Summer 2018

FEATURE ARTICLE Imagine compounding those improvements at every stage of the pipeline, and you can see a path to a dominant position in your home care market. Standardizing Pipeline Optimization, as a Path Toward Population Health? The relationship between “pipeline optimization” and “population health” may not be immediately apparent, but the same approaches that your agency takes toward optimizing and standardizing your “Lead to Revenue” pipeline processes are steps toward preparing for the increasing demands of the broader healthcare ecosystem. Why is that? As payers and providers increasingly see the value of home care—and are willing to pay for it—they demand service levels and specific standards of care for the patients they send our way. For instance, a hospital partner might require that an agency contact referrals within 12 hours of referral and authorization, perform an in-home assessment within 72 hours, and then follow specific protocols relative to the patient’s disease state. This may sound like home healthcare rather than home care, but payers and providers increasingly recognize the improved outcomes that these interventions can deliver for their costliest patients. The very standardization and controls that you put in place to manage your Lead to Revenue are not unlike the standards and controls required to meet the requirements of healthcare and other partners that are sending referrals your way. Was the referral contacted on time? Was the home care visit executed when expected? Was the assessment properly completed? Were the required tasks executed in the home? Was the quality control visit executed? Of course, healthcare partners aren’t going to want your agency staff to call them with updates on these critical items, nor will they tolerate batch files for updates. These partners are going to want data to flow seamlessly in and out of your systems including data around referrals, authoriza- tions, the care plan, point-of-care updates, and billing information. Technology enables the experience to be standardized at scale — in a way that is unique to your agency, your values, and to the requirements of your partners. Doing It Your Way The ability to do it “your way” and at scale across multiple staff members—or even across 100s of locations—requires a shift in approach to technology. Our future demands Enterprise Class capa- bilities that enable customized workflows, and that allow data to flow seamlessly in and out of your scheduling platform and to and from other enabling systems such as call center software, marketing automation systems, content management systems, healthcare systems, or even from your own custom applications (i.e. your custom caregiver application or even your own mobile app). The enabling technology is referred to as Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs. APIs let you pass data in and out of your scheduling platform and other systems to enable the kind of customized workflows described above. You can create proprietary interfaces and rules, specific to your agency, that optimize and standardize every step in a workflow across your agency or network. Standards become important as you plan for data exchange with the healthcare ecosystem; many are betting on the FHIR API standard, which is the latest version of the longstanding HL7 standards. It may sound uncomfortable, but the fact is that in our hypercompetitive market, many of the largest and leading agencies are already adopting these technologies to optimize their critical workflows. The result is that they are quietly able to grab that client or caregiver from the first call or ensure the ideal family member experience. With time, it means the ability to promise specific standards of care or even integrations with healthcare providers or referral sources. These approaches enable consistent delivery of an optimized client and caregiver experi- ence — whether at one agency or across 100s of locations. Getting Started If you have several locations—or even 100s of locations—then the evolving world demands an expanded view of technology and its possibilities. We advise our partners to start with their “dream state” of the idealized client, caregiver or partner experience. And from there, the question evolves to technology enablement—what other systems or applications come into play? What do we want to be proprietary versus “off the shelf?” These answers inform the team and approach required to execute your vision. Getting Ahead These technologies and capabilities are in play in a great many other industries but are still nascent in home care. For home care agencies, the fact that these approaches are still nascent means that there is an opportunity for leaders to leap ahead, capture market share, and take advantage of a rapidly expanding market. The years ahead will be a time of rapid expansion for those that leap to the forefront of adoption. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Geoff founded ClearCare after personal experience as a family caregiver. He realized that there had to be a better way to give transparency to family members, leading to ClearCare’s early point-of- care innovations and a cycle of ongoing innovation in partnership with ClearCare’s customers. Geoff has over fifteen years of experience in software development and is an alumnus of companies such as Motorola, Andersen Consulting, and Merrill Lynch. Geoff received his B.A. from Northwestern and M.B.A. from Kellogg. Geoff grew up in Texas but moved to the Bay Area and was fortunate to be eventually followed by all of his immediate family. He and his wife Andrea have three wonderful children, Kate, Henry, and Thomas, and an enthusiastic labradoodle named Charley. 9 Summer 2018 Appeared in the 2018 Home Care Pulse Benchmarking Study