Market Research Letter: March/April 2011
Providing insights for home care and hospice
March/April 2011
In This Issue
What’s New in 2011? 2009 Hospice and Home Health Data Availability
Feature Article: Medicare Wastes Taxpayer Money with Comparative Billing Report for Hospices
Metrics Matter: Home Health Grew by 8.4%. Do You Know Why?
Ask the Home Care Data Guru: Are my hospice physician billing levels appropriate?
In this month’s feature I discuss why the new Medicare Comparative Billing Reports aren’t as relevant for hospices as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services intended. Plus, we’ve added a variety of new reports and report formats for both hospice and home health 2009 data that are available for shipment now. Read “What’s New in 2011?” for more information.
Rich Chesney
President, Healthcare Market Resources, Inc.
What’s New in 2011?
All market profiles and market development reports for home health and hospice with 2009 data are now available for shipment within 2 to 3 days of order.
Healthcare Market Resources has introduced a variety of new reports and report formats to broaden the insights we can offer our clients. For hospice, we added to our local market profile a series of county and regional (multi-county) graphs, which visually display our data. This will enable some report users to quickly understand differences between their organization and their competitors. Healthcare Market Resources continues to offer the broadest array of options to work easily with our information, depending on how deeply you want to delve into it.
The new graphs/charts include:
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Click here to see samples of these graphs.
New Customized Hospice Forecast
Moreover, we’ve just made your planning process much easier with our customized Hospice Forecast. Choose any county or set of counties, and we’ll show you key statistics for the chosen geography for a 5-year period needed to:
- Determine hospice demand
- Calculate key metrics, including death rate, hospice utilization, and days per discharges
- Project 5 years for each statistic and metric.
The report comes in an Excel format so you can easily make your own estimates. Planning was never easier. Click here to see a sample.
New Hospital Readmission Report
Because of the Affordable Care Act, hospitals have become very interested in their Medicare readmission rates on key patient groups for the 30 days following discharge. Healthcare Market Resources has added a Hospital Readmission Report for every hospital in the country, which gives the readmission and mortality rates for these key DRGs, as well as compares their results at the regional and state levels, the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles nationally, and the best case scenario of our top performers’ categories. Click here to see a sample report.
- Order a 2009 hospice market profile report set and receive a customized Hospice Forecast at no charge.
- Order a Medicare Hospital Discharges by DRG Report for a given institution and get the corresponding Hospital Readmission Report FREE.
Feature Article: “Medicare Wastes Taxpayer Money with Comparative Billing Report for Hospices”
Medicare hired a contractor — SafeGuard Services — to process the 2009 claims data for a number of reimbursement categories. This has produced a series of reports that compares billing practices for providers, including the hospice sector. As a result, each hospice will receive an individual report by provider number, comparing its 2009 performance to all hospices nationally, as well as to hospices within its Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) region. Although CMS has found this comparative information to have relevance in other industry segments, hospice providers may benefit less than CMS intended. Read more.
Metrics Matter: “Home Health Grew by 8.4%. Do You Know Why?”
Medicare reimbursements for home health grew by 8.4% from 2007 to 2008. This rapid rise in payments — in a time when the base payment rate declined by 2.9% — has surely gotten the attention of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), and Congress. While 2008 was the first year of the “new” prospective payment system (PPS), this changeover accounted for only a small portion of the increase. In this month’s Metrics Matter, we analyze the factors that drove the growth in home health national revenue. 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 hospice physician billing levels appropriate?
A: Under the Medicare hospice regulations, physicians employed or under contract by a hospice can bill for physician services provided to patients under their course of treatment while on hospice. Practice varies from market to market and from hospice to hospice as to whether the physician who referred the patient to hospice or a hospice medical director manages the patient once he or she is on service. In most markets, the referring physician retains the patient. If a hospice has its own inpatient facility, it’s most practical for a hospice medical director to take over the patient’s care, particularly if the hospice uses nurse practitioners/physician assistants to supplement the physician’s work. Read the entire answer.