Market Research Letter: July/August 2009
Providing insights for home care and hospice
July/August 2009
In This Issue
HealthMR Report Update: Capitalizing on New Data Elements – Nursing Home and Assisted Living Patients in Hospice
Feature Article: How to Use Benchmarking to Boost Performance
Metrics Matter: Grow Your Business Strategically Using the Home Health Utilization Metric
Ask the Home Care Data Guru: Are my clinical staff’s visit levels appropriate?
What are the most relevant benchmarks that you can use to help make a positive change in your business performance? That’s what we discuss in this month’s feature, using non-cancer hospice death rates as an example.
It’s our goal at Healthcare Market Resources to provide your organization with the information needed to identify and create growth opportunities. Give me a call today at 215-657-7373, or contact me at info@healthmr.com, to talk about ways we can help your company succeed.
Rich Chesney
President, Healthcare Market Resources, Inc.
HealthMR Report Update:
Capitalizing on New Data Elements – Nursing Home and Assisted Living Patients in Hospice
With the advent of the 2007 data, hospices have been required to put information on their claims regarding the site-of-care for each day billed. The options are: home, assisted living, nursing home, hospital, hospice residence and unknown. In response, Healthcare Market Resources has modified its Level of Care Report to include market share by days for each of these settings by provider. You can now see if your for-profit competitors dominate the SNF business.
Coming Soon:
In addition, another report scheduled for release later this year will characterize all SNF patients in terms of demographics, length of stay, disease mix and level of care. Healthcare Market Resources believes that this group of patients has operational and financial outcomes that are clearly distinct from the rest of the hospice census.
Feature Article: “How to Use Benchmarking to Boost Performance”
In our March feature, we discussed what makes a good benchmark and the elements that influence a benchmark’s relevancy to your business. This month, we show that a benchmark must be relatable to the factors your organization can affect. After all, the point of benchmarking is to give information that helps you make positive changes in your business.
Read more.
Metrics Matter: “Grow Your Business Strategically Using the Home Health Utilization Metric”
When it comes to growing your home health business, should you focus your marketing efforts on “stealing” market share from competitors or finding new sources of patients? The Home Health Utilization metric can serve as an important guide in helping you make this key marketing decision.
Read more.
Ask the Home Care Data Guru
Looking for some hard-to-find data? In Ask the Home Care Data Guru, we share questions from our subscribers – and our answers. Send us your question today!
Q: Are my clinical staff’s visit levels appropriate?
A: A therapy manager at a client came to Healthcare Market Resources wanting to know if the visit levels of her therapists were in line with market norms. We investigated the data and found that her therapists were making two visits more on average than her competitors. We then looked at the disease mix of her agency’s patients to see if that could explain the difference. Her patient mix was not materially different than the market averages. She suspected that her therapists had been staying “too long” and not discharging their patients soon enough. (She said that she wasn’t surprised, since visits at the end of therapy were less demanding than those early on.) Her ultimate goal was to add capacity to the agency, since they were turning down therapy cases. She met with her clinical staff and presented the numbers. Since the benchmark was a local one, the therapists accepted the data and worked on a plan to discharge patients as soon as they are ready.