Hidden Quality Statistics Hinder Home Health Discharge Planning, Study Finds

McKnight’s Home Care | By Adam Healy
 
Hospital discharge planners are often limited in their access to home health agencies’ quality statistics, which can impair patients’ decision-making and potentially result in suboptimal post-acute care, according to new research.
 
The study, published in Sage Journals, surveyed 58 discharge planners representing 27 hospitals. While the majority considered information pertaining to the reputation, quality, availability of personal protective equipment and COVID-19 safety strategies of post-acute care facilities to be important, most reported that this information was not readily available. 
 
A home care agency’s reputation was an important piece of information to 98% of respondents, but only 34% found this data accessible. Less than 1 in 5 discharge planners could easily find information regarding an agency’s availability of personal protective equipment. And any information regarding COVID-19, such as safety measures in place or whether the agency was currently treating any infected patients, was largely inaccessible, according to the discharge planners.
 
These statistics are often sought by people leaving hospital care; without the data, discharge planners are unable to inform those aspects of a patient’s decision.
 
“Our study suggests that discharge planners were largely unequipped with accessible information to help patients understand COVID-19 exposure risk. Fewer than a quarter of discharge planners had readily available information on agencies’ COVID-19 competencies,” the study said. “This is particularly concerning, given that discharge planners report a third of their patients referred to home health having questions on COVID-19.”
 
But even when these data are readily available, it is sometimes not used at all during discharge planning, according to the study. Only about a quarter of discharge planners helped patients interpret post-acute care providers’ quality statistics, which could be due to a lack of adequate information or insufficient discharge planning practices at hospitals, the study noted.
 
The researchers made several recommendations for preventing these issues. First, they recommended that the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services gather more data on post-acute providers like home health agencies, and make it easily available to interested parties. They also advised CMS to create incentives for post-discharge follow-ups with patients to reaffirm whether a provider’s actual quality was actually consistent with expectations.