The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) penalizes hospitals for Medicare readmissions. Hospitals have difficulty tracking and managing patients after discharge. At Strategic Healthcare Programs (SHP), we look at millions of records each year from the Home Health Agency Outcome Assessment Information Set (OASIS) to correlate the patient characteristics that led to a transfer or discharge to an acute care hospital (readmission). With CMS incentives increasingly directed at reducing readmission rates, hospitals can maximize their Medicare reimbursement by selecting a post-acute care (PAC) home health care provider that uses actionable, real-time analytics.

Home Health Care News publishes: How Home Health Can Win the Readmissions Numbers Game, using SHP's data & insights gained from recent webinar presented by SHP.

After seeing promising preliminary results, our customer Amedisys is expanding a pilot program that aims to lower overall costs through fewer readmissions. The outcomes from the pilot and future results from the program will be evaluated against Strategic Healthcare Programs' (SHP) benchmark data on 3 metrics: hospital readmission rates, functional status of the patient and shortness of breath.

In late February, CMS announced that, for the first time, quality measures have been added to Physician Compare for group practices and ACOs.

We think the new measure is more favorable to home health and strikes a nice balance between emulating the hospital measure and giving agencies an accurate evaluation of their performance.

Hospital-based agencies have had lower re-admit rates in general, and tend to lead the industry by a month or more in declining readmit rates.

In the latest issue of Home Health Line (1/18/2016), Lynette Godhard, director of clinical operations, chief privacy and organizational integrity officer for Adventist Home Health in Silver Spring, Md., discusses the agency plans for this year.