. SHP compared Medicare claims data from 2018 to SHP clients’ claims data from 2020, says the company’s VP of product strategy, Chris Attaya.

The average number of non-therapy visits fell from 5.33 visits per episode in 2018 to 4.50 visits per episode in the first three quarters of 2020 — a 13.8 percent decrease. In contrast, the average number of therapy visits decreased from 4.53 visits to 4.04 visits during that time period — a smaller 10.9 percent increase.

“It was interesting to note that rehab visits were down less as a percentage than the other disciplines,” Attaya observes.

Overall, the average number of visits by all disciplines fell 12.5 percent, from 9.86 visits per episode to 8.63 visits, according to Santa Barbara, California-based SHP.

The 2020 data doesn’t come from all Medicare providers. But SHP has “well over 50 percent of the claims and periods in their national database, so it should be reasonably representative,” Attaya offers. That comprises about 4.5 million claims for the 2020 nine-month period, he says.