- Chuck Hulse
Looking Around the Corner - Is it Home Care?
You may have heard the saying “third time’s a charm”, or your landscape professional may have told you to plant things in threes. If you are into numerology the number three means creative inspiration.
In the last three days I have been presented three times how home care for patients is emerging as a key trend in health care delivery. Do practices need to be looking around the corner to anticipate this trend? Perhaps some creative thinking is in order.
Here is what I know:
Day One – Introduction: Dave Gans, MGMA visionary, was the keynote speaker at the annual Idaho MGMA conference. His talk included a discussion of innovation. In particular was information supporting telemedicine and of course home care is a primary target for telemedicine. As the boomers age and prefer to stay in their home as long as possible, home care will be helpful preventive medicine to catch problems before they escalate into hospital stays.
Day Two – Management: Following Dave’s presentation, I spoke to a vendor in the exhibit hall – a hospice group, who inquired about physicians that I might know to help with an unmanageable volume of home visits in this sector of healthcare. One could surmise home health care agencies and visiting nurses are experiencing the same staffing difficulties.
Day Three – Inspiration: I opened my email to find an article in Fierce Healthcare clipped from Kaiser Health News titled, “As Care Shifts From Hospital to Home…”.
How is the industry preparing to educate family caregivers who are increasingly managing the care of loved ones? Similar to the Kaiser literature, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement has expanded the notion of patient centered care to family centered care. The inference to family underscores a point made at a recent New England Journal of Medicine Summit – we expect a lot of patients to navigate our healthcare system and those without support, family or friends, can find that very difficult.
Is the new frontier of medicine returning to an old concept of house calls? Home based care – prevention, treatment, monitoring – how is your practice planning to innovate?
