With Choose Home Up In the Air, Providers Consider Preparation Strategies

Home Health Care News | By Andrew Donlan
 
The home health industry at large is excited about the prospects of the Choose Home Care Act of 2021.
 
For now, it’s been tabled in Washington, D.C., due to a variety of reasons, including it being an election year. It’s also – to some extent – been cast aside in home providers’ minds, given all the mayhem going on related to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ (CMS) proposed rule for 2023.
 
If the Choose Home legislation does come to fruition, it could be a massive tailwind for providers. The catch is that not all providers will benefit.
 
Instead, the ones that will benefit will be the ones that become designated Choose Home agencies. And in order to become that, they’ll likely need to begin prepping now for a bill that could come through as early next year, or never come to fruition at all.
 
“If this sounds good to you, what you should be working on now is to prepare yourself so that you can become a designated Choose Home agency,” Deborah Hoyt, senior vice president of public policy for Axxess, said last week at the National Association for Home Care & Hospice’s (NAHC) Financial Management Conference.
 
Dallas-based Axxess is technology company that develops cloud-based software solutions for home health, home care and hospice agencies across the country.
 
Broadly, Choose Home would allow for more skilled nursing facility (SNF) diversion in post-acute care, allowing home health agencies – utilizing an add-on to their existing home health benefit – to care for more higher-acuity patients in the home.
 
“Though it’s not yet enacted, there’s a lot of things that you can start doing today to help your organization prepare questions that you need to be asking,” Maria Warren, the VP of clinical consulting at McBee Associates, also said at FMC. “In approaching anything, whether it be Choose Home, a hospital-at-home program, diversifying services or implementing new technology, you want to take everything into a strategic assessment.”
 
That strategic assessment should include five steps, Warren said:

  • Establish governance, strategy team and pilot team.

  • Outline the current state of the agency, collecting as much data as possible, as well a GAP analysis

  • Conduct external assessment – analyzing competitors, the market and other findings. This step should also include considering partnerships as well as other M&A opportunities.

  • Act on data: “Look to integrative technologies and AI to better align staff to your patient population needs. Use predictive analytics to identify patient needs and prioritize patient visits.”

  • Continuously measure and monitor; the final step is to use data to drive action and accountability internally and externally to get desired results

To prepare or not
 
The steps to preparing for Choose Home raise another question for every home health agency: ‘Is this worth my time?’. . .
 
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