Credit for Caring Introduced in Both Houses of Congress

Dementia Care Costs Lowest for Patients Living in Home Care Settings, Study Finds

McKnight’s Home Care / By Adam Healy
 
When it comes to long-term care for patients with dementia, staying home may be the least expensive option, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association.
 
Comparing data from more than 4,500 respondents aged 70 years and older, the researchers found that the median monthly out-of-pocket cost of long-term dementia care was only about $260 for those living at home and in their communities. Meanwhile, nursing home residents incurred about $1,465 in out-of-pocket care costs each month, and people living in other kinds of residential facilities — group homes, assisted living facilities or retirement communities — generally spent about $2,925 per month, according to the study.
 
Community-dwelling people with dementia also receive a lot of support from unpaid caregivers, the study found. People living in their community generally received the most unpaid help from caregivers compared to those living in nursing homes or other residential care facilities. About a quarter of individuals living at home or in their community received at least 200 hours of help from unpaid caregivers each month.
 
The researchers called for enhanced support for services that keep people out of residential care facilities, where the long-term costs of dementia care are highest. They also called for expansions of services such as the Program of All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly, which has been proven effective in keeping many nursing home-eligible people at home and in their communities. 
 
“Given the costs associated with residential care facilities like nursing homes and assisted living centers, increasing funding for home- and community-based care is a promising way to reduce the financial burden that long-term care places on older adults, particularly those with dementia,” study authors Jalayne Arias and Jing Li said in a statement.
 
Still, regardless of their setting of care, people with dementia tend to experience far higher long-term care costs compared to individuals without dementia, given “intensive needs for functional help and the length of the disease course.”
 
“Because dementia is such an expensive illness, it really is in a category of its own when we start to think about funding for long-term care,” said senior author Jalayne Arias, associate professor in the GSU School of Public Health. “If you compare people with dementia to their age-matched counterparts, they experience costs that are untenable to manage.”

J15 A/B MAC Contract Re-Award Announcement

On November 30, 2023, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced that CGS Administrators was re-awarded the Part A/Part B Medicare Administrative Contractor (A/B MAC) Jurisdiction 15 (J15) contract. This seven-year contract includes the states of Kentucky and Ohio. The J15 MAC is also responsible for Medicare Home Health and Hospice administration services in the District of Columbia and the following 15 states: Colorado, Delaware, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

As the incumbent J15 MAC, it will be business as usual with no change in CGS contact information, systems, or processes. There will be no impacts to beneficiaries and providers, no workload number changes, and no system changes that would require payment floor releases or transition related dark days. CGS will continue working with our system maintainers as we currently do today.

CGS looks forward to continuing to serve all our key stakeholders and the Medicare Program through J15. Should there be any questions, please feel free to reach out to our J15 Implementation team at [email protected].

2024 Predictions: Three applications for AI in Home Healthcare

McKnight’s Home Care / By Preeti Kaur
 
Business is booming in the healthcare generative AI market. The sector is projected to reach a staggering $22 billion by 2032 — enabling technology providers, health systems, payers and others in the ecosystem to develop game-changing capabilities that are reshaping the field. 
 
Frankly, the timing couldn’t be better for the home healthcare sector, an area that is  particularly ripe for transformation. Variable schedules, provider shortages and a vulnerable aging population make managing logistics and providing care uniquely complex. In the face of these challenges, AI offers a compelling solution to streamline back-end tasks and enhance the patient-provider relationship.
 
So, while 2023 may have been the year of AI awareness, 2024 is set to be the year of AI advancement and widespread adoption. Although I’m encouraged by what we’ve already achieved, I’m more excited about the coming benefits that adoption at scale will provide both home care operators and patients.
 
Specifically, I envision AI revolutionizing the home healthcare industry in several important ways in 2024:
 
1. Improving personalization at scale
 
With nearly 3 million home healthcare patients across the nation, personalizing their individual experiences is a time-consuming and complex undertaking. However, AI excels at this task. It’s capable of analyzing vast amounts of data to identify individual preferences, behaviors, and patterns much more quickly and accurately than human workers.
 
Expect certain applications that are already in use to achieve more widespread adoption by home healthcare agencies in the next year, including:

• Streamlining care plan creation: With AI, providers can quickly generate personalized care plans based on the patient intake call, health records, and knowledge of similar patient profiles. AI-generated plans may include granular details like care reminders, medication schedules, and even activity recommendations.
  
  
• Optimizing care matching: AI handles the complex process of matching care providers with patients based on factors like scheduling needs, travel times, personality and skills, helping create more effective provider-patient assignments.
  
  
• Coaching providers: Using call recordings and transcripts, AI can offer recommendations for care providers. This could include general areas of improvement (e.g., areas where additional training is needed) as well as recommendations that are specific to the patient-provider relationship (e.g., future conversation topics).

2. Supporting task prioritization
 
By 2025, the U.S. is expected to face a shortage of over 400,000 home health aides. As the aging population continues to increase, AI offers home healthcare providers the ability to alleviate time-consuming tasks, streamline provider workflows, and reduce costs. One such application includes task prioritization and reorganization to help providers and administrators navigate an overwhelming list of to-dos. This use case is currently in development and will hopefully make its way into home healthcare in 2024:

• Optimizing task management: AI can analyze patient needs, biometric data, urgency and potential risks to create a daily list of to-dos for providers. Consider a patient who requires immediate attention due to a sudden change in their condition. AI can help restructure a provider’s daily schedule and find coverage if necessary, to ensure the patient receives prompt care. This capability isn’t just helpful for providers; it can also offer benefits for operators and desk-based administrative health workers.
  
  
• Generating communications: While AI is already widely used to generate communications, this capability becomes even more valuable when used alongside task prioritization. If a provider needs to rearrange the order in which they visit patients, AI can provide a script to quickly communicate with patients. In the event of a provider change. It can also communicate thorough notes on the patient’s needs to substitute providers.

Read Full Article

New Evidence Suggests Long COVID Could Be a Brain Injury

Medscape Medical News / By Sara Novak

Brain fog is one of the most common, persistent complaints in patients with long COVID. It affects as many as 46% of patients who also deal with other cognitive concerns like memory loss and difficulty concentrating. 

Now, researchers believe they know why. A new study has found that these symptoms may be the result of a viral-borne brain injury that may cause cognitive and mental health issues that persist for years.

Researchers found that 351 patients hospitalized with severe COVID-19 had evidence of a long-term brain injury a year after contracting the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The findings were based on a series of cognitive tests, self-reported symptoms, brain scans, and biomarkers. 

Brain Deficits Equal to 20 Years of Brain Aging

As part of the preprint study, participants took a cognition test with their scores age-matched to those who had not suffered a serious bout of COVID-19. Then a blood sample was taken to look for specific biomarkers, showing that elevated levels of certain biomarkers were consistent with a brain injury. Using brain scans, researchers also found that certain regions of the brain associated with attention were reduced in volume.

Patients who participated in the study were "less accurate and slower" in their cognition, and suffered from at least one mental health condition, such as depression, anxiety, or posttraumatic stress disorder, according to researchers.

The brain deficits found in COVID-19 patients were equivalent to 20 years of brain aging and provided proof of what doctors have feared: that this virus can damage the brain and result in ongoing mental health issues. 

"We found global deficits across cognition," said lead study author Benedict Michael, PhD, director of the Infection Neuroscience Lab at the University of Liverpool in Liverpool, England. "The cognitive and memory problems that patients complained of were associated with neuroanatomical changes to the brain." 

Proof That Symptoms Aren't 'Figment' of Patients' Imaginations

Cognitive deficits were common among all patients, but the researchers said they don't yet know whether the brain damage causes permanent cognitive decline. But the research provides patients who have been overlooked by some clinicians with proof that their conditions aren't a figment of their imaginations, said Karla L. Thompson, PhD, lead neuropsychologist at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine's COVID Recovery Clinic. 

"Even though we're several years into this pandemic, there are still a lot of providers who don't believe that their patients are experiencing these residual symptoms," said Thompson, "That's why the use of biomarkers is important, because it provides an objective indication that the brain has been compromised in some way."

Some patients with long COVID have said that getting their doctors to believe they have a physical ailment has been a persistent problem throughout the pandemic and especially as it relates to the sometimes-vague collection of symptoms associated with brain fog. One study found that as many as 79% of study respondents reported negative interactions with their healthcare providers when they sought treatment for their long-COVID symptoms.

Read Full Article