Healthcare at Home: The Rowan Report

by Tim Rowan, Editor & Publisher of Home are Technology Report

In the shadow of the news that LHC Group and Almost Family are merging and that Kindred has been slapped with a $3.1 million fine, it is important to not lose sight of what is going on in the Private Duty Home Care sector. Competition is tightening at a record pace. New agencies are opening; established agencies are closing or being absorbed into larger ones; and Medicare agencies are opening Private Duty divisions.

How does an independent, standalone non-medical agency catch the eye of the typical searcher, usually the adult daughter of a parent in need of care? If they know your agency name, they may make their way to your web site. In that case, all the work you have done with SEO, search engine optimization, will pay off. If not, they will go to Google, in which case SEO takes a back seat to a more modern method of guaranteeing they will find your agency. What will that adult daughter find there? You should know. Here is how you find out and how you move your way up to the top of Google search results. [Rowan describes means for boosting one’s agency’s

online profile, particularly by agencies’ owners soliciting reviews for  posting on online Google private duty companies’ rankings].

TRY THIS: Open Google in your browser and search for “Home care” + “your city.” Study these results for a minute and see if this is what you find: two or three ads at the top, paid for by one of your competitors, followed by a list of local agencies, arranged in what appears to be random order. Now remove the city name and search again. You have just experienced the difference between regular Google search results and the new “Google Local.”

Looking more closely, you will notice that the order is not actually random. All else being equal, Google has started pushing businesses with the most, best, and most recent customer reviews to the top of their local search results, which is where you land if you include a location name in your search string. Companies with no reviews or mostly negative reviews will appear somewhere on page two or three. You should read a few of these reviews; some will lavish praise, others will complain. People are like that.

Listings that have received at least five reviews also display Google star ratings. Those with mostly positive reviews get more stars; those with poor reviews get fewer. Five-star companies tend to appear at the top of the results list, immediately under the paid listings, (which most people tend to ignore). The top three listings on the list also appear on the accompanying map. These businesses get about 65 percent of shopper phone calls, marketing researchers say.

In these competitive times, your goal of course is to be one of the three, but how do you do that? Positive reviews are rarely spontaneous. Companies that make the top three have made concerted efforts to encourage their happy customers to write reviews.

This is why you need to start paying attention to this. Getting at least five reviews does not just happen. Even if you have fewer than five reviews and are not eligible to have your stars displayed, your place on the results list is determined as much by your positive and negative reviews as it is by your web site’s SEO strategy. If you only have one review and it is a bad one, chances are you will find your listing somewhere around page 15.

Don’t say ‘so what?’
This new way in which the Internet encroaches into your established, familiar marketing plans cannot be ignored. Suppose you pay for a large Yellow Pages ad or even a recurring TV spot. Even if these have your phone number prominently displayed, research has found that 88 percent of people will still look you up online before they call you up.

When they google you, if they find one bad review and no positive ones, 88 percent of the money you spent on those ads goes to waste. Remember the line you’ve heard so often, “The Internet Changes Everything?” One of the things it has changed is human behavior, particularly when that human is in the persona of a consumer. For reasons no one can completely explain, people trust the online comments of perfect strangers.

Therefore, if you have always had a word-of-mouth marketing strategy, you must accept that Google reviews is where word-of-mouth happens today, not the corner barber shop. For this reason, you must keep track of your online reviews. When you find a bad one, you have to spring into action. Ignoring them does not make them go away.

NOW TRY THIS SEARCH
To get some perspective, take a peek into how other industries are way ahead of us. This time, instead of searching for “Home Care,” search for “Home Cleaning Services” + “your city.” You will find local companies with dozens of reviews and star ratings. If you need further proof, search for auto mechanics, Chinese restaurants, or dentists.

As this experiment should show you, other industries have discovered how to take advantage of the billion dollar infrastructure Google has created for us. Home care has not yet, which means the first to grab this strategy will be the only ones to benefit from it. The time has come for home care to learn what other sectors already know:

• Google reviews cannot be ignored.
• Negative reviews can kill your business.
• There are solutions that enable you to keep 24/7 surveillance on Google reviews and that make it easy for your staff to encourage customers to write positive ones in order to raise your average star rating.

There is probably no room in your marketing budget to hire someone to keep a 24/7 eye on Google, not to mention Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, and all the review sites focused on health care. Fortunately, there are services available, usually for less than $200 per month, which will automate the process. The question is whether it is worth a couple thousand dollars per year to avoid wasting most of the rest of your marketing budget. The publisher of this newsletter has partnered with an expert in the field to bring these 21st-Century marketing strategies to healthcare at home providers. That’s how important we think it is. To grab the opportunity, start by reading about this new consulting service and software tool at RowanReputationResources.com before your competitors do.

©2017 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Tim Rowan’s Home Care Technology Report. homecaretechreport.com One copy may be printed for personal use; further reproduction by permission only.editor@homecaretechreport.com

Pubished by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Today, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued a final rule (CMS-1672-F) that updates the calendar year (CY) 2018 Medicare payment rates and the wage index for home health agencies (HHAs) serving Medicare beneficiaries.

The rule also finalizes proposals for the Home Health Value-Based Purchasing (HHVBP) Model and the Home Health Quality Reporting Program (HH QRP).[Details are provided on CMS’s not finalizing the Home Health Groupings Model and planning to take additional time to, as they note, further engage with stakeholders to move towards a system that shifts the focus from volume of services to a more patient-centered model. In addition, details are provided about MS’s reforming/removing many regulations related to OASIS assessment in the forthcoming final rule for CY2018; and additional details are provided about Payment Policy Provisions for CY 2018.]

 

CMS is not finalizing the Home Health Groupings Model and will take additional time to further engage with stakeholders to move towards a system that shifts the focus from volume of services to a more patient-centered model. CMS will take the comments submitted on the proposed rule into further consideration regarding patients’ needs that strikes the right balance in putting patients first.

Reforming Regulations

CMS recently launched the “Patients Over Paperwork” Initiative, a cross-cutting, collaborative process that evaluates and streamlines regulations with a goal to reduce unnecessary burden, increase efficiencies, and improve the beneficiary experience. This effort emphasizes a commitment to removing regulatory obstacles that get in the way of providers spending time with patients. The 2018 HHPPS final rule includes the following as part of this initiative:

• CMS removed 33 items from the OASIS assessment instrument collected at various time periods during the HH patient stay because they are no longer required for the calculation of quality measures, prospective payment, provider survey, the HH Value Based Purchasing (VBP) Model or care planning. The removal of these items will reduce time and paper required to complete HH patient assessments.
• In addition, CMS is finalizing exception and extension requirements, and reconsideration and appeals procedures.
• The estimated net burden reduction associated with the changes to the HH QRP in this year’s rule, which includes the removal of these OASIS items, was over $145 million. This corresponds to an estimated net reduction in HH clinician burden of over 2 million hours annually.

Final Rule Details

Payment Policy Provisions for CY 2018

CMS projects that Medicare payments to HHAs in CY 2018 will be reduced by 0.4 percent, or $80 million, based on the finalized policies. This decrease reflects the effects of a one percent home health payment update percentage ($190 million increase); a -0.97 percent adjustment to the national, standardized 60-day episode payment rate to account for nominal case-mix growth for an impact of -0.9 percent ($170 million decrease); and the sunset of the rural add-on provision ($100 million decrease).

Annual Home Health Payment Update Percentage

Section 411(c) of the Medicare Access and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) requires the market basket percentage increase to be one percent for home health payments for CY 2018. Therefore, the home health payment update percentage for HHAs that submit the required quality data for the HH QRP will be one percent. The home health update is decreased by 2 percentage points for those HHAs that do not submit quality data as required by the Secretary. For HHAs that do not submit the required quality data for CY 2018, the home health payment update will be -1 percent (one percent minus 2 percentage points).

Adjustment to Reflect Nominal Case-Mix Growth

CMS is implementing a 0.97 percent reduction to the national, standardized 60-day episode rate in CY 2018 to account for nominal case-mix growth from 2012 to 2014. CY 2018 will be the third year of the three-year phase-in of the reduction to account for nominal case-mix growth. The -0.97 percent adjustment to the national, standardized 60-day episode payment rate to account for nominal case-mix growth results in an estimated decrease in Home Health Prospective Payment System (HH PPS) payments for CY 2018 of -0.9 percent.

Sunset of the Rural Add-on Provision

Section 210 of the MACRA extended the rural add-on, which is an increase of 3 percent of the payment amount otherwise made for home health services furnished in a rural area, to episodes and visits ending before January 1, 2018. Therefore, for episodes and visits that end on or after January 1, 2018, a rural add-on payment will not apply.

Home Health Quality Reporting Program (HH QRP) Provisions

Section 2(a) of the Improving Medicare Post-Acute Care Transformation Act of 2014 (the IMPACT Act) amended Title XVIII of the Social Security Act (the Act) by adding new section 1899B, which requires HHAs, Skilled Nursing Facilities, Inpatient Rehabilitation Facilities, and Long-Term Care Hospitals to report: standardized patient assessment data, data on quality measures, and data on resource use and other measures. The data must be standardized and interoperable so as to allow for the exchange of such data among providers. It also requires the modification of the post-acute care (PAC) assessment instruments to provide for the submission and comparison of such standardized patient assessment data. These requirements are intended to enable interoperability as well as improve quality and discharge planning, among other purposes.

Beginning with the CY 2020 HH QRP, CMS is adopting three new measures that meet the requirements of the IMPACT Act. These three measures are assessment-based and are calculated using Outcome and Assessment Information Set (OASIS) data. The finalized measures are as follows:

• Changes in Skin Integrity Post-Acute Care: Pressure Ulcer/Injury;

• Application of Percent of Residents Experiencing One or More Falls with Major Injury (National Quality Forum NQF # 0674); and
• Application of Percent of Long-Term Care Hospital Patients with an Admission and Discharge Functional Assessment and a Care Plan That Addresses Function (NQF #2631).

To implement the requirement that HHAs report standardized patient assessment data under section 1895(b)(3)(B)(v)(IV)(bb) of the Act, CMS is finalizing that the successful reporting of the data elements used to calculate the pressure ulcer measures (both the current version and, beginning with the CY 2020 program, the newly adopted version) will also satisfy the requirement to report standardized patient assessment data on medical conditions and comorbidities, and that the successful reporting of the data used to calculate the newly finalized functional assessment/care plan measure will also satisfy the requirement to report standardized patient assessment data on functional status. CMS is also finalizing the adoption of additional functional status data elements that HHAs must report as standardized patient assessment data on the OASIS. After consideration of the public comments, CMS is not finalizing proposals that would have required HHAs to report standardized patient assessment data in three other categories: Cognitive Function and Mental Status; Special Services, Treatments, and Interventions; and Impairments. CMS intends to evaluate further how to best identify standardized patient assessment data that satisfies each of these categories, is most appropriate for CMS’s intended purposes, and can be reported by HHAs in the least burdensome manner. More information on the measures and standardized patient assessment data that CMS is finalizing can be found at https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/HomeHealthQualityInits/HHQIQualityMeasures.html.

CMS also reviewed the OASIS-C2 item set to identify candidate items for removal. Based on this analysis, CMS is removing 235 data elements from 33 current OASIS items, effective January 1, 2019. These OASIS items, or data elements within OASIS items, are not needed to calculate quality measures already adopted in the HH QRP or for other purposes unrelated to the HH QRP, including payment, survey, the HH VBP Model or care planning. A list of the items being removed can be found at https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/HomeHealthQualityInits/HHQIQualityMeasures.html.

CMS is also finalizing a number of procedural requirements for the HH QRP, including a process for requesting reconsideration of determinations regarding compliance with the HH QRP, as well as policies for requesting exceptions and extensions of reporting timeframes.

Home Health Value-Based Purchasing Model

In the CY 2018 HH PPS final rule, in addition to summarizing the comments received on the composite quality measures for future consideration, CMS is finalizing the following changes and improvements related to the HHVBP Model:

• CMS is amending the definition of “applicable measure” to specify that HHAs in the HHVBP Model must submit a minimum of 40 completed Home Health Care Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HHCAHPS) surveys for purposes of receiving a performance score for any of the HHCAHPS measures, beginning with performance year 1;
• Removal of the OASIS-based measure, Drug Education on All Medications Provided to Patient/Caregiver during all Episodes of Care, from the set of applicable measures for performance year 3 and subsequent years.

For additional information about the Home Health Value-Based Purchasing Model, visit https://innovation.cms.gov/initiatives/home-health-value-based-purchasing-model.

For additional information about the Home Health Prospective Payment System, visit https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Medicare-Fee-for-Service-Payment/HomeHealthPPS/index.html.

The final rule can be viewed at https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection.

By Tim Rowan, Author and Publisher of Home Care Technology Report

In a joint statement, the Medicare Rights Center and the Center for Medicare Advocacy described how the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives this week, would impact Medicare beneficiaries. The statement was signed by Judith Stein, executive director, Center for Medicare Advocacy, and Joe Baker, president, Medicare Rights Center.

“As organizations that share a commitment to promoting access to affordable, high-quality health care for older adults, people with disabilities, and their families, we have significant concerns with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act introduced in the House of Representatives yesterday. This massive tax cut for the wealthy sets the stage for deep cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security in the near future,” the statement begins. [Additional details are provided that indicate  that the speed with which Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is being rushed through Congress’s approval, and the expected detrimental effects that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act will have upon Medicare beneficiaries will be significant.]

“Although the changes outlined in the Act are the broadest our tax system has seen in over three decades — with far-reaching implications and profound effects on our nation’s budget — the House aims to rush this bill through within a matter of weeks. Even while the precise provisions of the bill remain in flux, and the Senate has not yet introduced its tax cut bill, the danger to our social safety net is clear.”

The joint statement describes its belief that the proposal will establish a two-step process:

1. cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations, adding $1.5 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade
2. use the higher debt — created by the tax cuts — to argue that drastic cuts are needed to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

“This strategy is not new,” they continue. “Some lawmakers regularly repeat tired and inaccurate arguments that Medicare is unaffordable for our country, but this tax cut will create additional pressure to make Medicare beneficiaries pay for newly created debt.

“We urge Congress to stop engaging in a rushed and partisan process on issues that affect every American, such as taxes and health reform. Instead, Congress should return to a thoughtful and transparent legislative process that includes public input through hearings and multi-stakeholder meetings. Any tax reform must promote retirement security for all Americans, recognize the high out-of-pocket costs that older adults and individuals with disabilities already pay, and ensure stable revenue for our essential programs. Medicare and Social Security are a promise our nation has made to every American; don’t break that promise.”

Center for Medicare Advocacy, established in 1986, is a national nonprofit, nonpartisan law organization that provides education, advocacy and legal assistance to help older people and people with disabilities obtain access to Medicare and quality health care. The Center is headquartered in Connecticut and Washington, DC with offices throughout the country.

The Medicare Rights Center is a national, nonprofit consumer service organization that works to ensure access to affordable health care for older adults and people with disabilities through counseling and advocacy, educational programs and public policy initiatives.

©2017 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Tim Rowan’s Home Care Technology Report. homecaretechreport.com One copy may be printed for personal use; further reproduction by permission only. editor@homecaretechreport.com

by Carolyn Dean, the Regulations Compliance Manager for Brightree. Post-Acute Care Services, Lawrenceville, GA

When a Medicare beneficiary elects to receive hospice care, the provider must submit a Notice of Election (NOE) with Medicare. NOEs are required to be filed and accepted in the Medicare system within five days of a patient’s hospice admission in order to be considered timely. In instances where an NOE is not timely filed, and exceptions do not apply, Medicare will not cover and pay for the days of care between the admission date and NOE acceptance date, making the provider liable for the cost of those days.

Since the NOE timeliness requirement went into effect in October of 2014, hospices have been struggling with meeting the timeliness of the NOE requirement due to limited and error-prone submission methods. Currently hospices may only submit NOEs using paper claim submissions or the Medicare Direct Data Entry (DDE) system. When the Medicare DDE system is used, data from the hospice electronic medical record (EMR) is manually entered into fields on DDE screens. This method not only creates an additional resource burden but creates opportunity for data entry errors that can lead to rejections and untimely NOEs. [Dean explains how hospices can benefit from NOE electronic submissions; and  means that are been undertaken by CMS to implement the electronic NOEs; However, as this system is a new one, she urges readers to pay special attention to several areas of new NOA submissions, as indicated near the close of this article.]

Per requests from the hospice industry to improve the existing methods, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is implementing a new NOE electronic submission method using a non-standard implementation of the 837I claims transaction, starting January 1, 2018.

Benefits of NOE electronic submission
Through electronic data interchange, human interaction is replaced with an automated process that allows NOE data to be retrieved directly from the hospice EMR and electronically submitted to Medicare Administrative Contractors (MACs)  via file submissions, and so  potentially
• eliminating problems with NOEs that result from data entry errors
• eliminating the time and resource burdens associated with manual data entry.In summary, the electronic submission method will increase hospices’ ability to submit clean NOEs for faster acceptance into the CMS system, thereby reducing the risk for untimely NOEs that lead to reduced Medicare payments. CR10064, issued by CMS on September 26th, 2017, contains the requirements and specifications for submitting electronic NOEs.

What to watch out for
As with any new process, there are a few things providers should keep in-mind.

• The ability to submit electronic NOEs is a new, optional submission method. Therefore, you should check with your vendor and/or trading partner to determine their plans for supporting the new method.

• While an NOE will be able to be submitted electronically in the new year, which should improve upon the cleanliness of the data, the speed at which NOEs are denoted as accepted will not necessarily be faster. Depending on the entity the electronic file is submitted to (i.e., a trading partner) and the electronic file batch processing schedules, there may be other delays that occur before the file is processed and accepted into the Medicare system. To help avoid delays, hospices are encouraged to generate and electronically submit NOE data daily and should consider testing the new NOE electronic submission process with a few NOE transactions to work out any kinks and formalize a process prior to full implementation.

• Similar to claims submitted via the electronic submission method, MACs will perform upfront edits on the NOE data and return the results of those edits within a 277-claim acknowledgement file. However, acceptance of the data via the 277CA file does not necessarily mean that the NOE transactions will pass Medicare back-end Common Working File edits that can also lead to NOE transactions being returned to the provider. It will still be important for hospices to maintain a process that checks DDE for the final status of the electronically submitted NOE transactions to ensure they have passed all edits.

• Monitor for additional information to include job aids from your MAC on the submission and processing of electronic NOEs.

Remember, the availability of a new NOE electronic submission method does not change the existing Medicare processing edits and/or payment policies related to NOE transactions. Hospices are encouraged to enjoy the benefits from the new electronic submission method but are also cautioned to avoid any false assumptions that the new method is a guarantee for timely accepted NOE transactions.  Hospices will still need to maintain many existing processes to ensure NOEs are submitted and accepted within the 5-day window.

Regarding the EMR with which I am familiar, Brightree’s compliance and regulatory team work to ensure they help client agencies achieve regulatory compliance.
brightree.com

Carolyn Dean is the Regulations Compliance Manager for Brightree. This content is provided for informational purposes only and is not intended to be, and should not be construed as, legal advice. Brightree strongly recommends each agency consult with counsel of its own choosing for legal advice on next steps in this matter that best suits it.

 

Joining the National Association for Home Care and Hospice to present a unified compromise proposal to the House Ways and Means Committee are ElevatingHOME, the Partnership for Quality Home Health Care, Kindred, Healthsouth/Encompass, Amedisys, LHC Group, and Almost Family. An informative opinion piece authored by Dr. Steven Landers, president and CEO of VNA Health Group, was published in The Hill, widely read by D.C. lawmakers, on October 24.

The final rule for the CY18 HHPPS was sent to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on October 20, following the required 60-day public comment period. As the staff of the Office of Management and Budget are restricted from sharing information about its contents, specifics will not be known until the final rule is released, which must happen by November 1 to meet the January 1, 2018 effective date.[Various proposals about revisions to the CY18 HHPPS are indicated in this article, and dire financial -oriented predictions are presented as well.]

 

While release of the final rule is awaited, the House Ways and Means Committee has also proposed its own revisions to H.R. 3992, the so-called “Rural Home Health Extension and Regulatory Relief Act.” Introduced by Representative Kristi Noem (R-SD), H.R. 3992 would also mandate a 30-day payment model for home health episodes.

In its public statement, NAHC describes CMS’s CY2018 Proposed Rule as “a policy that must be withdrawn because it will cause massive disruption in the industry.” The statement urges CMS not only to withdraw the proposal but instead to work with stakeholders to develop a fully budget-neutral policy that does not limit access to beneficiaries or diminish provider resources.

“The Home Health Groupings Model’s five percent reduction in Medicare reimbursements — almost $1 billion in 2019 alone — will lead to a loss of critical services to millions of patients,” the NAHC statement said. In addition, NAHC asserts that CMS does not have the statutory authority to impose these changes on the industry without Congressional action.

ElevatingHOME called the cooperative effort “an unprecedented display of industry collaboration.” In that collaboration, the VNAA parent association continued, “a unified compromise proposal was offered to the House Ways and Means Committee in an effort to gain a withdrawal of the HHGM proposal from the CY2018 Home Health Prospective Payment System final rule.

Calling to mind the last time CMS designed a flawed payment system that brought harm to patients, NAHC predicts the proposed HHGM would:

• Create access to care barriers for vulnerable home health patients;
• Significantly cut reimbursement for many types of home health patients without Congressional authorization;
• Compound five years of rate cuts that total nearly 18% in a benefit that has had essentially flat spending since 2010; and
• Impose non-budget neutral reforms in home health services at a level that previously caused significant harm to patients, e.g. with the Interim Payment System (1998-2000), nearly 1.5 million Medicare beneficiaries lost access to care following the closure of more than 4,000 home health agencies virtually overnight.

In their letter to CMS administrator Seema Verma, NAHC’s Bill Dombi and Keith Myers, Chairman of the Partnership for Quality Home Healthcare, asserted, “The home health industry requires additional information in order to fully assess the impact of the proposed rule, with more complete data analysis, and scrutiny as to the legal and policy authority to make the rule.”

Following that theme, Dr. Landers wrote in his “The Hill” article that a change of this magnitude needs to be tested as a demonstration project in a handful of states, not rushed into a national policy. “HHGM is a totally untested and unpredictable, ivory tower, top-down, Washington science project being foist on America’s most vulnerable seniors,” he writes. “…there is no way to know how severely it will change home health care for older Americans. The proposal was developed by data analysts and Medicare insiders and has never been tested in the real world in any fashion. So many untested changes are being proposed at once, it is virtually impossible to predict its impact.”

Associations Cannot Do It Alone All parties conclude their individual and joint statements by urging all stakeholders to help deliver the message. “To defeat this payment rule before it brings havoc to the industry, we need home health leaders, employees and patients to make their voices heard by policymakers in Washington, D.C. Without your support and advocacy, this rule cannot be stopped,” the official NAHC statement reads. To make it easy to help, NAHC has added to its Legislative Action Center a page where members can ask Congress to tell CMS to withdraw the payment rule. Your career may depend on whether you follow that link and offer your representative your views right now.

©2017 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Tim Rowan’s Home Care Technology Report. homecaretechreport.com One copy may be printed for personal use; further reproduction by permission only. editor@homecaretechreport.com

October 15, 2017 (Los Angeles, CA) — The Telehealth Honors® program announced its 2017 honorees at the National Association of Home Care and Hospice Annual Conference in Long Beach, California. It is the only program to annually recognize those individuals and programs who provide exceptional patient care in the home using modern telehealth technology.

The Telehealth Honors® are the first awards in the nation to showcase outstanding stories of successful patient care using telehealth in home-based care, including home health, hospice, palliative care, assisted living, and acute care transition models. The Honorees showcase exceptional stories of patient care and add to the excellent reputation of home based care in the United States.[An overview of the valuable contributions of telehealth to patients’ health are noted by Bill Bassett, Vice President of Clinical Services at Health Recovery Solutions. A listing of the 2017 Telehealth Honors® Recipients is provided at the end of this article.]

“The Telehealth Honors is a testament to how exceptional people have used modern telehealth solutions to enrich the lives of their patients while supporting the initiatives of their organization,” said Bill Bassett, Vice President of Clinical Services at Health Recovery Solutions. “These Honorees reflect a cross-section of care models and we thank everyone who submitted a nomination. We are incredibly humbled by the stories that were shared with us and are proud to be part of such an important program.”

2017 Telehealth Honors® Recipients:

• Anne Carle, Cornerstone Visiting Nurse Association
• Mia Millefoglie, MaineHealth Care at Home
• Cheryl Adams, Home Health Care of Sparta Community Hospital
• Carol Schulte, Catholic Health Home and Community Based Care
• Laurie Kinsella, Catholic Health Home and Community Based Care
• Joanne Porter, Atlanticare
• Stacey Williams, Sutter Care at Home
• Krista Ramey, Sutter Care at Home
• Ronessa Richards, Holland Home Health
• Theresa Brown, Centrastate Home Health Medical Center
• Kenneth Chrestler, Nascentia Home Care
• Myra Varnado Corstrata
• Lisa Hogan, Frederick Memorial Hospital Home Health

 

©2017 by Rowan Consulting Associates, Inc., Colorado Springs, CO. All rights reserved. This article originally appeared in Tim Rowan’s Home Care Technology Report. homecaretechreport.com One copy may be printed for personal use; further reproduction by permission only.editor@homecaretechreport.com