Market Research Letter: November/December 2008
Providing insights for home care and hospice
November/December 2008
In This Issue
Feature Article: Don’t Fight for Market Share, Create New Business
Metrics Matter: How Efficiently Are You Using Your Staff Resources?
Make the Data Work For You: Looking to Grow Your Hospice Referrals?
Can you succeed in business today without battling for market share? The authors of the international best seller Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant contend the companies that come out on top do so, not by fighting rivals in a blood “red ocean” of shrinking profit pools, but rather by creating “blue oceans” of new markets with unlimited growth potential. In this month’s feature, I talk about Blue Ocean Strategy and provide specific ways home health and hospice agencies can create their own Blue Oceans of new market opportunities.
At Healthcare Market Resources, it’s our goal to provide the information both home health and hospice providers need to create growth opportunities. Give me a call at 215-657-7373 or contact me at info@healthmr.com to talk about how we can help your company succeed today.
Rich Chesney
President, Healthcare Market Resources, Inc.
Feature Article: Don’t Fight for Market Share, Create New Business
Achieving sustainable success in today’s home health and hospice industries will take more than competing with other agencies for market share. Providers will have to find ways to set themselves apart from their competitors and create new market niches rich with growth opportunities. In other words, you’ll need to adopt a Blue Ocean Strategy. In this month’s feature, we briefly discuss Blue Ocean Strategy and offer ways both home health and hospice providers can implement this strategic concept to create and capture new business opportunities.
Read more.
Metrics Matter: How Efficiently Are You Using Your Staff Resources?
Is your agency using its clinical and paraprofessional staff efficiently? To help you answer that question, this month’s metric presents the number of visits per episode on the state level. Since the visit is the basic resource unit of activity and the episode the basic Medicare revenue unit, this metric is a good measure of resource utilization efficiency. This statistic is most influenced by the diagnosis mix of patients, as well as community practices including acute care discharge patterns and service expectations of the community.
Read more.
Make the Data Work For You: Looking to Grow Your Hospice Referrals?
All too often Medicare beneficiaries die while receiving home health services. These individuals would have been excellent candidates for hospice services. The key is getting the home health organization to transition patients at the appropriate time. In this month’s Make the Data Work for You, we discuss how knowing the number of home health patients that a) die on service and b) are transferred to hospice can help hospices grow their referrals.