Market Research Letter: May/June 2011
Providing insights for home care and hospice
May/June 2011
In This Issue
Feature Article: How to Use Market Segmentation to Differentiate Yourself from the Competition
Metrics Matter: When It Comes to Home Health – If You Build It, Will They Come?
Ask the Home Care Data Guru: Why are the hospitals in my market panicking about readmissions?
In this month’s feature, I discuss specific and effective ways home health agencies can differentiate themselves from their competitors through market segmentation. Plus, you’ll find some interesting statistics in our Metrics Matter article. As the number of home health agencies has increased, so too has the rate of home health utilization. So if you build it, will they come?
Rich Chesney
President, Healthcare Market Resources, Inc.
Feature Article: “How to Use Market Segmentation to Differentiate Yourself from the Competition”
In a highly competitive market, organizations seek to differentiate themselves in the eyes of their referral sources. Often this is done through market segmentation – focusing your efforts on a particular portion of the market. In this feature, we discuss the criteria for market segmentation and specific ways home health agencies can segment their markets. Read more.
Metrics Matter: “When It Comes to Home Health – If You Build It, Will They Come?”
“If you build it, [they] will come.” For those of you familiar with the film Field of Dreams, you know this is the message that inspired the character played by Kevin Costner to build a baseball diamond in the midst of his cornfield in Iowa. In this month’s metric, we demonstrate how this message seems to apply to Medicare home health, too. For example, the number of agencies billing Medicare grew from 6,869 to 10,159 between 2003 and 2009 — an increase of 47.9%. During the same time period, home health utilization rose by 25.3%, from 7.8% to 10.4%. 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: Why are the hospitals in my market panicking about readmissions?
A: According to the Affordable Care Act, hospitals can be penalized at least 1% of the Medicare revenues in FY 2013 (which starts October 1, 2012) if their readmission rate of Medicare patients within 30 days of discharge is in the lower quartile for the prior fiscal year. Three conditions are being monitored — chronic heart failure, pneumonia, and heart attack. So the clock starts ticking as of October 1 of this year and the penalty could have a significant negative impact a hospital’s operating margin. Read the entire answer.