NewsLine - November 2012 - (Page 18)

continued from previous page Develop a Strategy As an organization, you need to formulate goals that dovetail with the new reality of ACOs, and how they will affect you and your community. Creating a strategic plan to compete and win when opportunities arise is an important part of this process. The plan should address how you are going to (1) increase admissions without increasing costs; (2) improve profitability and effect the case mix; and (3) build marketing and education campaigns that efficiently and effectively communicate your service’s value to patients. You will need to perform a thorough GAP analysis of your current capacity to process referrals and its ability to fit together with the needs of the ACO. A solid understanding of where you are now will be a baseline for determining exactly what you need to do in order to provide the ACO’s patients with the highest quality care at a reasonable and sensible cost. The opportunity for your organization, and our industry as a whole, lies in managing the care of the most fragile, highacuity patients in the home setting. Today we are seeing hospitals approaching hospice and home care seeking solutions that parallel their own efforts to reduce admission/readmission rates and inpatient mortality rates. Hospices are uniquely positioned to provide the best solutions for many of these highest-cost patients within the post-acute continuum, with a focus and understanding of how to honor the patient’s and family’s preferences at the end of life. However, the demands for measurable outcomes will be high, so you will need to be prepared with hard data to support your case as the best provider to serve these patient populations. There also needs to be early consideration as to how our information technology will integrate with and serve the needs of the ACO. Know how it currently works versus how it will need to work into the future. Effective electronic information exchange with your referral partners and ACOs, as well as with patient and family/caregivers, may be a deciding factor in future referral relationships. Hospices will need real-time data management in order to possess the best information available for decision making related to both the cost and quality of care. Prepare for Growth In today’s world of ACOs, growing hospice referrals takes on a whole new level of complexity. “Care transitions” is one of the hottest buzzwords in medicine and will be at the core of successful ACO operations. How your hospice positions itself as a key component in this process will carry great value, especially among referral partners who are themselves ACO participants (e.g., physicians, hospitals). Marketing campaigns and educational programs will need to be clear on how to communicate the value of the hospice program in this process. Your marketing team needs to become more sophisticated, and must be able to communicate the hospice’s value to referral partners. The idea of selling to the C Suite now enters into the equation as the ACOs become key accounts. The team will also have to develop relationships with more people in each ACO, including nurses, case managers/ discharge planners, pharmacists, care coordinators, hospitalists, and palliative care clinicians. As their ultimate goal, the team 18 NewsLine

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NewsLine - November 2012

NewsLine - November 2012
WHV Partners Give Thanks
A Message From Don
Free Distance-learning Sessions on Serving Veterans
ACOs Today: Are You Ready?
AchieveLinks: Introducing a Rewards Program (display ad)
Simione: Solving Your Hospice Challenges (display ad)
In the Continuum: KCHPC
The Voice of NCHPP
How a Veteran’s Experience Can Inform Bereavement Practice
Free Bereavement Section Activities
Now Live: eHospice
A Free Tool to Help Evaluate Your Service to Veterans
Member News and Notes
CTC Sponsors (display ad)
Compliance Tip
2013 MLC Plenary Speakers (display ad)
Videos Worth Watching
News From FHSSA

NewsLine - November 2012