Market Research Letter: January/February 2009
Providing insights for home care and hospice
January/February 2009
In This Issue
Feature Article: Hospice Inpatient Beds: A Potential Growth Opportunity for Your Hospice
Metrics Matter: What Percentage of Your Home Care Patient Episodes Are Subject to LUPA?
Ask the Home Care Data Guru: Medicare managed care plans
Are hospice inpatient beds at a hospital or dedicated facility a potential growth opportunity in your service area? In this month’s feature, we show you how to project the need for hospice inpatient beds, plus provide a free download for a worksheet and sample report to help you easily do the calculation.
Be sure to give me a call at 215-657-7373 or contact me at info@healthmr.com to find new business growth opportunities to help ensure success for your company in 2009.
Rich Chesney
President, Healthcare Market Resources, Inc.
P.S. Check out the new addition to our newsletter – Ask the Home Care Data Guru – where you can read the answers to other subscribers’ challenging healthcare data questions, as well as submit your own questions.
Feature Article: “Hospice Inpatient Beds: A Potential Growth Opportunity for Your Hospice”
Hospice inpatient beds at hospitals or in a dedicated facility in your service area may provide significant opportunity for growth for your hospice. In this article, we discuss how to project the need for hospice inpatient beds using internal hospital data, as well as provide a free download to help you quickly and easily perform the calculation.
Read more.
Metrics Matter: "What Percentage of Your Home Care Patient Episodes Are Subject to LUPA?"
This month’s metric takes a look at the percentage of home care patient episodes that meet the criteria for the Low Utilization Payment Adjustment (LUPA) at the state level. The reimbursements for these episodes are only about 10% of those for Medicare patients who qualify for the episodic Home Health Resource Group (HHRG) rate. Yet home health providers still must incur all the typical per-patient costs. The net effect? These patient episodes are financially unattractive to home health agencies.
Read more.
Ask the Home Care Data Guru
Looking for some hard-to-find data? We’ve started a new section that shares questions from our subscribers – and our answers. Send us your question today!
Q: My sales representatives and discharge planners tell me that more patients are moving to Medicare managed care plans. How can I verify this for my market?
A: Healthcare Market Resources offers a report that tracks Medicare managed care enrollment by county for every state over a 4-year period. See a sample of this report.