Market Research Letter: July/August 2011
Providing insights for home care and hospice
July/August 2011
In This Issue
Feature Article: How to Sell Your Agency’s Services to Medicare’s New Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) — Phase I
Metrics Matter: Will Hospices Benefit from a Multiyear Calculation of the Hospice Cap?
Ask the Home Care Data Guru: How do I determine if my specialty programs are working in the marketplace?
In this month’s feature, I give advice on what home health agencies can do to help position themselves as a preferred provider for Medicare’s new accountable care organizations (ACOs). Plus, you may be surprised by the results of our analysis in Metrics Matter that evaluates whether a multiyear method of calculating the hospice cap — recently proposed by Medicare — will actually benefit hospices.
Rich Chesney
President, Healthcare Market Resources, Inc.
Feature Article: “How to Sell Your Agency’s Services to Medicare’s New Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) — Phase I”
Becoming a preferred provider with Medicare’s new ACOs is likely to be a very lucrative relationship for home health agencies. Is your agency well positioned as a preferred provider in the eyes of the ACOs? In this issue’s feature, we help you answer that question, plus give you tips on how to successfully sell your agency’s services to ACOs. Read more.
Metrics Matter: “Will Hospices Benefit from a Multiyear Calculation of the Hospice Cap?”
The Medicare hospice benefit has a regulation that requires a hospice to repay excess Medicare reimbursements when its per admission expenditures in a given year exceed a predetermined hospice cap. Traditionally, Medicare has only counted patients admitted to hospice in the chosen time frame. Several hospices challenged Medicare in court about the fairness of this approach and won. In order to forestall further lawsuits, Medicare has proposed a multiyear method of calculating a hospice’s cap performance. Will hospices benefit from a multiyear calculation of the hospice cap? That’s what we analyze in this month’s metric. 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: How do I determine if my specialty programs are working in the marketplace?
A: Home health agencies often develop clinical specialty programs — which consume added staff and capital resources — with the objective that they’ll differentiate their organizations in the eyes of the referral sources and generate more business. If your agency’s clinical specialty programs are accomplishing that goal, your market share among patients with that clinical condition should be higher than market share in the rest of your agency. To determine if that’s the case, you need to calculate your agency’s market share for the particular clinical segment, as well as without the clinical segment. Read the entire answer.