This article is sponsored by WellSky®. This article is based on a Home Health Care News discussion with Hannah Luetke-Stahlman, Vice President of Solutions Management at WellSky, and Sheila Davis, Senior Vice President of Area Operations at Always Best Care. The discussion took place on November 16, 2022, during the HHCN Home Care Conference in Chicago. The article below has been edited for length and clarity.
Home Health Care News: Can you tell me a bit about your respective roles at your companies?
Sheila Davis: Always Best Care Senior Services is a franchise organization. We cover about 233 territories in the United States and Canada, and have been in business for 25 years. We do both skilled care and non-medical home care.
Hannah Luetke-Stahlman: WellSky is a leading healthcare technology company offering a range of proven software solutions, analytics, and services that are transforming healthcare and public health through real-time connectivity, greater visibility, and relentless innovation. We offer some of the most complete networks in healthcare with 2,000 hospitals and over 130,000 post-acute and community providers leveraging WellSky solutions.
HHCN: I also want to learn a little bit more about your respective roles at your organizations too.
Luetke-Stahlman: Yes, I lead our WellSky Personal Care solution development cycle, which includes our roadmap, taking enhancements and feedback that we get from clients and developing the execution of that with our solutions and engineering teams. I also manage our analytics solution, WellSky CareInsights for Personal Care, which assesses hospitalization risk of clients, as well as managing the growing interests of third-party vendors.
We’ve talked a lot today about the importance of creating an open API ecosystem and managing the partners that we have today as well as new vendors that are showing interest. Part of my role is to focus on how we connect all of our solutions to ensure we’re creating a cohesive data platform across our organization.
HHCN: Sheila, what about you?
Davis: Yes, as the Senior Vice President of Operations, I oversee the operations of the system. I have four national directors that work underneath me that oversee a number of franchisees. We really are the industry experts, I guess you would say, from our division. A lot of compliance legality issues, making sure that our offices remain compliant with all the rules and regulations, and advocating for our industry as a whole. We are very involved with HCAOA, as well as the National Association of Home Care. I’ve been in home care for 33 years. When you know every one of the software vendors that have ever been out there in the post-acute world and now they’re all rolling up, that tells you how long you’ve been out there. Very much enjoyed doing the operations compliance aspect of it.
HHCN: Sheila, I want to stick with you. As an operations expert for your agency, what are you looking for in your technology suite as the demands for more care at home increases?
Davis: I think it’s exactly what Hannah said a minute ago, it’s those API integrations. We’ve talked so much about new technology that’s coming about. We have artificial intelligence systems, telehealth systems, and remote patient monitoring. All of these things are becoming a very important part of the continuum of care. We feel it can enhance people staying at home, but we need to be able to have all of those systems communicate to a single aspect. I think it’s that communications aspect of it on the API side.
Then secondly, just as Hannah was also talking about, it’s what WellSky calls those care insights. It’s statistical reports that show what our outcomes are, what is the probability of a client who is possibly going to fall within their home or is going to have an acute episode in their home so that we can put preventative measures in place to begin with. That way we’re also enhancing the client’s aspect of staying at home, and that’s where our clients all want to be. They don’t want to go to the hospital or the emergency room. Those predictive analytics and then those API integrations are important.
HHCN: Hannah, as a software solutions provider, how has the shift to care at home influenced your team’s work and the roadmap of WellSky Personal Care?
Luetke-Stahlman: WellSky Personal Care has always focused on care provided in the home. I think the shift we’re starting to see is the prioritization and focus across the industry in the personal care space. When we think about our solution life cycle development process and developing our roadmap, we really focus on four key areas. That’s interoperability in the open API ecosystem. We’ve been discussing regulatory and compliance. Electronic visit verification, 21st Century Cares, information blocking, all the state-by-state regulations around e-signatures and compliance, growth and innovation. How do we continue to develop groundbreaking new innovations for caregivers, for patients, for family members? And then lastly, infrastructure and platform scalability, making sure that our platform can continue to scale with the growth of our client organizations.
HHCN: Hannah, can you please speak to how technology is used in whole person care?
Luetke-Stahlman: Prior to coming to WellSky, I led social care for Cerner, so I think the concept is nothing new to the industry, certainly nothing new to you all. When I think about it from a tech perspective, it’s about focusing on the documentation, the data, the analytics around social, behavioral, clinical, and financial aspects of a person’s condition. Think about transportation as an example. Knowing whether or not a patient has access to transportation for follow-up appointments is a critical piece to whether or not they can access the care that they need.
Surfacing that data within our platform is important, but so is being able to integrate, taking it a step further with RideShare apps, Uber, and Lyft, or being able to refer to a community-based organization so they can get that unmet social need fulfilled. We also think about growing that post-acute network, so we believe our mission is to create smarter connected care. When we think about whole person care, it’s being able to take that person through the journey and connect those referrals. If they need home health, if they need hospice and palliative, whenever they’re ready for that next level of care, we’re providing that integrated ecosystem to be able to provide coordinated care.
HHCN: Sheila, I want to throw the same question to you, but from your perspective, how are you using technology to help provide that whole-person care in the home?
Davis: Going off of what Hannah said, it’s those analytics and that information that you’re taking in at the very beginning of a case and then ongoing. One of the things that we stress within our system is that, you shouldn’t just do an assessment of a client when you’re onboarding them into care. It should be every 30 to 60 days. We have some technology partners we work with that help us follow up every 30 to 60 days to see how that client’s condition is changing. With those analytics, we know in the past 60 days if the client has become more prone to a fall or if their sway pattern has differed or has their vital signs been out of control?
Then we can sit down with the families and we can discuss those issues and decide, maybe it’s more care that they need, maybe it’s some other technology they need in their home. Maybe it’s a DME piece of equipment that they need. It’s continually analyzing that client and making sure that you’re following up and not just having that one set care plan. A lot of non-medical providers think that we’re a little bit different, that our care plans are never going to change, and honestly, our care plans probably change more so than they do in the skilled medical world of skilled Medicare. It’s constantly analyzing that client and making those appropriate changes to the care plan.
HHCN: Sheila, have you been surprised about anything when it comes to technology? In other words, has there been a challenge that technology helped solve something that you weren’t necessarily expecting?
Davis: Oh, absolutely. I think that the one thing that COVID did bring to us, as a positive aspect, was that it focused attention on home care itself in the non-medical world. I think that telehealth and all of those technologies were slowly beginning to come on board back in 2018 and 2019. Then of course, when COVID hit, it had to come very, very quickly. I think we saw all of those technologies really evolve over the past few years very, very quickly, and are probably now more so compared to where pre-COVID, we would have thought that this would not happen until more towards the end of 2029, or 2030. But I think it’s come on very, very quickly, and I think it’s a positive aspect.
HHCN: In our last couple of minutes here, I want to pose a question to both of you. Hannah, we can start with you. Looking ahead towards 2023, whether it’s something we’ve already talked about, or something else entirely, what technology trends are you most excited about and why?
Luetke-Stahlman: I think one of the things that comes to mind, and we’ve been talking about today, is addressing the caregiver shortage and the workforce capacity issues. We’re in the process of developing a new analytics solution, WellSky TeamInsights, to address these challenges. The goal is to provide a high-level dashboard around performance metrics—measuring staff engagement and the quality of care that they’re providing in order to provide more management and analytics around caregivers in the workforce. This will allow our client organizations to increase staff satisfication and efficiencies, and offer appropriate rewards and recognitions, which we’ve talked about today as well. I think it’s critical that caregivers are being recognized and rewarded. Using analytics and technology, you can add a $10 gift card and show some appreciation or award your staff in other meaningful ways. I think looking ahead, though, there’s a real opportunity around unpaid family caregivers. We have 53 million unpaid family caregivers today in our country.
I also think there’s a real opportunity from a policy perspective as well as technology to better enable family members to care for their loved ones, and we’re working around some efficiencies for our family room capabilities. We have apps for our pets and our children when they go to daycare. We should be able to have better technology to help family members take care of their loved ones.
Davis: I think there’s a lot of good technologies that are coming around for the client aspect. I think that those are going to be great, but exactly what Hannah said is that technology can help with recruiting and retention. I think the communication between the home office and the caregiver is vitally important and I think that WellSky is doing a great job, but everybody knows we all can improve. Ultimately, I think it’s that communication, that two-way communication, to make it quicker and easier.
The texting platforms and all of that is great. It has to be HIPAA compliant, but I think the more that we can interface with those caregivers in the field and have more communications and let them know that they’re doing a great job, the better. They are the bread and butter of every organization. I think it will help build that retention part of it. I think that’s really what our caregivers are looking for and may help us in the workforce shortages. I know we’re up against Amazon and Walmart and places like that but if you’ve ever worked in those retail spaces, that’s not a place you really want to work because you’re dealing with all kinds of customers all day.
People who choose to be caregivers truly want that one-on-one connection and to care for that client, but we have to make them be appreciated and I think that’s always been my message to my team is to let your caregivers know that they’re appreciated. Let them know they’re part of the organization because they don’t have a lot of interaction with the office. I think any of those technologies that we can increase and enhance that connection is going to help us in that caregiver pool.
WellSky is passionate about helping home-based care providers successfully increase their efficiency, grow profit, improve communication and coordinate care for people. To find out how, visit: https://wellsky.com/.
Companies featured in this article:
