Improve Data-Driven Decisions in Home Health

Increase Patient Retention, Customer Satisfaction, and Overall Performance with Cortex

As the role of big data continues to expand in healthcare, home health agencies are increasingly reliant upon patient satisfaction as a key measure of care team performance, customer service and patient retention. In order to make data-driven decisions, HHAs require regular feedback about patient experience that is accurate, unbiased, real-time and actionable--not simply a summary of numerical scores. This provides both granular and global insights to help HHAs improve performance and patient retention.

But how do you accurately and effectively measure patient satisfaction? Despite the importance of data-driven decisions in healthcare, commonly-available data remains rife with challenges: poorly-gathered or untimely data, insufficient detail or inadequate sampling can easily skew your key metrics such as Net Promoter Scores and Star Ratings. Decisions based on these methods are ineffective at best, or harmful to your patients and organization at worst.

The Healthy Living Network

Rob Barrow is Chief Operating Officer of The Healthy Living Network, a leading multi-agency home health company operating throughout the Western US. In 2018, Rob and the HLN team recognized their need to improve access to detailed and consistent patient satisfaction surveys. As a key part of how HLN measures operational success, patient satisfaction directly and indirectly affects other metrics such as clinician quality, staff productivity and measurable output. Without better and granular visibility into the survey data, it’s hard to determine the root cause of mis-matching scores, such as a team that scores poorly on patient outcomes but has high satisfaction scores. Rob was finding care teams being impacted by ancillary staff or support team performance, such as a nurse receiving a poor mark on patient satisfaction due to a PTA’s bedside manner or poor hygiene.

In order to enact meaningful data-driven action to improve key operational metrics, HLN needed a consistent way to obtain patient satisfaction data, with real person-to-person interaction, using detailed script with follow-up questions that provide a clearer picture of the data. And the data must be obtained timely, frequent, and objective.

Cortex Solutions

By using Cortex’s Check-up™ calls, HLN was able to effectively gather patient satisfaction data and use it to drive operational decisions based on NPS results.

Check-Up Calls™ provide a way to monitor and intervene when patients struggle. In addition, follow up calls evaluate patient satisfaction as well as specific scores via scripted calls made by our HIPAA certified Registered Nurses. Our powerful Dashboard gives you rich analytics to provide real-time data and actionable alerts. Best of all, Check-up™ calls free up your nursing staff to care for the patients on site, alleviating provider stress and improving quality of care.

Prior to Cortex, HLN did not have clear insight into patient status during the first 30 days post discharge. With Cortex’s Check-up calls, not only is the nursing staff freed up from making these calls during critical hours in their shift, allowing them to operate at the top-of-license, but the call data remain objective, detailed, and at the right frequency to obtain actionable data for operational metrics, leading to better patient care outcome and improved staff satisfaction.

Hospital Alerts gives HHAs real-time visibility to high-risk patients, using Cortex’s advanced analytic and patient risk-scoring tools so your can remain agile in re-acquiring patients and improve patient’s care outcomes. Integrated data with hospitals and preferred agencies in-network ensures measurable and actionable metrics are shared across the care continuum. Combined with the Check-Up Calls platform, Hospital Alerts increases revenue through increased census and decreases cost by avoiding costly readmission fines.