|
|
The Facility Perspective
Home » News » The Facility Perspective |
Suppose you are a discharge planner at Lakelovely Hospital and you’re seeking a facility for Mrs. Smith, who is recovering from a stroke. Information from the Beachside Home lists average length of stay, functional gain scores for stroke patients based on a national scale, and the percentage of patients discharged to home. The nursing home across town, Cloudview, provides personal testimonials about its rehab but has no objective data on how long therapy would last or how effective it might be. Which facility would you choose?
Creating a Marketing Advantage
Quality that can be documented is a powerful marketing tool. “You may think that you have great outcomes for your hip fractures, but that’s just a feeling,” says Mike Beckwith, Senior Sales Manager for Aegis Therapies. “With outcomes reports, a facility can compare its gains for fracture patients with those of other facilities in the area.” Hard numbers provide a distinct marketing advantage.
In his highly competitive metro market, Joel Kelsh, Administrator for Providence Place in Minneapolis, relies on his outcomes data. “Presenting outcomes data shows I’m progressive and committed to being a leader,” he says. “That’s the message I want to send out.”
At Beverly facilities, too, outcomes data have proven invaluable. “Our Rehabilitation Outcomes Measure [ROM] reports quantify our quality and progress,” says Mary Spooner, Director of Operations for Beverly Healthcare for Ohio. “They enable us to let our managed care insurance companies know how we are doing, let our patients and families know how we are doing, and let our referral sources know how their patients have improved. They give a specific, measurable report to the physician. I don’t know why more facilities aren’t using outcomes.”
It may be that the word just isn’t out yet. Denise Norman, District Manager for Aegis Therapies for northern Illinois, says hard information about outcomes is not widespread. “My customers say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard about outcomes before,’ but they’ve never really seen anything,” she says. “If the facility hasn’t had a company that provides outcomes information, it doesn’t know what it is missing.”
But seeing is believing. “What wows them is when we show them the proof of what we’re doing,” says Norman. “Once the facility sees these reports, we get nonstop requests from the administrator and the marketing team. They say, ‘Can you pull up that information for me? I’m going to meet with this doctor today,’ or ‘I’ve got a hospital meeting next week.’ Hopefully people will come to expect outcomes reporting as a standard of care.”
Boosting Demand for Rehabilitation
Data on outcomes are an effective means of transforming the image of a nursing facility from a warehouse for the elderly to a place for rehabilitation and discharge back to the community. “Providers have a ‘census’ mind-set,” explains Gary Phillips, operations consultant for BKD, a consulting firm in Springfield, Missouri. “They’ve been taught that if they keep their beds full, they will be profitable. We even hear some physicians say, ‘Well, these are old people; we’re not going to rehabilitate them.’” But Phillips says showing outcomes reports to physicians often results in obtaining their full cooperation for the higher level of rehabilitation a facility wants to perform. That, in turn, enhances a facility’s image. “Instead of competing with community-based services, skilled nursing facilities should position themselves as part of the continuum of care,” he says. “If they can rehabilitate patients and discharge them to a lower level of care, customer satisfaction increases dramatically.”
Empowering Staff
Positive feedback is a powerful incentive for staff. Data on the number of discharges to home and standardized scores on patient gains are feel-good statistics that indicate quality interventions. “It’s very motivational and uplifting for the staff,” says Norman. “To be able to prove what happened in care is helpful for the quality assurance team.”
Justifying Rehab Levels
With outcomes data to back up treatment, high RUGs categories needn’t be a red flag for Medicare, according to Aegis’ Beckwith. He cites one facility that was concerned about performing aggressive rehabilitation. “But in this particular case, outcomes data revealed that the facility actually had more acute patients, length of stay was shorter, and more patients were discharged to home than the average facility,” he says. Outcomes also showed that the gains patients made in therapy were actually higher than the average facility. “The facility had no idea,” says Beckwith. “Nobody knows that kind of information unless you have an outcomes program to show it.”
|
|
|
|
|