Hospital Readmission Penalties

Are hospital readmission penalties under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) affecting your bottom line? Assisting Hands Home Care can address all four of the identified triggers that cause a patient to return to your facility within 30 days.

These include:

1. Lack of social support
2. Mismanagement of medication
3. Not understanding the disease process
4. Missing follow-up appointments

If you are looking for an ally in discharge planning and transitional care, we can help.

Keeping Clients Healthy, and Thriving at Home

Assisting Hands’ focus:

• Prevent hospitalizations by addressing the top reasons for trips to the ER/hospital – including home safety and falls prevention.
• Reduce readmissions to hospitals/rehabs by taking proactive measures –
  • helping families/clients manage aspects of their health at home,
  • monitoring for abnormal symptoms/pain, and
  • effectively escalating to health care providers.

● Tracking all incidents and hospitalizations to gauge our effectiveness.

Hospital readmission penalties are avoided if the patient followed the plan laid out for them by the hospital upon their discharge. Unfortunately, some patients do not have a loved one or family member to care for them, helping them to follow that plan. Here is where we enter the picture: Making sure patients take their medicine on time and providing transportation so that they make their follow-up appointments with their regular physician. Our licensed and bonded caregivers understand the disease process.

An important part of the healing process is companionship. Our caregivers provide that to your loved ones. Other useful services we offer are bed making, dressing, dusting, safety and fall protection, meal preparation, incontinence care, organizing mail and trips to the post office, oral hygiene and pet care and feeding, grocery shopping, taking out the trash, washing dishes and accompanying your loved one on walks.

Our results are significantly better than the national average for 30-day Medicare readmissions (18-20%).

Still, we continue to:

• train our caregivers monthly and offer supplemental Thriving at Home Certification training, and
• work proactively with families on monitoring/interventions to keep their loved ones healthy at home.

How do we do all of this?

• Assisting Hands specializes in providing patients with smooth transitions out of the hospital/rehab, and we embrace technology to coordinate and communicate with other healthcare providers to provide the best possible care for our clients.
• To better inform family members, we provide copies of our Owner’s book Thriving at Home – A Handbook for Preventing Hospital Stays. This book helps family caregivers identify and implement the types of interventions that our team performs to keep their loved ones healthy at home.
• We measure client and caregiver satisfaction and are earning awards for our performance!

We look to partner with you, your patients, and their families in providing the best possible care and support to lower readmission rates.

Please call to learn more about what we do to keep patients healthy at home – call us at: 781-315-6700.

See chapter 4 (p 25) in Thriving at Home – A Handbook for Preventing Hospital Stays for tips on preventing hospital trips. Please share with others on your team, or families who could benefit.