Where to Invest to Cut Costs (and Improve Quality) in 2023?

Wound care patients represent a third of your census and are likely your most costly population. Wound care presents the greatest opportunity for financial improvement.

Even without the feared Medicare payment adjustment, many home health agencies feel next year will be a year of great financial strain – where operational efficiency and cost-effective care delivery will be paramount.

Raising inflation costs, persistent staffing challenges and the national rollout of Home Health Value-Based Purchasing (HHVBP) will place increased fiscal pressures on agencies. Agencies will be required, with greater scrutiny than ever, to simultaneously deliver higher quality care, reduce spending and improve clinician satisfaction.

So if you’re wondering where you’re going to focus. Which area of your business to invest in to yield the greatest ROI. Well, look no further.

Why Invest in Wound Care

If you’re looking to move the needle on quality, cost and experience, the most bang for your buck could very well be in your wound care program. This is for several reasons:

As 33% of your patients have a wound, there is a logical ROI to investing in a clinical program that will directly impact a third of your business.

Under PDGM, wounds are the clinical grouping with the highest base reimbursement, with the average wound care episode generating over $4,000 in revenue.

Wounds are the leading risk factor for home health hospitalizations – increasing the risk of readmission by 52%. As unintended hospital use is the most heavily weighted quality measure under HHVBP, wound care hospitalizations will have a meaningful impact on your Medicare adjustment.

The top 10% of home health agencies all have one thing in common: 100% of them have a wound certified specialist on staff.

The top 10% of agencies were determined based on care quality, patient experience and financial performance.

Our Customers have Proven the Wound Care ROI

Home health agencies that have invested in building comprehensive wound care programs, that leverage Swift Medical’s wound management solution, have realized meaningful financial benefits:

Agencies who have adopted Swift Skin and Wound as a part of their wound care program have seen up to a 20% reduction in visits per episode.

Agencies who have adopted Swift Skin and Wound have been able to empower LPNs to complete an increased proportion of wound care visits (as opposed to higher cost RNs). This has resulted in a 9% reduction in RN utilization – in favor of LPNs.

Agencies who have adopted Swift Skin and Wound have seen up to a 14% reduction in 60-day hospitalizations for wound care patients. Under HHVBP, unintended hospital use accounts for 35% of your total reimbursement adjustment (+/- 5%), and wound care patients represent 33% of your census that will impact that score.

Clinicians who use Swift Skin and Wound in home health are 86% satisfied with the technology. On top of this, 80% of clinicians said they preferred the technology to manual wound evaluation techniques and 89% said it helped them better track and manage wounds overtime.

Reducing Costs while Improving Quality

It’s easy to imagine how increasing efficiency and cutting costs can have an adverse impact on quality.

However, with a comprehensive, digitally-enabled wound care program, home health agencies are realizing quality and cost benefits in tandem. In fact, by building a program on the foundation of objective wound data collection, visibility into healing and risk and clinician collaboration, formerly scarce and often inexperienced nursing resources can be deployed to their fullest potential – to the patients in the greatest need.

Swift Medical Proven Customer Outcomes in Home Health

Wound patients are so often seen as high-risk referrals that can be a source of concern for agencies looking to control costs. But what many of the top agencies have seen is precisely the opposite. They’ve seen that with a strong wound care program and technology in place, wound care can be the most impactful clinical initiative to invest in — generating a substantial financial return (plus quality and satisfaction improvements to boot).

Request a call with a Swift team member to get a custom ROI estimate for your home health agency.