Archive for the ‘Skilled Nursing Facilities’ Category

Infographic: Skilled Nursing Facilities Focus on Quality and Partnerships

July 13th, 2018 by Melanie Matthews

Focus on performing well in the CMS Five-Star Quality program has become a business imperative for skilled nursing facilities—it’s essential to keeping occupancy rates up, according to a new infographic by the Health Industry Distributors Association.

The infographic examines how skilled nursing facilities are working with the hospitals in their communities to reduce readmission rates and gain referral volume.

2018 Healthcare Benchmarks: Post-Acute CareValue-based healthcare payment models, such as clinical integration, shared savings, bundled payments, shared risk and full capitation, as well as the need to coordinate care across the acute and post-acute care (PAC) continuum, are reshaping the PAC landscape. And, with the start of Medicare readmission penalties for skilled nursing facilities starting in October of this year, PAC providers will continue to examine strategies for improving care quality and reducing costs.

2018 Healthcare Benchmarks: Post-Acute Care is the second comprehensive analysis of the PAC market by the Healthcare Intelligence Network, capturing such key metrics as PAC initiatives, strategies, challenges, tools used to manage PAC, results and ROI.

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Posted in Care Coordination, Care Transitions, Healthcare Trends, Hospital Readmissions, Infographics, Reducing Readmissions, Skilled Nursing Facilities | Comments Off on Infographic: Skilled Nursing Facilities Focus on Quality and Partnerships

SNF Visits to High-Risk Patients Break Down Barriers to Care Transitions

September 21st, 2017 by Patricia Donovan

For patients recently discharged from the hospital, a SNF visit covers the same ground as a home visit: medications, health status, preparing for physician conversations and care planning.

The care transitions intervention developed by the Council on Aging (COA) of Southwestern Ohio for high-risk patients starts off in the hospital with a visit by an embedded coach, and includes a home visit.

Additionally, to reduce the likelihood of a readmission, patients discharged to a skilled nursing facility (SNF) also can expect a COA field coach to stop by within 10 days of SNF admission. Here, Danielle Amrine, transitional care business manager for the COA of Southwestern Ohio, describes the typical SNF visit and her organization’s innovative solution for staffing these visits.

We conduct the home visit within 24 to 72 hours. We go over medication management, the personal health record (PHR), and follow-up with specialists and red flags. At the SNF, we do the same things with those patients, but in regards to the nursing facility: specifically, do you know what medications you’re taking? Do you know how to find out that information, especially for family members and caregivers? Do you know the status of your loved one’s care at this point? Do you know the right person to speak to about any concerns or issues?

We also ask the patients to define their goals for their SNF stay. What are your therapy goals? What discharge planning do you need? We set our SNF visit within 10 calendar days, because normally within three days, they’ve just gotten there. They’re not settled. There haven’t been any care conferences yet. We set the visit at 10 calendar days to make sure that everything is on track, to see if this person is going to stay at the SNF long-term. Our goal is to have them transition out. We provide them with all of the support, resources and program information to help them transition from the nursing facility back to independent living.

For our nursing facility visits, we also utilize the LACE readmissions tool (an index based on Length of stay, Acute admission through the emergency department (ED), Comorbidities and Emergency department visits in the past six months) to see if that person would need a visit post-discharge.

For our CMS contract, we are paid for only one visit. Generally we’re only paid for the visit we complete in the nursing home, but through our intern pilot, our interns do that second visit to the home once the patient is discharged from the nursing home. We don’t pay for our interns, and we don’t get paid for the visit. We thought that was a perfect match to impact these patients who may have a hard time transitioning from the nursing facility to home.

Source: Post-Discharge Home Visits: 5 Pillars to Reduce Readmissions and Engage High-Risk Patients

home visits

In Post-Discharge Home Visits: 5 Pillars to Reduce Readmissions and Engage High-Risk Patients, Danielle Amrine, transitional care business manager at the Council on Aging (COA) of Southwestern Ohio, describes her organization’s home visit intervention, which is designed to encourage and empower patients of any age and their caregivers to assert a more active role during their care transition and avoid breakdowns in post-discharge care.

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Posted in Avoidable ER Use, Care Coordination, Care Management, Care Transitions, Chronic Care Management, Disease Management, Health Coaching, Home Visits, Hospital Readmissions, Skilled Nursing Facilities, Transitions in Care | Comments Off on SNF Visits to High-Risk Patients Break Down Barriers to Care Transitions

Shared SNF Patients, Common Readmissions Goals Unify Three Competing Health Systems

June 15th, 2017 by Patricia Donovan

A common desire to reduce SNF readmissions resulted in the formation of Michigan's Tri-County SNF Collaborative.

A common desire to reduce SNF readmissions resulted in the formation of Michigan’s Tri-County SNF Collaborative.

Concerned about escalating hospital readmissions from skilled nursing facilities (SNFs) and the accompanying pinch of Medicare readmissions penalties, three Michigan healthcare organizations decided to set competition aside to collaborate and reduce rehospitalizations from SNFs. Here, Susan Craft, director of care coordination, family caregiver program, Office of Clinical Quality & Safety at Henry Ford Health System, describes the origins of Michigan’s Tri-County SNF Collaborative, of which her organization is a founding member.

I want to talk about the formation of the Tri-County SNF Collaborative between Henry Ford Health System, Detroit Medical Center, and St. John Providence Health System. As quality and care transition leaders from each of the health systems, we see each other frequently at various meetings. After some good conversation, we learned that each of us was partnering with our SNFs to improve quality and reduce readmissions.

We all required that they submit data to us that was very similar in nature but not exactly the same, which created a lot of burden for our SNFs to conform to multiple reporting requirements. We knew we were working with the same facilities because geographically, we are all very close to each other. We recognized that this was really a community problem, and not an individual hospital problem. Although we are all competing healthcare systems, those of us with very similar roles in the organization had very little risk from working together. And because we had so much in common, it just made sense that we create this collaborative.

We also worked with our MPRO (Michigan Quality Improvement Organization) and reviewed data that showed that about 30 percent of our patient population was shared between our three health systems. We decided it made sense to move forward. We created a partnership that was based on collaboration and transparency, even within our health systems. We identified common metrics to be used by all of our organizations and agreed upon operational definitions for each of those. We all reached out to our SNF partners to tell them about the collaborative and invite them to join, and then engaged MPRO as our objective third party. We created a charter to solidify that cooperation and collaboration.

Source: A Collaborative Blueprint for Reducing SNF Readmissions: Driving Results with Quality Reporting and Performance Metrics

reducing SNF readmissions

A Collaborative Blueprint for Reducing SNF Readmissions: Driving Results with Quality Reporting and Performance Metrics examines the evolution of the Tri-County SNF Collaborative, as well as the set of clinical and quality targets and metrics with which it operates.

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Posted in Care Transitions, Chronic Care Management, Healthcare Quality Ratings, Hospital Readmissions, Medicare, Quality Improvement, Reducing Readmissions, Skilled Nursing Facilities, Transitions in Care, Value-Based Reimbursement | Comments Off on Shared SNF Patients, Common Readmissions Goals Unify Three Competing Health Systems

Reducing SNF Readmissions: Clinical Targets, Quality Scorecards Elevate Performance

May 23rd, 2017 by Patricia Donovan

reducing SNF readmissions

Michigan’s Tri-County Collaborative holds the line on hospital readmissions from 130 participating SNFs.

Three geographically close Michigan health systems shared more than a concern over escalating readmissions from skilled nursing facilities (SNFs).

As Henry Ford Health System (HFHS), the Detroit Medical Center and St. John’s Providence Health System ultimately discovered from Michigan Quality Improvement Organization (MPRO) data in 2013, they also shared about 30 percent of their patient population.

This revelation, combined with the pinch of new hospital readmission penalties from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), prompted the three to set aside competition and siloed strategies and forge a coordinated approach to reducing readmissions from SNFs.

Today, the resulting Tri-County SNF Collaborative operates with a set of clinical and quality targets and metrics created in tandem with more than 130 member SNFs. Tri-County’s dozen participation requirements for SNFs range from regular reporting through a dedicated SNF portal to achievement of specified performance metrics.

“We developed collaborative relationships,” explained Susan Craft, director of care coordination for the family caregiver program in HFHS’s Office of Clinical Quality & Safety. “We wanted to have very open, honest conversations to review issues that were identified and find ways to resolve those.”

Ms. Craft shared the roots, framework and results of the SNF collaborative, which launched in the first quarter of 2015, during Reducing SNF Readmissions: Quality Reporting Metrics Drive Improvements, a May 2017 webcast now available for replay.

Once admitted to the collaborative, member SNFs must report on 14 metrics in four key areas: acuity, care transitions, quality and readmissions. In return, SNFs receive a 13-point unblinded quarterly scorecard with metrics on readmissions and patient acceptance response times, among many others.

A multidisciplinary team within Tri-County Collaborative reviews all SNF metrics bi-annually to determine each facility’s continued participation.

As for the collaborative’s impact since its launch, Henry Ford Health System achieved a nearly 20 percent drop in Medicare SNF readmissions as well as a 28 percent reduction in SNF lengths of stay. The initiative also identified opportunities for improvement, resulting in enhanced outpatient scheduling and nurse-to-nurse handoffs and interventions focused on SNF-specific issues like sepsis, Ms. Craft explained.

Despite these advancements, the collaborative still faces the inherent challenges of competition and transparency, as well as SNFs’ hesitancy to adopt value-based practices. “Our SNFs are still entirely dependent on fee for service [payment models],” said Craft. “They haven’t been impacted by penalties and value-based purchasing, although that is coming for them next year.”

Although not yet referring to participating SNFs as “preferred providers,” the collaboratives hopes to one day equip patients with complete data pictures to guide them in SNF selection. Also on Tri-County Collaborative’s radar are home care agencies, concluded Ms. Craft.

“We know there needs to be a lot of coordination across all post-acute care settings.”

Listen to Susan Craft describe how Michigan’s SNF Collaborative set aside competition to improve quality and readmission rates.

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Posted in Avoidable ER Use, Care Transitions, Data Analytics, Healthcare Quality Ratings, Healthcare Trends, Hospital Readmissions, Medicare, Medication Management, Post-Acute Care, Skilled Nursing Facilities | Comments Off on Reducing SNF Readmissions: Clinical Targets, Quality Scorecards Elevate Performance